Measuring Australia's music industry for the first time: The Bass Line

The Bass Line is Creative Australia and Music Australia’s first comprehensive economic analysis of Australia’s music industry - the first study of its kind, and the opening edition of what’s now an ongoing annual series.

The brief

Australia’s music industry had never been measured end to end. Advocacy, funding cases and policy conversations about the sector had always run on argument and anecdote, because there was no agreed number behind them - no baseline that industry bodies, government and the sector itself could all point to and stand behind. Creative Australia and Music Australia needed that baseline, and it needed to be credible enough to survive contact with a sector, a government and a media that had never seen the industry measured this rigorously before.

Our approach

A year-long study drawing on more than 1,000 contributors and hundreds of thousands of data points, spanning the industry’s full breadth so no meaningful part of it could reasonably say it had been left out. Building a first-of-its-kind number meant the method had to do double duty: produce a figure that would hold up, and set a structure disciplined enough to be repeated, not just a one-off exercise. Every input was built to be defensible on its own terms - traceable back to a source, consistent in definition across contributors, and documented well enough that the next edition could extend it rather than start again from scratch.

The outcome

A $2.82 billion direct economic contribution (gross value added) to the Australian economy - the first published figure of its kind, and one the sector, government and media have used since as the reference point for what the industry is actually worth. Just as importantly, it set the baseline and the method the second edition later built on, turning a single study into the first data point in an ongoing annual series.

You can download the First Edition of The Bass Line here.