Culture and Creative

Industry Trends:
Contemporary Observations
(Professor Richard Haines, CEO of the South African Cultural Observatory &
Ms Unathi Lutshaba, Research Manager of the South Africa Cultural Observatory)
 Section 1:
Introduction
• This paper considers select current and emerging trends in
regard to the CCIs.
• It focusses primarily on globally identifiable trends.
• Given the rapidly changing digital environment impacting on
the creative economy, observations are not definitive but rather
suggestive.
 Section 2:
History and Context
• Examining the history and shifting discourse on the CCIs and the
creative economy provides some touchstones for the epistemic
construction and symbolic and material developments within the
sector and the creative economy more generally.
• In the early 1970s ‘cultural industries’ emerge as an object of
academic and policy concern
• The appearance of the ‘cultural industries’ as a more overt policy
concern at the end of the 1970s was not the acknowledgement of
the economic importance of commercial culture. Rather it
represented the opening up of a new kind of ‘cultural political’
space.
• Formal use of the term Creative Industries is quite recent (1994),
indicating the advent of the digital era of cultural industries and
creativity.
• However there are earlier uses of terms such as ‘cultural industries’
dating back to the 1930s.
• In a real sense the notions of Creative Industries, CCIs (creative
and cultural industries) and the creative economy were strongly
conditioned by the expansion of the digital economy both nationally
and internationally and its increased influence on and production of
popular cultural forms and products.
• The concept of the creative industries appears to be first
documented in 1994 in the Australian government’s new cultural
policy termed ‘Creative Nation’. While supposedly a cultural policy,
the document had a strong economic policy core, which explored
new IT opportunities and the growing pervasiveness of global
cultural forms underpinned by digital media
• In 1997-8 the newly restructured Department for Culture, Media and
Sport (DCMS), now Department for Culture, Olympics, Media and
Sport (DCOMS), built on the functions of the earlier Department of
National Heritage. A Creative Industries Task Team was set up and
in 1998 the seminal document ‘Creative Industries – Mapping
Document’ was published.
• Thirteen areas of activity were (somewhat arbitrarily) listed–
advertising, architecture, the arts and antiques market, crafts,
design, designer fashion, film, interactive leisure software,
music, performing arts, publishing, software, television and
radio. Distinguishing these fields was the fact that they ‘have
their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and …have a
potential for wealth creation through the generation of
intellectual property’.
• While there were some amendments to the 1998 DCMS
categorization of creative industries, the original definition of
these industries is still essentially in place in the UK and has
also been used as a basis by several countries for generating
their own concepts and categorizations.
• These changes in the definitions of the terms ‘creative’ and
‘cultural’ industries had both a symbolic and instrumental
import:
• The shift from cultural to creative industries, reflected technological
change; a more extensive of culture and artistic activity. There was an
increased emphasis on creativity, innovation, and skills in economic
development; and changes in consumption and demand patterns.
• There is the purported repositioning of culture from being elitist and
exclusive so that to a working notion which is more incorporative,
creative and even democratic in character.
• There is a shift from seeing the production of culture as a separate
industrial activity to seeing it as a sector, which takes into account the
relationships, connections and clustering of cultural and creative
activities.
• There has been a shift from subsidised arts and centralisation to the
idea of cultural domains in the generation of wealth.
• A follow-up mapping study and analysis by the DCMS in 2001
revealed that this impressionistically conceived creative sector
was generating jobs at twice the underlying rate of the UK
economy as a whole.
• For a policy document issued from within a new government
department, the DCMS Mapping Documents gained
remarkable traction and ongoing significance.
• The idea of creative industries was adopted not only by the UK
national government by also by cities and regions.
• In the late 1990s the idea of the creative industries discourse
gained traction in Australia and the US (at sub-national and
local levels).
• For some scholars, these developments are linked to a
coalescing neo-liberal consensus on economic policy in such
countries which was increasingly evident from the early 1980s
and onwards.
• As Ben Eltham emphasizes ‘the keystone cultural policy of all three
nations, the US in particular, has been the maintenance and
extension of strong copyright and intellectual property regimes,
especially in international trade negotiations.’
• Two decades later the concept of ‘creative industries’ is
internationally recognized. In some respects though it is being
superceded by the idea of a wider ‘creative economy’.
• The term ‘creative economy’ first appeared in John Howkin’s book,
The Creative Economy: How People Make Money From Ideas
(2001). For him the creative economy was characterized by ‘the
transactions of creative products that have an economic good or
service that results from creativity and has economic value’.
• Richard Florida in his developed the concept of ‘creative class’
(Florida 2003) and took a more incorporative take on those working
in or related to the creative industries. This concept was seen as
included most if not all of those offering knowledge-based services
and products.
• Over time the realization grew among policy makers that
economic value of creative industries should not be de-linked
from the social and cultural value of such enterprises.
• A 2008 UN Study stressed that the growth of creative and
cultural industries was not a select experience but impacted on
all continents.
• UNESCO, the UN’s cultural arm, took a somewhat guarded
approach regarding the idea of the creative industries, but the
most recent revision of its cultural statistics framework in 2009
took more account of them.
• UNESCO opted for the linking cultural and creative
industries as ‘sectors of organised activity whose principal
purpose is the production or reproduction, promotion,
distribution and/or commercialisation of goods, services and
activities of a cultural, artistic or heritage-related nature.’
• Hendrik van der Pol of UNESCO saw the differentiation
between cultural and creative industries as follows:
Cultural industries relate to the creation, production and
commercialisation of the products of human creativity, which are copied
and reproduced by industrial processes and worldwide mass
distribution. They are often protected by national and international
copyright laws. They usually cover printing, publishing and multimedia,
audiovisual, phonographic and cinematographic productions, crafts and
design. Creative industries encompass a broader range of activities
than cultural industries including architecture, advertising, visual and
performing arts.
