Is Australia unusual? Well, are other nations doing well when it comes to local artists performing local songs which are streamed by locals?

Yeah, there are some winners and there are some losers.

And I guess this is where the confusers come in.

I just want to give a quick couple of grams of theory here.

I'm going to talk about two words, the B word and the C word.

And contrary to any Scottish stereotypes, these do not involve profanities.

The B word is what I learned at university when I was there in the 1800s, which is globalization.

So, yeah.

So what does the YouTube example tell you about what's knowable and not knowable, especially in a new industry?

There's a lot of known unknowns in the world of podcasting.

I'm fond of calling it the Wild West because there's so much noise out there that people are trying to make sense of.

We reckon there's about five million podcasts out there.

That's episodes, not shows.

Spotify would estimate higher, Apple would estimate lower.

That's interesting.

Here again is Will Page, former chief economist at Spotify.

What do we know about who is downloading this music or how it's being streamed? Do they even know they're listening to AI-generated music?

Up until recently, the answer was no, they wouldn't have known.

We now have a labelling initiative to tell the audience this is AI-generated, this is human-generated, and that's being rolled out as we kind of speak.

But I think the reason why it kind of triggers is because it's fed into the playlist, it's fed into the algorithms.

So your playlist might be country music and people know that they've responded to Breaking Rust before and that song will be added to somebody else's playlist, just like human music would be dispersed through the algorithm as well.

There's a slight question there about whether this music is cheaper to stream for the platforms as well.

So you might have an incentive to promote it, which is worth considering too.

Will, are there lawyers all over this?

So are we simply making too much music? Here's Will Page again.

Every kid in a bedroom can, you know, go onto DistroKid and services like it, where you pay $20 fixed fee, retain 100% of your copyright, see 100% of your revenue, and upload music onto streaming platforms.

If we go back to the start of the century, we had Top of the Pops, which was just 40 songs.

Today, it's 130,000 new songs, and that's just today.

That's not a weekly chart.

Trying to understand what's happened to the supply side still puzzles the music industry, but other industries should be looking at us and learning from it as well.

And there's a statistical concept that I guess we have to refer to here called the long tail.

But it's increasingly more challenging for even the biggest artists to get people listening all around the world, no matter how big you are.

entertainment, how much more are people spending on all of these other subscription products? When you zoom out, how much actually is different and how many dollars are you competing for? That's the gap there that I don't know was always front of mind when people were doing this type of analysis.

Yeah, two points.

One, it's a very simple point to make, and I don't want to sound patronizing in any way to your audience, but I think there is in the industry still a struggle with the concept of demand creation and demand allocation.

Demand creation, you talked about Tower Records.

That's when I go to the till with three CDs and I end up buying five.

I've just added an extra $20, $30 to the demand creation for music.

Demand allocation is a fixed pot of cash, and that means there's nothing else to go around for that month, for that invoicing period.

Part of it is because a lot of the people in Korea are already connected and already subscribed to these services, which does make growth, whether it's for additional artists or for additional fandom to have with K-pop itself as a genre to potentially have some other factors that may play into it.

All right.

I'll start with a couple of just high-level observations.

I found it interesting to learn that, as of this month, I should stress, the GDP of India has overtaken Japan.

Wait, what? The economic value of India is now worth more than Japan.

Had I said this on your podcast five years ago, you'd laugh me out the studio.

It's happened.

Which made me think, do you think that would ever happen in music? Do you think the Indian music industry is ever going to overtake Japan's? And I plot some data in the report to show not really.

How does it affect various markets differently?

So let's dig into that.

So one interesting thing with this report is you'll hear my voice, but also hear the voices of four other experts offering countering views to my pessimistic economic interpretation of events.

And Brazil is interesting because, as we've discussed before, if you just hop onto the YouTube top artist charts for Brazil, the top 100 species this week, and I checked before I came on the mic, is entirely Brazilian artists all performing in Portuguese.

No Swift.

No Olivia Rodrigo and no K-pop Demon Hunters, which was dubbed into Portuguese.

Everyone's performing in local mother tongue.

That's bonkers.

What's your take on that?

So, Will, what's happening here with the streaming services? What's the issue that's, I guess, facilitating this decline?

So here you have to be very careful.

And I encourage people who are reading the report to think like a doctor.

Look for the symptoms and the cures.

And that involves dropping a few of your own biases.

The way I approached this was to make quite a striking observation about the plight of Australia.

And I have to add, you know, Canada and the United Kingdom are moving in similar directions in terms of the presence of their local artists and their local charts.

So presumably that's weeding out the Wiggles constantly who are on a loop in any household with young children but not necessarily people's favourite music to listen to.

These things are all happening, but it's also all happening while the U.S. has continued to get stronger.

I ask you to go to the YouTube artist charts for Brazil.

It's a brilliant site.

Google it up and pull down those top 100 artists in Brazil this week.

And you'll find one, maybe two international artists on that chart is singing in Portuguese.

Very little Spanish.

And if you're lucky, I think The Weeknd is ranked 95 and Bruno Mars is ranked 65.

But what do you think would happen if there was to be some type of tariff or quota that these countries decided to place and it went through one of the streaming services or one of the short form video platforms?