Music by local artists has appeared far less often in the Australian charts since worldwide streaming services began, a new study , published in De Gruyter's International Journal of Music Research, finds. The study, which looked at local and international artist representation in the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) Top 100 singles and albums charts over the past two decades, also found that North American music now dominates.
The study analyzed Australian artist representation, indigenous artist representation and the nationalities of artists in the ARIA charts for each year from 2000 to 2023, a period that saw Wi-Fi and high-speed broadband replace dial-up modems, the rise and fall of early peer-to-peer audio file sharer Napster, and the birth of modern streaming behemoths such as iTunes, Spotify and Amazon Music.
Study author Tim Kelly from the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia wanted to see whether artists from a place physically less well connected than the Global North benefited from the arrival of digital streaming which should, in theory, have opened up new markets around the world, democratized choice and allowed both emerging and established artists creating niche sounds to compete fairly via the democracy of the Internet.
However, the data suggested that, following the maturity of streaming in the Australian market, both Australian and non-Anglo (that is, other non-UK and non-North American) artist representation in the ARIA charts has declined in favor of artists from the US, Canada and the UK.
For indigenous music from Australia and New Zealand (ANZ), the singles chart share declined from 16.6% in the pre-streaming era 2000–2016 to 10.5% in 2017–2023, then to just 2.5% in 2023.
The annual albums charts also demonstrated these trends, with the ANZ artist chart share declining from 29% in 2000–2016 to 18% in 2017–2023 to just 4% in 2023. Furthermore, in 2023, only one new Australian artist release single (by Dean Lewis) and one new release album (by Spacey Jane) qualified for the best-selling charts.
"None of the study's findings revealed an increase in diversity," said Kelly. "This is not good for local artists, consumers or, in the longer term, the industry itself."
Adding that it's important the findings are used for positive change, Kelly said: "This isn't about hand-wringing or binary positions on the good/bad of Spotify. The intent is to contribute to a nuanced debate on how a complex industry can pivot its structural framework to support new music and diverse offerings: this research suggests the current environment is not supporting these outcomes."
He cites other studies that have evidenced the benefits of streaming for local artists, albeit those with the advantage of a distinct local language. For example, a paper by Will Page and Chris Dalla-River on musical 'glocalization' showed that in European markets with distinct languages, such as Germany and Poland, chart representation of local artists has increased. Glocalized music distribution, they argue, has created a 'flywheel effect' stimulating further investment to the benefit of local artists – an effect that seems to have missed Australasia.
"Local operatives for labels and streaming platforms are supportive of new Australian music," Kelly said, "but individually they are unable to override the dominance of wider, more powerful commercial and marketing influences."
