Australia: Music industry enjoys best year in current millennium despite piracy

With the music industry having struggled in the two decades since the advent of downloadable music, new figures from the the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) show that there was a 10% increase in revenue from recorded music in 2017, the best result since 1996.

For the first time, the streaming giants - Spotify, Amazon Music, Google Play and Apple Music - provided the majority (54%) of the cash.

Explaining that piracy was also declining as more and more people were becoming paid subscribers to streaming services, ARIA Chief Executive Dan Rosen explained "to put that in perspective, streaming services effectively were zero five years ago.”

However, while streaming is returning cash to artists - Spotify said in its recent IPO it had paid out $10 billion in royalties to date - many still think it is undervaluing music.

While Ed Sheeran, the most-streamed artist of 2017, likely earned millions of dollars on Spotify last year just from his hit Shape of You, the vast majority of Australian artists are getting nowhere near that amount.

Rosen added “we still have a ways to go to where we were back in the 90s, but it's a great thing that we have tailwinds rather than headwinds."

He said there was still work to be done to make sure the new corporate giants of the music business - most of them US-based tech start-ups - were investing in the future of Australian music.

Rosen told the ABC that means Australian content quotas for streaming services, the same as what commercial radio has, stating “we need to make sure that playlists are localised, that they have people on the ground working with local artists."

Steve Cross, a co-founder of Melbourne label Remote Control, which works with international acts like Radiohead and Adele as well as locals like Courtney Barnett, said his business was seeing a strong upward trend when it came to people listening on demand.

Cross commented “people are obviously enjoying the convenience and the incredible catalogue of music that is available to them.

"Digital service providers have also been very forward thinking, introducing people to lots of new music and new artists."