The Australian music industry: not drowning, waving

 

Australian music sales in first half of 2009 versus the same period last year. Source: ARIA

A couple of years ago, it seemed as though the big four music companies were heading for rapid oblivion. CD sales were falling as fast as Lehamn Brother shares and the expected saviour of paid digital downloads had yet to figure significantly on balance sheets.

 

But in the Australian territory at least, Big Music is ack off the canvas and fighting on. As you can see from the ARIA sales figures above, music sales have finally stabilised, helpped by continued strong growth in digital music sales. While CD sales continued to decline, they were still substantial, grossing $131 million for the first half of 2009 on the back of superstars like Pink and the Kings of Leon. Meanwhile, the dollar value of digital music sales grew by 43% for the first six months of 2009 versus the same period of 2008.

The result is that the Australian music industry is climbing out of the abyss, stemming the bleeding and with broad sunlit uploads of future digital music sales just over the horizon. And remember: these are just sales of recorded music. Attendance at concerts and music festivals is a billion dollar industry in Australia.

Take home message? The record industry is here to stay – even the much-maligned majors, who are still finding and marketing musicians that audiences will pay to see and hear.

Melissa Gregg on the travails of junior academics

Melissa Gregg, one of the better young researchers in the country, has done a lot of good work researching the precarious working lives of tech-savvy professionals.

Now she’s written a fine piece in New Matilda about the dire  state of the Australian higher education sector for junior academics:

s the system currently stands, junior scholars are asked to prove their worth to universities in ways that those hiring them never had to. The heads of search committees today didn’t even need a PhD to start their career, yet devise intricate formulae for assessing the accomplishments of those seeking to follow their example.

A book, multiple journal articles and a history of grant funding is now usually necessaryon top of a completed dissertation to make a shortlist after graduating. How it is possible to achieve any of these things, when handing in a thesis also means handing in any claim for library access, desk space or institutional support? The industry has divested the responsibility of training their smartest students to a level where they can gain access to sustainable long-term employment.

And of course, for those who do make it in the door, life isn’t exactly a picnic.

A recent survey of academics at one Sydney university showed a 100 per cent response rate when asked if they worked on weekends. My own research in the past few years has shown how tenured life involves a never-ending series of online administrative tasks that consume work and home life. All too rarely are these duties punctuated with face-to-face contact with colleagues and students — often the principal motivation for scholars to aspire to the job in the first place.

The situation Gregg describes is structural, owing to the sustained reduction in public funding per student since John Howard’s government took office in 1996.

But all is not lost. Other aspects of the higher education sector in Australia mean the long-term future for academics such as Gregg are relatively rosy. The Australian higher education workforce is ageing rapidly, and many senior staff will retire in the next 5-10 years. At that point, universities will have no choice but to embark on sustained hiring campaigns, simply in order to replace their current staff.

And let’s not forget that the lifetime income benefits accruing to those who gain higher degrees are very substantial. A robust literature has demonstrated that people who graduate with bachelors degrees earn significantly higher incomes across their lives than those who only complete high school.

Telecommunications: Australia’s unhappiest industry

 

Australian mobile phone complaints nearly doubled in the 2008-09 year

On Friday I attended the Communications Policy Research Forum at the University of Technology Sydney.

Speaking at the Forum, amongst many others, were  my old supervisor, Associate Professor Elaine Lally and my colleague at the University of Western Sydney’s Centre for Cultrual Research, Professor David  Rowe. Lally and Rowe were presenting the results of a research project about customer complaints for the Communications Alliance, the peak body for the telco industry in Australia.

The results were sobering. There were an astonishing 230,000 complaints to the national complaints body, the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, in 2008-09, a rise of 54% over 2007-08 figures, according to TIO data. Horror stories like this one published by the Sydney Morning Herald’s Paul Sheehan are common. So bad is the situation that a large proportion of complaints are actually about Telco complaints handling proceedures themselves. Complaints by mobile phone customers were up a staggering 78%.

