Being a fanatically bonkers music fan since pretty much as long as I can remember and working as a music journalist for about 14 years earlier in my career, I love a damn good music doco. Needless to say, I have been looking forward to Rialto Channel’s music documentary-focused month with bated breath, and was rather stoked to be given the chance to talk about them each week.

The first up is the delightfully mad MISTAKEN FOR STRANGERS showing tonight, which Pitchfork has called “the funniest, most meta music movie since Spinal Tap…” and Michael Moore "one of the best documentaries about a band that I've ever seen". No mean feat, and I definitely enjoyed it and then some.

It follows lead singer of the The National, Matt Berninger as he encourages his younger brother Tom to document their 2010 tour. Initially designed as offbeat webisodes for a bit of fun, the would-be tour diary ends up becoming an affectionately chaotic tale of sibling rivalry that isn't exactly focused on the National. The band serves more as a backdrop, whilst the true leading man is Berninger's younger brother, Tom, the film’s director and subject. It’s this fact that makes it a very different kind of rock doc, but one that will still keep the fans happy with concert footage and a nice behind the scenes look at the dirty back end of being in a band in the process of commercially blowing up.

As accounts of brotherly rivalries go, MISTAKEN FOR STRANGERS isn't exactly Cain and Abel. For one thing, its ending is far less tragic and lots of fun is had along the way. I agree with Roger Ebert when he said that in tone, it's somewhat similar to "American Movie", the 1999 cult doc about a desperate filmmaker's misguided attempt to make a horror film at the expense of his own personal life. But Tom's bad luck and general ineptitude paid off in the end: it landed him the opening-night spot at 2013’s Tribeca Film Festival and saw him actually follow a project through to the end.

The second doco I’ve been given the job of writing about this week is ARTIFACT, showing on Rialto on Friday at 8:30pm. At its centre is an artist I find personally at the opposite end of the likeability scale to Tom and Matt Berninger, the pompous – albeit talented – Jared Leto.

Telling harsh truths about the modern music business, the actually quite riveting, award-winning documentary gives intimate access to the singer/actor and his band Thirty Seconds to Mars as they fight their record label Virgin/EMI and write songs for their album This Is War.

The doco, which was shaved down from over 40,000 hours of footage and took nearly four years to complete, first zooms in on the band in 2008, as they break alternative chart records with the song “The Kill.” As they began to create what would become their 2010 album This Is War, they discover an unexplained $2 million debt, despite their newfound success. 30STM then aimed to exit its nine-year contract with Virgin Records/EMI — citing the De Havilland law, a California labor code put in place after Olivia de Havilland fought victoriously against Warner Bros. and the studio system in the 1940s — only to be slapped with a $30 million lawsuit for damages on the yet-to-be-recorded albums. Big numbers, and a big deal.

“This was not a fight against a record company, but against corruption,” Leto told the The Hollywood Reporter. “A record company can be a beneficial thing — to have a team of people around the world to help you realize your dream — but a corporation that engages artists with these convoluted contracts that leaves them in a state of terminal debt? Just because you can get away with something doesn’t mean it’s okay to do. The battle between art and commerce is something we dealt with consistently from the time we were signed, and even today.”

While the film outlines minute details of the band’s tug-of-war with EMI, it doesn’t touch on a very modern topic that pisses off many successful musicians today: streaming. Over the last year or so, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, Atoms for Peace’s Nigel Godrich, David Byrne and Steven Tyler are among the many who have voiced their concerns over streaming services’ inadequate royalty payments, with Bette Midler tweeting early last year that Pandora paid her a ridiculous $114.11 for more than 4 million song spins over a three-month period.

“We all know that, as content creators, artists and musicians, a great deal of our work is going to be streamed, but the issue is that artists are getting the short end of the stick,” Leto has said, and I’d love see a follow up to ARTIFACT dealing with exactly that. “The streaming companies are paying record labels, but record labels are not paying artists,” he has said, “I’d welcome anybody to debate that. Record companies are taking giant advantages. They’re taking pieces of stock options or technology companies in exchange for guaranteeing rights to artists’ streams; there are all kinds of deals being made, and artists aren’t a part of those deals. I think artists don’t have a seat at the table when it comes to being part of the conversation about the future of technology and creativity. There’s a blueprint being made, and artists should be part of the design.”