Merlin’s Charles Caldas at BigSound: ‘Australia is out-stripping global figures’
Despite streaming entering Australia later than the rest of the world, the country is outstripping growth patterns in the rest of the world.
UK-based independent digital rights licensing agency and advocacy agent, Merlin, made just under $200,000 in audio streaming revenues for its Australian members back in 2012; but as of July 2016, it was closer to $800,000.
That was more than double of those made in 2015 and gives Australia an overall average monthly growth of 6.5% per month – compared to Merlin’s overall growth of 5.43%.
The figured stem from a survey of Merlin’s more than 700 of global members, including Australian indie labels.
While the annual survey findings were released back in June, Merlin CEO Charles Caldas presented unreleased local findings at his BigSound mini-keynote in Brisbane yesterday.
“We have a lot of speculation in the press about the state of the digital market and the future,” he said. “It’s either, that we should all give up and go and get jobs as Uber drivers, or that the future’s going to be incredible.”
Merlin pays out $25 million month-on-month just in audio streaming revenues to the independent industry. However, as Caldas revealed, Australia is actually out-stripping global market figures in terms of its growth.
On an annual rolling basis ending in July, audio streaming revenues in Australia were up 81.3% compared on the previous financial year. Merlin’s average global measure was 62%.
“To me that’s a really encouraging sign that we’ve got a connected market,” he said yesterday afternoon. “A market that’s engaged, a market that’s got a hunger for consumption of music, a market that’s actually driving this growth.”
Caldas believes Australia will double this growth again in the next year. A case study on one small Australian Merlin member label in June found its music was streamed 2 million times in 60 countries that month; with one third occurring outside of Australia and New Zealand. In fact, 35% of the unnamed label’s streams occurred across Europe.
2015 marked a tipping point for Merlin members, where for the first time, over half of them (54.67%) reported digital income accounted for more than 50% of its growth. Now in 2016, Merlin’s survey found that number is now 62.1%.
During his keynote, Caldas said Merlin will get close to paying out 300 million to its members this financial year.
“As independents, we feel as if we’re battling against these huge multi-national corporations to actually get any share of market,” he said. “But what we’re saying for independent labels is the more digital the market gets, the more consumers come into market, the bigger the pie actually is for us.”