Books and sound recording: Key economic data in 2023

The final part of my macro-economic analysis of national data from 2012 to 2023

We have come to the end! Today’s post is part 6 of 6 on macroeconomic indicators in culture, the arts, and components of the arts sector (visual arts, film and video, and performing arts).

I have a dual focus today, on books and sound recording. These are the components of the arts with the lowest total revenues and the smallest number of jobs.

As always, my analysis includes key economic indicators in 2023 and trends since 2012. The three key economic indicators are jobs, output (essentially an estimate of total revenues), and direct impact on Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Because of the dual focus, I’m going to simplify a few charts by adjusting only the output (revenue) statistics for inflation and population growth.

Statistics Canada’s Canadian Framework for Culture Statistics situates books as a subdomain within “written and published works”, alongside periodicals, newspapers, and other printed works. The Framework defines books as “a set of written pages, published as a single entity, and which may contain a story, information, poems, photographs, drawings, and other forms of writing, on any subject matter” (whether physical or digital). The books subdomain also includes “book festivals or fairs”.

Sound recording has its own domain, including music publishing. Sound recording: “the process of creating, producing and recording of sound signals for reproduction at any subsequent time”. Music publishing: “the business of acquiring, protecting, administering and exploiting the rights in musical compositions”, plus “the composition and arrangement of music”.

The data source and other notes are at the end of this article.