The $3 Million Joke

How WA Treats Musicians Like Spare Change (And Why That's Not Actually Funny)

Picture this. You're a talented musician in Perth. You've got the songs, the passion, and the drive to make it. But every 1 track recording session costs more than your weekly rent. The only venues booking new original music are closing down one by one. Your mates are moving to Melbourne because that's where the opportunities are… and the venues, and the funding, and basically everything that makes a music career possible.

Coldplay doing what Coldplay do…

Meanwhile, you watch the government spend more on a single international headliner than your entire music community gets in a year. And then some conservative journalist in the West Australia tells you, “you should just stop eating avo toast”, while you're eating instant noodles for the fourth day running.

Welcome to WA, where we'll drop a cool $15 million to entice a guy who called his daughter Apple to WA because ‘economic impact’, but allocate less than $3 million to support our entire independent music sector. Because apparently, one British rock band that already has more money than God is worth more than every local artist combined. Makes perfect sense, right?

Let's talk about WA's budget priorities, shall we? Prepare to be either amazed or enraged (probably both, possibly simultaneously):

Contemporary music gets approximately $3 million, which represents around 0.0050% of the state budget. Now we’re not going to talk about the massive money that gets dropped on Sport & Recreation here… we’ve been warned by our own peak body that in the ‘sport and mining state’ to throw rocks at our favourite pastime might get us blackballed… apparently it’s “not a fair comparison”. So fine… we’ve cherry-picked a few other very annoying comparisons that might surprise you.

Fossil fuel subsidies burn through $315 million annually - 155 times more than music. Event Tourism consumes $91.6 million - 45 times more than music. And my personal favourite: The Collie coal transition gets $118 million - 58 times more than music.

“To break it down even further, and even more annoyingly. Music receives less funding than just six days of the Collie coal transition support. Six. Bloody. Days. Now I like Collie bro… but… c’mon bitches!?”

When the government can magically find $662 million for one town's mining transition but only $3(ish) million for our entire independent music sector, the message to WA’s cultural community is crystal clear: your creativity is about as valuable to them as yesterday's newspaper.

Want to see how WA compares to other states? Buckle up for some more delicious stats.

Victoria invests $2.42 per person for music. NSW manages $2.23 per person. South Australia puts in $2.33 per person. And WA? A generous $0.72 per person. We're basically the stingy uncle of Australian states when it comes to supporting local music.

Our music funding represents around 1.9% of our arts budget while NSW and Victoria dedicate 11-12%. Despite having the nation's strongest economy (thanks, mining boom!), WA has pretty much the lowest per capita music investment rate in the country. It's like being the richest person at the party but refusing to buy a round of drinks, then wondering why nobody wants to hang out with you.

Here's where it gets really beautiful for our indie musos, and by beautiful I mean soul-crushingly absurd. Tourism WA has spent over $22 million since 2020 on just three headline acts. Coldplay got $15 million for one concert - ONE CONCERT! Björk with WASO got $2.2 million, and Highway to Hell cost us $5 million.

That's $22 million for three nights of entertainment versus $3 million for an entire year of supporting local artists who actually live here, pay taxes here, and contribute to our communities year-round instead of jetting off to their next private island after the show. The annual Contemporary Music Fund could run for 5 years on what we gave Coldplay alone. But hey, at least we know where the government's priorities lie: with millionaire rock stars who won’t remember they even played here, not the musicians who actually call WA home. And how are they doin’? Not so great WA Gov… not so great…

A WA musos wallet?

Remember earlier this year when the Premier announced a "$2.75 million boost to the local music industry"? Sounds impressive, right? Politicians love big numbers, especially during election season. But if you read the fine print (and the pollies hope you won’t), the "boost" was a four-year total, not an annual increase. So instead of $2.75 million per year (which is what most people assumed), it's $2.75 million spread over four years - about $687,500 annually in new funding.

It's like promising someone a million-dollar salary and then revealing you meant over 10 years. Technically true, completely misleading, and exactly the kind of creative accounting meets manipulative marketing BS that makes people lose faith in politics.

While WA works to perfect the art of creative neglect, other places are showing what's possible with relatively modest investment, and the results are pretty clear:

• Austin invests $25 million annually and gets a 7:1 economic return - that's what we call smart business. Berlin spent €10 million and saved 85% of their threatened venues - imagine that, actually solving problems with targeted funding.

• Iceland invests $42 per capita and gets 95% youth gig attendance - turns out young people will engage with culture when you actually support it.

• South Korea invested $500 million over 10 years and now generates $10 billion annually from K-pop revenue - we call that long-term thinking.

But sure, let's keep spending our mining royalties on coal transitions while our musicians emigrate to places that understand the difference between a diversified economy and a sunk investment.

Mel-style snarkiness aside though, this chronic underfunding actually costs us. As we’ve written about before, WA already has a massive talent drain, with artists leaving for Melbourne and Sydney like refugees fleeing a cultural wasteland. Venue closures are accelerating - we've lost 28% of dedicated live music rooms since 2010. Our economic underperformance is embarrassing - WA delivers 60% less music economic output than Melbourne despite having comparable population. And we're experiencing cultural homogenisation, where local voices get drowned out by imported entertainment because it's easier to book international acts or pay cover bands than support original, domestic talent.

Every dollar invested in grassroots live music returns $3.60 to local economies. That's basic arithmetic, folks. But apparently, understanding multiplication is too complex for our event tourism budget planners, who seem to think economic development means spending more money on bigger rockstars.

We’re not asking for subsidisation here. We’re not asking for charity. We're proposing strategic investment in economic diversification, which is fancy talk for "maybe don't put all our eggs in the mining basket forever." For less than half of what we spend on sport and rec annually (yeah, I know we said we wouldn’t make a comparison, we lied, OK…?), we could transform WA from cultural backwater to creative powerhouse, generate hundreds of millions in economic output, create thousands of sustainable creative jobs, position ourselves as the Asia-Pacific music hub (because geography matters, and we're actually pretty well-positioned for that), and actually support the artists who make our communities vibrant. Imagine.

The framework exists. The demand is there. The economic case is solid. The only question is whether WA has the vision to stop subsidising yesterday's industries and start building tomorrow's economy, or whether we'll keep throwing money at coal transitions and Coldplay while waving our creative talent off as it moves east.

The choice is ours. The question is whether we're brave enough to make it.