More Than Notes on a Page: the economics of Australian music education
More Than Notes on a Page is a standalone economic analysis of Australia’s music education ecosystem, commissioned by Music Australia and Creative Australia.
The brief
The Bass Line Edition One had flagged music education as a gap worth its own study - it behaves differently from the industry’s commercial side, and lumping it in would have blurred both pictures. Music Australia and Creative Australia needed two things from a standalone study: what the sector is actually worth in its own right, and what’s happening to the pipeline that feeds it - the teachers, school programs and courses that turn a child’s first music lesson into a working musician a decade or two later.
Our approach
We treated value and capacity as two separate questions and answered them together. Sizing the education sector’s economic contribution meant tracing its revenue and value-add on the same rigorous basis as the industry study it complements, so the two figures could sit side by side without qualification. Tracking capacity meant following the pipeline through every stage it depends on - teacher training, school access, and course availability - across more than a decade of data, so a single year’s snapshot couldn’t hide a longer-running trend.
The outcome
$1.79 billion in total revenue and $1.45 billion in direct GVA - an 84% GVA-to-revenue ratio. But the numbers sit alongside a structural decline: only 47% of children learn music at school; primary teachers’ music-training hours fell from 17 to 8 between 2009 and 2022; senior-secondary music enrolments dropped 16% between 2012 and 2022; and more than 40 creative-arts university courses have been discontinued since 2018. Music exports were worth $90 million.
Together, it’s a sector generating real economic value on a shrinking training base - and that combination is the study’s real contribution. A value figure alone would have made the sector’s case; sitting it next to a decade-plus of declining teacher training, school access and course availability turns the report into an early-warning signal as much as a valuation, giving Music Australia and Creative Australia evidence for both arguments at once: the sector is worth protecting, and the pipeline that sustains it is visibly under strain.
You can download More Than Notes on a Page here.
