The Bass Line: Australia's music economy, edition by edition
Before The Bass Line, nobody could say with any confidence what Australia’s music industry was actually worth. Advocacy, funding cases and policy conversations about the sector ran on argument and anecdote, because no agreed number existed for anyone to point to. Commissioned by Creative Australia and Music Australia, The Bass Line set out to fix that - and has since grown from a single baseline study into an ongoing annual series, with a dedicated companion study of music education along the way.
The studies
Edition 1: measuring the industry for the first time
The first edition was the industry’s baseline - a year-long study drawing on more than 1,000 contributors and hundreds of thousands of data points, built so no meaningful part of the industry could reasonably say it had been left out. It found the industry generated $8.78 billion in total revenue and contributed $2.82 billion in direct gross value added (GVA) to the Australian economy, with live music performance ($4.83 billion revenue, $1.44 billion GVA) and music retail ($2.73 billion revenue, $515 million GVA) the two largest contributors, and $975 million in industry exports. It was the first published figure of its kind, and the reference point the sector, government and media have used since.
Read the full credential: Measuring Australia’s music industry for the first time: The Bass Line.
Edition 2: a fuller, more granular picture
The second edition extended the original method, rather than redesigning it, so the results would be genuinely comparable to the first rather than a fresh one-off exercise. On that consistent base, it added a state-by-state breakdown so every jurisdiction can see a breakdown of revenue, GVA and exports, and - for the first time - quantified music education’s place in the industry. The headline numbers grew with the method: $10.76 billion in revenue, $4.28 billion in direct economic contribution, and more than $1 billion in exports.
Read the full credential: The Bass Line, Edition 2: a fuller picture of Australia’s music industry.
The numbers, side by side
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.
| Edition 1 (2023-24) | Edition 2 (2024-25) | |
|---|---|---|
| Total revenue | $8.78 billion | $10.76 billion |
| Direct economic contribution (GVA) | $2.82 billion | $4.28 billion |
| Exports | $975 million | $1 billion+ |
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.
Music education: a known gap from Ed. 1, addressed in Ed. 2
Edition One flagged a gap that was not possible to 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 worth or tracked what was happening to it. Edition Two treated it as its own focussed workstream, mapping the music education value chain, and that work grew into a standalone study published alongside Edition Two, More Than Notes on a Page.
That study found music education contributes $1.79 billion in revenue and $1.45 billion in direct GVA to the Australian economy - an 84 percent GVA-to-revenue ratio most sectors would envy. But the value figure sits alongside a structural decline in the pipeline that produces it: only 47 percent of Australian 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 percent between 2012 and 2022; and more than 40 creative-arts university courses have been discontinued since 2018.
Read the full credential here: More Than Notes on a Page: the economics of Australian music education.
Why it matters
A sector value number that resonates with an industry, government and media doesn’t happen by accident - it happens by building a method disciplined enough to repeat, not just a one-off exercise. That discipline, and the committment from Music Australia to do so, has ensured The Bass Line is not a single point-in-time study but an ongoing series, and what let a gap the first edition flagged - music education - grow into a genuine standalone body of work in its own right. Two editions in, the same question keeps getting easier to answer with evidence instead of argument: what is Australia’s music industry actually worth, and what does it need to keep being worth it?
