But that rosy headline figure for the creative economy obscures the fact that disparity in incomes within it was huge. Musicians, for instance, reported a median income of just $46,900 in 2021. “The devastation wreaked by the COVID pandemic on the cultural production sector is very evident in the fall in employed musicians,” the authors wrote. What’s more, “the proportion of musicians who reported working zero hours in the week of the Census increased from 2.7 per cent [in 2016] to 14.8 per cent [in 2021].”

Tim Moxey and his wife Lauren managed to avoid that fate, but they were nonetheless forced to close their eight-year-old music school, which had 200 students, because of the pandemic.

“The school was set to have its best year ever,” says 37-year-old Tim, who has appeared as a contestant on The Voice and The X Factor. “But after COVID it became our worst. It was pretty devastating, and we were so exhausted by the end of the pandemic that the thought of trying to strike it up again was too much.”

Still, the pair from Helensburgh, south of Sydney, have done better than most. He was able to adapt his teaching to online, while she has thrown herself into finishing her PhD (on the place and nature of music in Australia). And because he’s more available, he says, he’s even started to land more gigs.

Just 1560 people reported their profession as “musician” on census night, but the authors argue this is a significant underestimation because the census only records the respondent’s main source of income. Many working musicians (and actors, dancers and other performers) were likely recorded under an entirely different employment category (hospitality or telemarketing, for instance) as a result.

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“The number of musicians who receive income from singing or playing is 11 times the number reported in the 2016 Census,” the authors write, citing an earlier study they conducted on participation in the creative economy. “For visual artists, it is nine times as many, and it is four times for actors and dancers.”

The best-paid and fastest-growing sector in the creative economy was software publishing, where the median income was $143,500. That remains a relatively small field, however, with just 5119 people identifying it as their area of employment.

At the other end of the spectrum, the lowest-paid fields included jewellery design ($45,200), visual arts ($41,100), photography ($48,400) and the performing arts. The median income for actors was $45,100, and for dancers and choreographers it was $47,100.

Growth industries included film and television production (jobs growth of 4.8 per cent per annum since 2016), marketing (6.9 per cent) and industrial design (8.3 per cent).

Publishing (down by 2.1 per cent per annum) and newspaper journalism (1.8 per cent) were among the few sectors that went backwards over the five-year period.

Email the author at kquinn@theage.com.au, or follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin.

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