• Despite increased consensus regarding the official
organization of the CCIs, efforts continue to find more new
ways of conceptualizing the creative economy and whether to
see the cultural and creative industries as more discrete
sectors.
 Section 3:
The World of Work and
the CCIs
• A key paradox of the CCIs and the wider creative economy is
that with a greater recourse to machines, robots and AI
application the world will shed a range of jobs in coming
decades. Jobs in cultural work and the creative economy more
generally appear to be more resistant but not untouched.
• Precarity will remain a defining quality of cultural work and if
anything the short-term contractual, under-paid and non-
remunerated professional work will endure.
• The hollowing out of traditional unions in the established
sectors of the creative economy, such as printing seems likely
to continue.
• However, in more affluent/developed economies there are
signs of a shift to more specialized and niched forms of
unionization.
• In a number of the developed economies there are now visible
interventions in a range of cultural sectors, including visual arts,
designed to address the prevalence of unpaid work in these
sectors.
• These are responses in part to concerns about social mobility and
access to professions.
• With prospects of declining work the Finnish universal basic income
experiment may lead to a broader suite of interventions over time.
These may entwine with social security programmes for artists and
cultural workers
• We may see some restructuring of prevailing notions of work and
recreation.
• Constraining influences may be the declining public spending on
ACH sectors
• ‘New kinds of cultural practice across the globe, concerned to
create new spaces of possibilities and collaboration, can be seen
as part of work to invent new kinds of social collectivities’ (O Connor
2011).
 Section 4:
Meta Trends: High Technology
and the Creative Economy
• Overall, the growth trajectory is based on the increased
recourse to the internet and the ongoing digitization of the
cultural and creative spaces.
• There are four major technological trends which are informing
and in certain aspects disrupting the creative economy.
Section 4.1:
Virtual Reality
• Virtual reality still in effect in its early stages and offers creators
opportunities ‘to get in on the ground floor’.
• Will reshape the way people consume content and provide
creative industries with a further opportunity to get it right in
making content creation more profitable
• Digitization didn’t change the underlying content, rather
making it cheaper to share and create, and more convenient to
use.
• VR content will largely be more expensive to create as it
requires the addition of another dimension of information. The
higher costs of production should help protect professional
creators from more amateur creators’ will to distribute content
free or for low fees.
• A further advantage means that consumers will have less
scope to create and share their own content. Currently at least
with VR content there is no equivalent to ripping CDs and
creating mixes.
• For instance, there is the case of virtual reality concerts. The
limits to sharing will be far stricter as VR headset scanning
retinas and associated ticketing are more individual oriented.
• There are downsides to this. Stronger copyright regimes may
not increase economic welfare. While decline in music
revenues weren’t always beneficial for creators, they did on the
whole benefit consumers.
 Section 4.2:
Augmented Reality
• Augmented Reality makes the real-life environment into a
digital interface by putting virtual objects in real-time. AR
used the existing environment (world) and overlays new
information on it.
• Video gaming: now rivalling global film production.
• Sets up for new methods for music production,
visualization, mixing and control.
• GPS Navigation one of the best know applications.
• Augmented reality content may be even more expensive to
produce than VR content.
• UK’s Premier Inn using AR wall maps in its London hotels.
• AR and increasingly mixed reality (MR) are being used to
enhance the museum experience and engage visitors in
content in new and innovative ways.
• The technologies are still in their early stages and
confidentiality of information is one of the defining features of
the emerging industries.
• As one AR company director remarked regarding the
possibilities for museums: ‘The beauty of AR and MR is that
the technology is far less an intrusive experience than virtual
reality. They blend reality with created reality and content in a
way that can be very powerful’.
• A key example it the recently opened Centre International d’Art
Parietal Montignac Lascaux, in the Dordogne region of France.
The Centre walks visitors through a representation of a nearby
historical site that has been closed to the public for years – the
caves of Lascaue.
• It is the need to retain the strength of content while providing
an improved means of engaging with it that appeals to
museums and curators.
• In this regard the ability of AR systems to load different content
onto a device for different viewers is significant.
• AR digital content can also provide curatorial staff with direct
feedback.
 Section 4.3:
Artificial Intelligence
• The use of AI in the CCIs has seen a range of advances in
terms of the production, distribution and consumption of
content.
• While AI has considerable potential for the creative economy a
range of the creative content is being routed through
technology platforms. This re-shapes the relationship between
creators, publishers and technology companies.
• With the convergence of platforms and the accompanying
economies, they create a new setting in which the platform
could exercise excessive influence on our information and
entertainment diet.
• A Chinese content industry AI installation writes articles and
even poems, and paints. The underlying algorithm is however
developed by humans.
• Local media companies are adopting AI in some of their news
writing.
• There is also evidence of increasing collaboration between
human creativity and AI. For instance, AI algorithms are being
used to reproduce images from an artist’s oeuvre.
 Section 4.4:
Blockchain Technology
• Blockchain technology has its origins as the underpinnings for
the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, and the payment methodology
linked with it.
• Blockchain is a technology rather than a particular product that
allows payments to be made on a peer-to-peer without the
involvement of a third party.
• Mougayar (2016) suggests that the technology is as important
as the World Wide Web and that it ‘might give us back the
Internet, in the way it was supposed to be: more decentralized,
more open, more secure, more private, more equitable and
more accessible’.
• The World Economic Forum suggests that we could store in
the region of 10% of the global GDP on blockchains by 2025.
• Internationally block-chain technology has real advantages for
the music industry providing:
• A networked database for music copyright information
• Fast, frictionless royalty payments
• Transparency through the value chain
• Access to alternative sources of capital
• Indeed, such changes can help create a ‘networked record
industry’.
 Section 5:
Trade and the CCIs:
Some Snapshots
Export Values: Goods
700,00
All creative goods
600,00
Export values USD millions

