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APRA AMCOS’s full-year report is mostly good news, as revenue reached an all-time high. And some bad.
Both sides of the financial story were presented Thursday morning, Oct. 17th, during SXSW Sydney, as the PRO published its 2024 “Year In Review” before a full-house at its Ultimo headquarters.
The good news. Group revenue topped $740 million, an all-time result up 7.2% from the corresponding period the previous year, with digital accounting for almost 50% of the entire sum.
Distributions came in at $634.1 million, up 6.5%, on an expense-to-revenue ratio of 14.32%.
“It’s been a really great year in terms of our growth,” APRA AMCOS CEO Dean Ormston told guests, pointing to “record-breaking success and momentum across various parts of the business.”
On balance, he continued, inside this “exciting, fantastic industry, there are great things going on and at the same time, we should hone in on the issues and look to the solutions.”
Within that bottom-line result, public performance, for which the PRO licenses small businesses for the use of music, whether it’s background music or in hospitality, grew 10.5% year on year, and grown 43.3% over the last five years.
“We’ve seen those increases across the board, retail, hospitality and fitness and background music,” Ormston told guests.
Within public performance, concerts and festivals revenue came to a record $34.7 million, up 8.4% year-on-year, as the concerts industry came roaring back following the pandemic, with tours from Taylor Swift and P!nk among the blockbusters during the reporting period.
Also, international revenue achieved an all-time record high of $86.1 million, up an “incredible” 22% from last year, remarked Ormston.
And the bad. Among them, female-identifying members account for just 23% of its 120,000-plus members. “It’s low,” admits Ormston. “When we first started looking at these figures about five years ago, it was 21%. So it’s going to take a long time to move the ship,” he adds. “So we’re very conscious of the job. We don’t back away from it.”
There’s also a job to do on artificial intelligence and the “potential downside of generative AI. If there’s not a framework for us to be able to license AI,” Ormston remarked, “it’s a massive issue. It’s relevant to everybody in the industry.”
Another massive issue that won’t go away is the set of challenges that run through the live music sector, a business, APRA notes, that is “still in a critical recovery phase.”
Dean Ormston
Since 2019, Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand artists have lost over $600 million in income from live performances due to the pandemic, according to the PRO, “and the road to full recovery remains long.”
“That is a disaster,” says Ormston. “One solution in that space is tax offsets. We are saying to the federal government that there has been an absolute crisis in this area. We need a national catalyst to jumpstart live music.”
It’s an issue that will be pushed at election-time. “We would love the industry to come together behind that,” he continues. “We’ve been talking to the hospitality sector.”
There are signs of recovery in the live music sector, with APRA posting a 19% year-on-year increase in licensed venues. The devil is in the detail. The stage count remains 13% lower in Australia and 17% in New Zealand than before the pandemic, and average licence fees are 25% below pre-Covid levels.
“We’re an amazing industry,” Ormston concludes. “There’s huge opportunity for the Australian and New Zealand music industry.”
Read APRA AMCOS’s 2023-2024 Year In Review here.
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