Australian report says local music is in trouble and that Canada isn’t far behind
This isn’t encouraging.
A study from Australia says that recommendation algorithms used by Spotify, Apple Music, et al, are the main reason why local musicians are making less money even as people spend more on music. I quote:
“Australia is now the global poster child for what ‘market failure’ looks like in recorded music. A vicious cycle risks taking root, with increasingly fewer domestic success stories resulting in less domestic investment, meaning even lower chances of future success. Intervention is required to stop the rot.”
This requires a little unpacking. Music fans tend to favour tracks that are in their native language. The report points to Denmark where local artists singing in Danish top the charts. In the English-speaking world, competition is obviously much stiffer. Australian artists have to scrap it out for attention amongst material from the US, the UK, and Canada. The study also points out that the same applies to Canada and the UK. (Canada has a little more protection because of programs like FACTOR, Starmaker, and other assistance plans.)
I quote: “[Canadian artists are] “encroached upon by the dominance of its southerly neighbor, with a steady decline of domestic presence compounded by a ‘talent drain’ where many of their own major breakthrough artists are signed and managed out of the United States.”
Former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull wrote this in the forward: ““This digital ‘one-way valve’ that sends our listening offshore reflects a broader challenge of sovereignty in the digital age.”
What’s Australia’s solution? Work with Spotify and other streamers to develop human (and local!) content creators. “Curators that can compile playlists relevant to a particular city or region (some of whom may also be local radio stations, local concert venues or local artists themselves) can organize and differentiate music in ways that algorithms either cannot or do not.”
Read more here.
