The Bass Line, Edition 2: a fuller picture of Australia's music industry
The second edition of The Bass Line builds on Creative Australia and Music Australia’s first study of the sector’s economy - deepening the analysis and, for the first time, quantifying music education’s place within it.
The brief
The first Bass Line established a baseline. The second needed to go further on two fronts. State and territory governments and arts agencies each needed their own investment case, not just a single national figure to divide up by assumption. And the first edition had flagged a gap it couldn’t close in the time available: music education sits upstream of the whole industry, feeding it musicians, technicians and audiences, but nobody had ever put a number on what it was actually worth or tracked what was happening to it.
Our approach
We extended the original study’s method deliberately, rather than redesigning it, so the second edition would be genuinely comparable to the first and not just a fresh one-off exercise. On top of that consistent base, we built a state-by-state breakdown of the industry’s economic contribution, and stood up the first dedicated economic quantification of music education - treating it as its own workstream given how differently it behaves from the industry’s commercial side, then reconnecting it back into the fuller picture.
The outcome
$10.76 billion in revenue, $4.28 billion in direct economic contribution (GVA), and more than $1 billion in exports - a fuller, more granular picture of an industry that, two years earlier, had no published numbers to point to at all. The state and territory breakdown gives every jurisdiction its own evidenced case rather than a slice of a national estimate, and the education analysis gave Creative Australia and Music Australia the first real look at the health of the pipeline feeding the industry the two editions now track. Together, the two editions turn a single baseline into the start of a genuine annual series - each one building on the last rather than starting the argument over.
You can download the Second Edition of the Bass Line here.
