New body to look at musician remuneration – example of how cross party Select Committee working @CommonsCMS and effective campaigning @WeAreTheMU @MrTomGray can achieve progress – the industry must engage positively https://t.co/zDERe5ehoB
Our second month of the Creative Survival Index shows a few trends that may be interesting. First, core inflation indicators are up as has been widely reported. Keep in mind that at the beginnings of an inflationary surge firms may choose to absorb price increases of their inputs or vendors before passing those price increases on to consumers in the form of more expensive finished goods. That’s why we look at basic inputs like cotton, energy and the cost of money as well as essential goods like food and rent.
Because we’re focused on measuring sustainability in the creative economy, particularly music, we look at hotel rates and gasoline which directly affect touring, as well as the unemployment rate in arts and entertainment (which is coded NAICS 71).
We follow money supply growth to measure demand pull “too much money chasing too few goods” type inflation.
The index is a simple arithmetic sum of all these various indicators which is not a true econometric model, so take that into consideration. We’ve put this index together because there hasn’t ever been one so this is just a start for discussion.
What appears to be happening is that as the index increases, life gets intuitively harder. We’ll see how these trends develop.
I had such a positive response to the post Why Songwriters Should Care About Inflation Protection for Mechanical Licenses that I developed a number that we will use for reference. I call this the Creative Survival Index and I will update the index monthly as new data comes in for all the categories. I’ll also track the monthly change (“MOM Change %”).
Realize that this is just a reference point that adds together all the different inputs I cover in the post. It’s just a way to have a single number to refer to for easy reference. The number itself does not tell you anything about the underlying data and I’m happy to have any input on how to make it better.
Remember I discussed the potential for stagflation hitting the US economy–the International Monetary Fund announced today that it reduced the global Gross National Product projections to 5.9% from 6% one sign of stagflation.
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