500,00

400,00

300,00

200,00

100,00

0,00
2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
 SA share relative to the World
0,16

0,15

0,14

0,13

0,12

0,11

0,10

0,09

0,08
2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
 Visual arts;
10,53 Art crafts; 7,01
Audiovisuals;
4,29

Export Share: Services

Publishing;
6,60
Performing
arts; 0,86

Visual arts;
7,64 Art crafts; 9,04 New media;
8,28
Publishing;
Design; 62,43
13,60 Audiovisuals;
5,28
Performing
arts; 1,32

Design;
58,80
2015
New media;
Art crafts;
4,32 Visual arts; 6,33 7,53
Publishing;
9,64
Performing Audiovisuals;

2005 arts; 1,10

New
8,46

media;
9,64

Design;
57,31

2010
 Section 6:
Institutional and
Policy Issues
• Increased innovation and centring of CCIs in industrial and
economic policy. A good deal of the work happens at sub-
national level.
• In certain of the regional blocs such as the EU, CCIs are
receiving quite extensive coverage ranging from specialist
institutional structures, joint R&D work, funding initiatives and
incentives.
• Heterodox economic theory is playing an increased role in the
articulation of new approaches and policy regarding the CCIs
and creative economy, with space, place and history being
accorded more systematic attention.
• Despite such interventions, concerns remain regarding
reduced public funding in ACH sectors.
• Other institutional and policy trends include:
• An increased emphasis on regulating the creative economy.
• This includes emerging ideas about increased tax revenues on the
multinational tech companies.
• Cultural practitioners and workers beginning to challenge through
channels such as social media their relative lack of worker rights
within the creative economy in question. These developments are
adversely affected by reduced levels of unionism in more established
CCI sectors.
• More attention paid to the question of ensuring education curricula
and systems inculcate arts-related skill sets, digital skills and creative
thinking.
 Section 7:
Concluding Thoughts
• Contemporary discourses and debates on the creative
economy, and the CCIs more specifically, are worth
considering in an historical context as they can provide one
with an anticipatory and reflexive dimension.
• Inequalities in terms of the playing field/s for the CCIs need to
be countered actively to expand the spaces in which such
enterprises can flourish.
• The growth, dynamism and accompanying structural
insecurities in the creative economy require research and
smart policy interventions.