Seventy-Two Cents

On what WA's music funding figures actually say, and what they say about us

Western Australia has the strongest state economy in the country. Its per capita gross state product consistently leads the nation. Its mining royalties fund a budget that other states regard with the specific envy of people who know they are watching someone else's luck. It is, by most conventional measures, a wealthy place.

It spends seventy-two cents per person per year on contemporary music.

Coldplay doing what Coldplay do…

Victoria spends $2.42. New South Wales spends $2.23. South Australia spends $2.33. Western Australia, the state with the nation's strongest economy, spends $0.72 — the lowest per capita music investment rate in the country.(1) The Contemporary Music Fund, which supports the entire independent music sector in WA, receives approximately $3 million annually. This is 0.005% of the state budget. It is a rounding error in a budget built on mineral wealth.

The figures alone make the argument. What is worth examining is what they reveal about the assumptions underlying them — about what the state believes culture is for, and whose culture is worth supporting.

Budget allocations are not neutral accounting exercises. They are expressions of priority, made legible through numbers. The question of what receives public investment relative to what does not is a political question with a political answer, and the answer is visible in the figures.

WA's fossil fuel subsidies total approximately $315 million annually — 105 times the Contemporary Music Fund. Event tourism receives $91.6 million — 30 times more. The Collie coal transition support program received $118 million in recent allocation — 39 times the music fund, or enough to run it for nearly forty years.(2)

To be precise about the Collie comparison, the annual Contemporary Music Fund allocation is equivalent to six days of the Collie coal transition support. Six days of funding for a single town's industry transition equals a full year of support for every independent musician in Western Australia. This is not an argument against supporting Collie, whose community faces a genuine challenge and deserves genuine support. It is an observation about proportionality. The state can find $662 million for one town's mining transition. It allocates $3 million for its entire independent music sector. These are choices, not inevitabilities.

WA's arts budget allocates approximately 1.9% to contemporary music. New South Wales and Victoria each dedicate 11 to 12% of their arts budgets to the sector.(3) The gap is not explained by the relative size of the sectors — WA has a substantial independent music community, documented across WAM and Live Performance Australia surveys. It is explained by the weight the state budget gives to music as a category of cultural infrastructure worth supporting.

Earlier this year the Premier announced a $2.75 million boost to the local music industry. The announcement was received with cautious optimism by a sector that has grown accustomed to cautious optimism as its default political register — enough enthusiasm to acknowledge that any increase is better than none, not enough to mistake a press release for a policy commitment.

The caution was warranted. The $2.75 million was a four-year total, not an annual increase. The new funding, distributed over four years, amounts to approximately $687,500 per year — a meaningful sum to an individual artist or a small venue, and a modest increment in the context of a fund whose existing annual allocation is already inadequate by every comparative measure available.

The announcement is worth dwelling on not to diminish the increment, which is real, but because the framing illustrates a pattern that the sector encounters regularly: the political performance of support for local music, calibrated to generate positive coverage without generating the budget commitment that would make a structural difference. A four-year total presented as a boost. A per capita investment that trails every comparable state, defended as evidence of commitment to local culture. The gap between the language and the ledger is where the actual policy lives, and it has been consistently wide for a long time.

The most illuminating comparison is not with mining subsidies or fossil fuel support, though those figures are striking enough. It is with the state's own event tourism spending — because event tourism and contemporary music support are both, ostensibly, investments in the cultural and economic life of Western Australia, and the disproportion between them makes the underlying logic visible.

Since 2020, Tourism WA has spent over $22 million attracting three headline international acts: $15 million for Coldplay, $5 million for the Highway to Hell concert, and $2.2 million for Björk with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra.(4) These figures were reported, defended, and in most cases presented as evidence of WA's capacity to attract major international events.

The $15 million allocated to a single Coldplay concert equals five years of the Contemporary Music Fund. The full $22 million spent on three international acts equals seven years of annual support for the entire local independent sector.

The economic impact argument for major event investment is not without merit. International headline acts draw visitors, fill hotels, and generate hospitality spend that can exceed the subsidy. This argument deserves engagement rather than dismissal. But it does not explain why the investment calculus consistently favours artists who will leave after the show over artists who live here, pay tax here, employ local sound engineers and venue staff and booking agents year-round, and contribute to the sustained cultural life of the state in ways that a single concert cannot.

The local independent music sector generates economic activity continuously, not in the single spike of a stadium event. It develops the audience culture that makes WA a viable market for international touring acts in the first place. It provides the performance infrastructure that major events depend on when they arrive. It is, in event tourism terms, the ecosystem that makes the headline possible. The headline receives $15 million. The ecosystem receives $3 million a year, again… distributed across every independent artist in the state.

Every dollar invested in grassroots live music returns approximately $3.60 to local economies.(5) WA's own economic data supports the broader principle: the independent music sector generates cultural and economic activity at a multiplier that makes the current funding level look less like prudent budget management and more like leaving money on the table

The consequence of sustained underinvestment is a talent pipeline that consistently empties toward the eastern states. WA already delivers around 60% less music economic output than Melbourne despite having a comparable population. The gap is not explained by the quality of WA musicians, who are by any reasonable measure competitive with their eastern-state counterparts. It is explained by the conditions available for building a career.

Melbourne and Sydney have more venues, more funding, more industry infrastructure, and the accumulated critical mass that makes the next stage of a career viable. WA musicians who reach the point of needing those conditions either relocate or contract their ambitions to fit the available infrastructure. This is the standard outcome of regional underinvestment in any skilled sector: the producing region bears the development cost, the receiving region captures the career. For WA, which has the financial capacity to retain its creative workforce and has chosen not to, this is a decision with a cost that does not appear in the budget papers but is legible in the departure patterns of the sector's most capable people.

