The Pack Australia

While streaming was sold to the music industry as an accessible distribution channel with almost unlimited global reach; it has highlighted some increasing inequities in the music industry. With major labels taking the lion’s share of streaming revenue for their ‘famous’ artists, where does this leave the independent music creator, who doesn’t have the financial, marketing or distribution backing to buy his way into popular playlists, or send her streams sky high?

With the average song play on most global streaming platforms netting an individual artist less than 0.005 cents, to make back the cost of an average coffee in Perth, a song must be streamed 1000 times.

To put this in the context of artist earnings - one million streams on YouTube nets an artist approximately $690. One million streams on Spotify = approximately $4370. One million streams on Apple Music = approximately $7350. One million streams on Amazon Music = approximately $4020. These kinds of figures barely cover the cost of recording an album – cheaply!

Without costly marketing and huge effort driving discovery, achieving a million song plays is beyond the capability of most independent artists. Many won’t net this volume of listener traffic across their entire music career. At the same time, ‘free’ subscription options educate consumers not to place a value on music – to expect to access the creative labour of our musicians at the touch of a button, but to also expect not to have to invest in it in any way.

Streaming has also made redundant the few remaining revenue streams for musicians - the sale of physical product (compact discs etc.) and digital downloads (being superseded by low cost streaming services). Live performance is now a far less viable income source for most local, original musicians, so the loss of revenue from recorded music is doubly impactful. Music streamed in our retail, commercial and hospitality spaces is predominantly international, so royalties that should be retained by our industry are instead flowing out of it.

In 2014 the Western Australian music industry pumped nearly $1 billion into the state's economy from live music alone. Researchers at Edith Cowan University found that the sector contributed $985 million and employed almost 3,000 people.

The APRA AMCOS Live Music Report from the same year found that live music generated $15.7 billion for the Australian economy, creating 65,000 full and part-time jobs across the country. However, the report also found that despite the clear economic benefits, little is trickling back into the pockets of our artists.

"Relatively few performing musicians are able to generate a living wage from their music, with the median income for practicing musicians in Australia calculated at just $7,200 per year," the report found. Financial instability is a leading cause of mental health issues in musicians and will have increasing impacts on the music industry over time.

Australians continue to spend $2 billion per annum on recorded music, and buy 3 recordings per second or 100,000,000 each year. Unfortunately however, these statistics don’t reflect our consumption of Australian music - they relate largely to Australian music consumers’ spending on international artists.

The Pack Australia sees this situation as the ultimate ‘industry killer’. The way we see it, if this continues unchallenged, unsigned Australian musos won’t be able to afford to make new music at all, and we’ll be stuck with ‘cookie-cutter’ albums coming out of big labels and hit studios from overseas, but struggling to support our own great, Australian artists. To us, that’s not an industry – it’s a factory.

So here’s what we’re doing to combat this issue.

We’re like Spotify… but with a social conscience. We care about the artists, not just the art.

The Pack understands that music streaming is here to stay – so instead of swimming against the tide, we’re using streaming technology, but building a very different business model from the current players in the market. We’re creating a ‘community’ model, where our artists are our valued content creators, our users and our beneficiaries – not just a tradable commodity or economic product.

As a social enterprise, instead of inadequate streaming fees, The Pack will manage a transparent “pool”, where 30% of revenue is distributed directly to artists on the basis of their play data.

Our platform will do something no other streaming player has done – which is to forge mutually beneficial connections between local businesses, local listeners and local musicians, with the support of local government, in order to save our local music industry. We’ll make sure that in local businesses and venues the community will hear local artists – and those artists will make money and connections where they live, work and play.

Rather than becoming a model that mirrors the major global streaming services, The Pack business model more closely resembles Patreon, as it provides community and business members the means to directly support their local music community through monthly subscription-based funding, becoming local arts patrons.

The Pack Australia is, for that reason, deliberately discriminatory. The Pack will only work with local, original artists – to provide them with a launchpad from which to kick off their careers.

While we love our successful, signed Australian artists, we know that once an artist is signed to a major label, they are already well-placed to access the distribution and marketing channels they need to find performance opportunities, tours and to generate music sales. In short – if you’re famous, you don’t need us!

We want to re-democratise the system, re-localise our music community and make sure that our artists get the recognition (and the revenue) they deserve. We don’t intend to be a global giant, but we do want to be a local hero.

With no major labels or licences to hold The Pack to ransom, and no ‘free services’ to support, The Pack will use its revenues to create multiple income possibilities for recording artists through online sales, personalised gig notifications, and fair streaming royalty allocations - so that every artist who gets played, gets paid.

We don’t just give you music – we give you the music that is made in your ‘hood, by your pack!