Lally and Rowe’s talk detailed why. Training hours for call centre workers in the telecommunications industry are much l;ower than for industries like banking. In fact, an amazing 72% of telecommunications call centre workers leave the industry after less than a year. There’s also no prizes for guessing why there are so many complaints: maddeningly complex phone plans and byzantine corporate billing and service structures make it almost as hard for employees to understand customer issues as the customers themselves. The way phone and internet services are bundled and solved is structurally complex, to the point of being almost impenetrable.

More fundamentally, the practice of making customers wait in long phone queues for information about their service or to make a complaint is inherently frustrating. In many cases, customers are being asked to spend significant amounts of time and do significant amounts of unpaid “work” merely in order to resolve a complaint for a service they’ve already paid for. It’s not surprising customers and call centre workers often end up adversarial, angry – even traumatised.

The result is Australia’s unhappiest industry – as the TIO data shows. No wonder the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is threatening to step in and introduce greater regulations for the sector. Consumers will be wondering why anyone expected anything else.

What’s new in the journal Cultural Science: Terry Flew on the “cultural economy moment”

From the cover of the current edition of the journal Cultural Science

I’ve always considered QUT researcher Terry Flew to be one of Australia’s sharpest thinkers on culture and its industrial manifestations.

Now he’s published an excellent review article that traces the intellectual history and surveys the current field of ideas around the “cultural economy.” It’s in the current edition of the journal Cultural Science and you can read the full text here:

The Cultural Economy Moment?
The term “cultural economy” has gained considerable intellectual currency over the course of the 2000s.We have seen edited collections on cultural economy (du Gay and Pryke, 2002), a reader on the subject (Amin and Thrift, 2004), and the launch of the Journal of Cultural Economy. Such developments arise in part out of a growing interest among both academics and policy-makers in the creative industries (Hartley, 2005) and the associated notion of a creative economy (Venturelli, 2005; Scott, 2008a; UNCTAD, 2008). The growing international interest in creative cities and global city-regions can be connected to such developments (Scott et. al., 2001; Florida, 2002, 2008; Scott, 2008b), as can the rise of hybrid fields such as cultural-economic geography (James et. al., 2008). Such developments are also reflective of shifts in cultural policy towards conceiving of culture as a resource (Yúdice, 2003), and the rise of economic discourses within arts and cultural policy which, in cultural economist David Throsby’s account, see cultural policy ‘rescued from its primordial past and catapulted to the forefront of the modern forward-looking policy agenda, an essential component in any respectable economic policy-maker’s development strategy’ (Throsby, 2008: 228). Throsby associates this with a reframing of the arts, which are now seen as ‘part of a wider and more dynamic sphere of economic activity, with links through to the information and knowledge economies, fostering creativity, embracing new technologies, and feeding innovation’ (Throsby, 2008: 229).

Flew goes on to survey the development of the academic literature in this field, drawing on work from the fields of communication studies, cultural economics, the sociology of culture and the cultural political economy. For the academic readers of this bog, you’ll notice all the important names in the field: Towse, Throsby, Lash and Urry, Garnham, Bordieu, Scott, Hesmondhalgh and so on. There’s also a fascinating discussion of the term “neo-liberalism” as a term of abuse amongst cultural theorists against the creative industries movement (remember Toby Miller?)

This is probably the best  short review of the field extant.

The Google Book Settlement grinds on

Sherwin Siy has a post that helpfully updates us all on the latest twists and turns in Google’s attempts to license the entirety of printed publishing (or as close as it can get to that, anyway).

Late on Friday, a federal court in New York received a new version of the Google Book Search settlement. As with the old version, the new one was drafted jointly by Google and its erstwhile litigation opponents: the publishers and authors who sued Google for scanning their books without permission.

Substantively, the new settlement bears a great resemblance to the old one. There’s a large number of changes (which are conveniently marked up in a downloadable file available from the settlement site here), but while they chip away at some of the rough edges of the earlier proposed settlement, the core of our antitrust concerns seems to remain.

Why is this? Orphan works and the ability of other  players to license and sell works online remains the big issue.

That main concern is that Google should not be the sole entity able to license the display of orphan and unclaimed works.

Nothing in the new settlement agreement seems to change that dynamic.

