Books and sound recording both see a declining number of jobs over the long term
Analysis of key economic data from 2012 to 2024
Today’s article examines key macroeconomic indicators for two components of the arts: books and sound recording. The estimates relate to book and sound recording products, i.e., the production of goods and services from cultural organizations and industries as well as non-cultural ones.
My analysis includes key economic indicators in 2024 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 some 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, which includes 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 sources and other notes are at the end of this article.
Declining number of jobs in both books and sound recording
Both books and sound recording lost roughly one-third of their jobs between 2012 and 2024 (-31% for books and -32% for sound recording).
The first graph in today’s post offers yearly estimates of the number of full-time and part-time jobs between 2012 and 2024.