17 November 2009 — Are Artists Getting More Money Than They Used To?
If you read this blog, you've probably already seen this article (via @virginia) from the Times Online blog, which looks at the UK music industry, and makes the case for the possibility that artists are making more money now than they used to, despite the massive fall in album sales over the past decade. I'll likely be looking at a few of these ideas in future posts, but for now I'll just point out that, due to this being a UK-based study, the results may be massively different if one were to conduct the same research in Australia (and I'd love to see those results).
There are a few reasons why I would expect Australian statistics to vary at least slightly from this study. The first is that there are much fewer internationally successful bands from Australia than from Britain (although, as a ratio in relation to number of performing bands it may be similar). The second is that there are much fewer "legacy" Australian acts - barring AC/DC - who, as this study suggests, may be the ones making the vast majority of live touring income. The third is that musicians in general have fewer opportunities for touring in a way that will generate a profit: there aren't many cities in Australia, and touring internationally is vastly more expensive for Australian musicians than it is for bands based in Europe or the United States.
Nevertheless, it's an interesting read, and I'm always happy to see this sort of thing: music industry reporting that actually looks at figures, rather than slavishly toeing the major-label line.