Siy continues,, explaining that:

Sure, other outlets might be able to embed a sort of Google Book reader into their web pages and act as resellers of the Google database, but that doesn’t create actual competition, especially if it’s Google-controlled information and software at the back end. All that the reseller would be doing is providing different window dressing and customer support.

Bottom line:

In the end, it’s still just Google alone in that market, and that’s something that is a real cause for concern.

Elsewhere: The Googlization of Everything

Where have all the artists gone?

Cultural employment in Australia, by occupation, 2001-2006. (Source: ABS 6273.0 Employment in Culture, Hans Hoegh-Guldberg). You can click on the image to get a bigger jpg.

Yesterday we looked at a detailed breakdown of cultural funding in Australia.

Today, I’m reprinting part of a recent Art Monthly Australia article by Peter Anderson about the surprising (alarming?) decline in artistic employment shown by the latest census figures. Anderson went through and crunched some of the ABS data on cultural employment. He also refers to Music Council of Australia research by the cultural economist Hans Hoegh-Guldberg. As Anderson writes in his Art Monthly Australia piece, in many sectors the figures are not pretty:

While the ABS Employment in Culture report only provides raw numbers for each arts occupation, Hoegh-Guldberg’s analysis converts the numbers into percentages, which clearly show the substantial nature of the issue. He notes that between 2001 and 2006 there was a 12.5% decline in music professionals, a 20% decline in actors, dancers and related professionals, an almost 6% decline in authors, and an 18% decline in visual arts and crafts professionals. Within the more tightly defined occupations in the visual arts and crafts, the declines are a little uneven, with painters falling by 13%, sculptors by 9% and potters and ceramic artists by a very significant 55%. There were also declines in the more general visual arts and craft occupations categories, such as Visual Arts and Craft Professional nec (not elsewhere classified). In fact, this latter category – which includes new media artist, ephemeral artist, multimedia artist and textile artist – fell to below the numbers of a decade earlier, after peaking in 2001. Potters and ceramic artists, on the other hand, have been in decline for a decade, falling from 2,155 in 1996 to just 652 in 2006 – a whopping 70% reduction.

Australian cultural funding, by artform category

As promsied, this week I’m looking at the fine print of Australian cultural funding.

Today I’m looking at funding by artform category. As you can see from the graph below, the big ticket items are parks and environment funding, public broadcasters, libraries and art galleries.

Australian cultural funding by artform category, 2007-08, all levels of Australian government, operational figures only (excludes capital funding). Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics data, collated by myself.

You can get a bigger jpeg of the graph above by clicking through on the image (it’s a link to a bigger file).

Lynden Barber on unspectacular acting

 

Alfred Molina (source: Circus Theatricals).

There’s a great piece about film acting up at New Matilda at the moment by Lynden Barber.

He mentions the wonderful character actor Alfred Molina as an example of a screen actor who often “perfectly embodies a character.”

Good films — and sometimes even mediocre ones — are full of great acting that goes unnoticed. That’s why they’re great — we’re not meant to notice the craft behind them. Genuine performances don’t have tickets on themselves. Sadly, this means they often pass uncelebrated.

For instance I can’t recall anyone ever writing that Alfred Molina, who plays the father of Carey Mulligan’s schoolgirl heroine in An Education, is one of the greatest British film and TV actors currently working — which he so clearly is. Incredibly, I’ve never read a single interview or profile of the man, whose long line of screen credits stretches back as far as a 1981 appearance in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Not once has he been nominated for an Academy Award.

Yet there is a very good reason he keeps on getting so much work. Molina is one of those actors — and oddly we call them character actors, as if there were any other kind — that most viewers recognise, but whose name is known by few outside of a small circle of film critics and screen industry professionals.

There are shades here of the hilarious conversation between Ben Stiller and R0bert Downey Jr about the craft of playing handicapped characters in Tropic Thunder.