International comparisons are instructive, and not because they describe exotic policy experiments.

Austin invests $25 million annually in its music sector and generates a 7:1 economic return. Iceland invests $42 per capita and achieves 95% youth attendance at live music events. South Korea invested $500 million over ten years in its music export infrastructure and now generates $10 billion annually from that investment. Berlin spent €10 million on venue support and retained 85% of threatened venues.(6)

These are not cases from jurisdictions with vastly larger budgets or unusually favourable circumstances. They are cases from places that decided the music sector was an investment rather than a subsidy, applied resources accordingly, and produced outcomes that are now cited internationally as models. The common thread is not the scale of the investment — Iceland's $42 per capita is a policy commitment, not an exceptional expenditure — but the decision to treat cultural infrastructure as vital rather than discretionary.

Closing the gap between WA's per capita music investment and the national average does not require a radical reallocation of the state budget. Matching Victoria's $2.42 per person would require an annual investment of approximately $6.5 million — an increase of $3.5 million on the current Contemporary Music Fund. In a state budget of over $40 billion, this is not a resource constraint. It is a priority question, and it has been answered consistently in the same direction.

The practical interventions are documented: increased core funding for the Contemporary Music Fund, a dedicated venue acoustic retrofit program, regional touring subsidies, career development grants structured around income supplementation, and export development support for WA artists building interstate and international audiences. Each exists in some form in Victoria or New South Wales. Each produces measurable outcomes. None requires a budget allocation that would be visible against WA's existing spending on event tourism or mining support. There is precedent and there is evidence.

The case for music investment is sometimes made primarily on cultural grounds, and those grounds are entirely sufficient. But the economic argument deserves its own statement, because it meets the state on its preferred terrain.

Western Australia's economic strategy is, by the government's own account, focused on diversification — reducing dependence on the commodity cycle that has driven the budget through successive booms and contractions, and developing the industries that will generate value when the mining conditions that have underwritten the current budget are less favourable. The creative industries are consistently identified in economic development literature as a high-value, knowledge-intensive sector that is structurally resistant to the commodity price volatility that affects resource extraction. Music exports, in particular, have a small carbon footprint, require no royalty payments to foreign resource owners, and generate ongoing returns from intellectual property that appreciate rather than deplete with use.

The argument that serious music investment would position WA as an Asia-Pacific music hub is not fanciful. The geography is favourable — Perth is closer to Singapore, Jakarta, and Tokyo than to Sydney — and the appetite for Australian music in Asian markets has been demonstrated by the export success of Australian artists who have built careers in those markets with minimal institutional support. What those artists needed, and largely did not have, was the infrastructure to develop their careers to the point where export was viable: the venues, the funding, the industry development support that other states provide and WA does not.

This is not a proposal for subsidisation. It is a proposal for strategic investment in an industry that generates documented economic returns, develops skills that cannot be offshored, builds the cultural identity that makes a place attractive to the knowledge workers and creative professionals who drive economic diversification, and sustains the community life that makes the state somewhere people choose to live rather than somewhere they happen to work while the mine is operating.

Seventy-two cents per person is not a number that emerged from careful analysis of what the independent music sector requires. It is the number that emerged from a series of budget processes in which contemporary music was not a priority, in which nobody with sufficient political leverage made the sustained case that it should be, and in which the people most affected — independent musicians working three jobs to fund the next recording session — had the least capacity to make that case effectively.

The framework for doing better exists. The demand is demonstrably there. The economic case is solid and the cultural case is stronger. The only element that is genuinely uncertain is whether the people with the power to change the budget line have decided that it matters enough to try.

What the current figures communicate to every musician in WA who is calculating whether to stay or go is that the answer to that calculation is no. Not in words. In seventy-two cents.

That number can be changed. The question is whether we will change it before the people it is failing have already left.

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References and inspirations

1.  Per capita music investment figures by state from the Live Music Office national survey and the Australia Council for the Arts comparative funding analysis, 2023. WA Contemporary Music Fund allocation from State Budget 2024–25. Gross State Product comparison from ABS State Accounts 2022–23.

2.  Fossil fuel subsidy figures from the Australia Institute annual subsidy tracking report 2024. Event tourism allocation from WA State Budget 2024–25 supplementary papers. Collie Transition Fund figures from the WA Government's Collie Sustainable Futures announcement and subsequent budget appropriations.

3.  Arts budget proportion figures from state arts funding agency annual reports and the Australia Council national arts funding analysis 2023. The 1.9% figure for WA and 11–12% for NSW and Victoria are drawn from comparative analysis in WAM's advocacy submissions.

4.  Event tourism subsidy figures — Coldplay $15 million, Björk/WASO $2.2 million, Highway to Hell $5 million — from Tourism WA reporting and WA State Budget supplementary papers, confirmed by the WA Government in response to parliamentary questions and reported by WAtoday and The West Australian 2022–2024.

5.  The $3.60 local economic return per dollar invested in grassroots live music is from Live Performance Australia economic impact analysis, consistent with similar findings from the UK's UK Music economic impact reports.

6.  Austin music economy figures from the City of Austin Music and Entertainment Division annual report. Iceland cultural investment and attendance figures from the Icelandic Ministry of Culture. South Korea K-pop investment and export revenue from the Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA). Berlin venue support outcomes from the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe.