Foreword, authorship, and acknowledgments
Published 23 September 2021
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This report was delivered by Professor David Hesmondhalgh, Dr Richard Osborne, Dr Hyojung Sun, and Dr Kenny Barr on behalf of the Intellectual Property Office (IPO).
Foreword
From your favourite rock and pop artists, to film and TV scores, to classical and ambient, music is often the backdrop to our lives. But how do artists earn money from their music? Before COVID-19 lockdowns, artists earned much of their income from live performances. But the pandemic changed that: artists could no longer rely on live performances to make a living and had to look at their other sources of income. This shift brought into sharp focus several issues around streaming, including the way in which artists are remunerated.
Not only has digital technology revolutionised the way we access music, it has also transformed how artists earn money from music. These changes have been rapid, meaning that there has been limited evidence and data that would show how money is made and distributed. This has in no small part led to a high profile and highly polarised public debate, with this lack of evidence and data contributing to misunderstandings and confusion.
Intellectual property (IP), especially copyright, trade marks and brands provides creators with the tools to allow them to make money and protect their creativity. The Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has a role to play in understanding how those IP rights support the creative value chain. As such, the IPO has led the way by working in partnership with the UK music industry to commission this study to deliver robust and independent evidence. The following report is the most comprehensive piece of research on this topic, to date. I am confident that it will inform decision-makers nationally and internationally in supporting one of the UK’s greatest exports - creativity.
I am grateful to everyone who has contributed to the report, whether in providing data, or in giving their time to discuss the many issues raised during the course of this research. Thank you in particular to Dr Hyojung Sun, Professor David Hesmondhalgh, Dr Richard Osborne, and Dr Kenny Barr for their tremendous work.
Tim Moss
Chief Executive Officer
Funding, authorship and acknowledgements
In 2020, the UK Intellectual Property Office commissioned research on music creators’ earnings, led by Dr Hyojung Sun at the University of Ulster as Principal Investigator (PI), with Professor David Hesmondhalgh (University of Leeds) and Dr Richard Osborne (Middlesex University) as Co-Investigators. As the scope of the project grew in size in response to increasing public and industry interest in this issue, further funding essential to the completion of the project was provided to the University of Leeds, with Hesmondhalgh as Principal Investigator, by Research England’s Quality-Related Research Strategic Priorities Funding (QR SPF) from January to March 2021 and by the IPO from April to July 2021. These extra funds allowed for the purchase of Official Charts Company data, the commissioning of a survey of musicians, and the employment of a Research Fellow, Dr Kenny Barr, at the University of Leeds from January to June 2021. Support for some of the time of two of the researchers came from DigIT, the ESRC Digital Futures at Work Research Centre (Hesmondhalgh) and the AHRC Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre (Sun).
The three main researchers (Hesmondhalgh, Osborne and Sun) were equal partners in the research and so are listed alphabetically as authors. The research could not have been completed without the work of Kenny Barr as Research Fellow, who is therefore also listed as co-author. Chapter lead authors were as follows but all chapters should be considered as co-authored by all four members of the team: Chapter 1 - Barr and Hesmondhalgh; Chapters 2 and 4 - Osborne; Chapter 3 - Sun; Chapters 5 and 6 - Hesmondhalgh and Barr. Hesmondhalgh acted as editor. Professor Jake Ansell (University of Edinburgh) kindly provided further assistance with data analysis in Chapters 5 and 6. As part of the same research, we have also produced a separate report, Buyout contracts in the UK audio-visual commissioning sector, with Kenny Barr as lead author, published in parallel with this report.
The survey in Chapter 5 was designed in collaboration with AudienceNet; our thanks to colleagues there and to Rob Poole at the Official Charts Company for the data discussed in Chapter 6. The research team would like to express our gratitude to Pauline Beck (IPO) for overseeing the research and to Pauline and to Jenny Goodwin (Ivors Academy) for their work in chairing meetings and co-ordinating communication between the Steering Group and the Research Team.