The perils of contrarianism: Gladwell and the Freakonomicists versus Pinker, Krugman and the entire scientific community

 

Malcolm Gladwell at TED

The New York Times currently carries two reviews of Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw, one by Janet Maslin and one by Stephen Pinker. Both offer back-handed criticism of this much-imitated writer and his occasional tendency to warp the reality he portrays in order to gain maximum narrative leverage. I think these reviews have something in common with the backlash against Superfreakonomics. They might even signal a change in critical sentiment about the modern style of non-fiction writing.

How transparent is the Australia Council’s Annual Report?

Australia COuncil funding by category, 2008-2009. source: 2008-09 Annual Report

Over at Marcus Westbury’s blog, he’s posted a graph breakdown of the Australia Council’s funding by artform category, from the Australia Council’s 2006-07 Annual Report.

I was intending this post to be a detailed breakdown of Australian government cultural and arts funding, drawing on the public sources and drilling down into the detail of the funding to describe the distribution of that funding in various ways. But after glancing at this year’s Australia Council Annual Report, I am going to write instead about the decreasing transparency of that document.

While I mention cultural funding, though, here are some top-line figures. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, cultural funding across all levels of government in Australia exceeds $6 billion (it was $6,311.4 million in 2007-08, to be precise):

The Australian Government contributed $2,358.9m (37.4%) to total cultural funding while the state and territory governments contributed $2,952.2m (46.8%) and local governments provided $1,000.3m (15.8%).

Where does the money go? Mostly to parks and environmental heritage, broadcasting (the ABC and SBS), libraries and museums, in that order:

Environmental heritage was the largest recipient of funds, with funding of over $1.4 billion ($1,466.4m) or 27.6% of total cultural funding from the Australian Government and state and territory governments combined. The other major recipient of Australian and state and territory government funding in 2007-08 was Radio and television services at over $1.3 billion ($1,355.0m) representing 25.5% of Australian and state government cultural funding. Libraries received $1,036.4m or 16.4% of total funding, including $653.4m from local government while Other museums and cultural heritage received $630.4m (10.0%).

Once you drill further down into the figures, it becomes quickly apparent that the majority of cultural funding is channeled through relatively large government cultural departments and agencies, while grants and subsidies to artists and non-profit cultural organisations – the kind of thing most people would recognise as “arts funding” remains a relatively small proportion of total cultural spending by the government sector.

Part of the difficulty with reporting on this area is the aggregated nature of the statistics available. The Australia Council’s annual statement (this year branded with the embarrassingly Orwellian slogan “One Arts Sector: One Arts Council”, which must make the artists and organisations in parts of the sector not supported by the Australia Council feel wonderful) has become noticeably less transparent in recent years, and the Council has also had a less than consistent approach to which statistics it reports.

One glaring omission from the 2008-09 Annual Report is a breakdown of its grant recipients. You can find these breakdowns in earlier reports, and mighty useful they were too. It might seem like a minor point, but the list was in fact a key data source for my 2007 investigation of financial and governance irregularities in the Noise festival. Noise is a major initiative funded by the Australia Council as a national youth media ‘festival’ (even though it is no longer a festival), but which actually involved the payment of large sums of money to the private company of Sydney promoter Brandan Saul. Noise continues to receive funding, by the way, but you have to drill down into the entrails of the report’s financial statements to find reference to it.

The Annual Report has a few other notable omissions and unexplained inconsistencies . Owing to a new system for classifying artform data, there is a new category called “cross-artform” which is presumably the successor to the category which used to be called “multi-artform/other.” Is it the same category, or a different one? We don’t know because the Australia Council doesn’t explain it, or publish the funding breakdowns which would enable us to independently verify it. One of the highlighted projects from the Inter-Arts departmental description in the Annual Report is the commendable Splendid project, which included some real talents of the emerging Australian scene, like Alice Lang and Mish Grigor. Splendid is definitely a “cross-artform” project – but what else is? We don’t know.

Tomorrow, I’ll get around to that special post breaking down Australian cultural funding, and I’ll discuss some interesting factoids that fall out form it, like the fact that support for individual artists at the Australia Council appears to be falling, and that funding to public agencies and cultural organisations dominates cultural funding at nearly every level and category of funding program.

UPDATE: Marcus informs me the grants breakdown is to be forthcoming in a future document.