An Investigation into the Victorian Music Industry —

Published May, 2023

It should come as no surprise that music is vitally important to Victoria.

Its significance has been qualifed economically, with live music adding $1.7 billion in GDP to the Victorian economy and the national recorded music industry having an estimated worth of $566 million in 2021 (Music Victoria, 2022).

It has also been valued for social and cultural importance, with 37% of surveyed Australians agreeing that music is their number one passion (Victorian Music Development Office, 2022).

Despite these statistics, data on the Victorian music industry at a micro-level is challenging to quantify and assess. Limited localised research and the lack of available, complete, and reliable location-specific data sources make it difficult to realise and quantify the full scale and inner workings of the Victorian music industry.

Following the Victorian Music Development Office (VMDO)’s Scoping Study (Ryan, 2020), conducted by Dr Ben Eltham and Ms Catherine Ryan from Monash University in 2019, VMDO invited independent researcher Benjamin Wiesner to investigate the state and scale of the Victorian music industry using different data sources and methodology in 2022.

This research project aims to begin the process of breaking down some of the more unknown complexities of the Victorian music industry. With previous research starting with Census data (Ryan, 2020), perhaps considered a top-down approach, this research begins with creating a database of Victorian artists that can be linked to reliable, current, and updatable statistics.