The known creative economy includes audiovisual products, design, media, music, performing arts, publishing and visual arts, among other areas.
According to UNCTAD, the sector’s commercial boom points to the need to establish solid regulatory frameworks to ensure that technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) benefit everyone and foster a competitive and sustainable economy.
UNCTAD illustrated that by 2022, global exports of creative services soared to USD$1.4 trillion, while those for creative goods totaled USD$713 billion, for hikes of 29% and 19%, respectively, compared to 2017.
However, there are notable differences between countries, with the major powers accounting for 80% of creative services exports; this includes headings such as software, research and development, advertising, market research and architecture.
The study revealed that by 2023, streaming services expanded their share by 10.4%, now accounting for more than two-thirds (67.3%) of global music market revenue.
Meanwhile, AI helped expand content creation, distribution and consumption by being used to generate scripts, movies, music, images, captions, animations and virtual reality content, as well as to optimize post-production and user data analysis.
While digitalization and AI promote growth and efficiency, they also raise issues related to the digital gap, labor changes, quality control, privacy and consumer protection, copyright and market monopolization, UNCTAD noted.
In UNCTAD’s view, decision-makers must monitor technological evolution and update policy and regulatory frameworks to take advantage of development opportunities and mitigate risks.
The organization remarked that the relevant issue is the growing market concentration: the top five publishers in the United States have cornered nearly 80% of the book market, while six movie studios have dominated nearly 90% of box office ticket sales in recent years. UNCTAD recalled that by 2021, three companies held 59% of the global streaming music subscription market.
While the creative industries have a growing role to play, their contribution is quite different when comparing advanced and developing countries, with contributions ranging from 0.5% to 7.3% of GDP, as well as 0.5% to 12.5% of labor force employment, UNCTAD assured.
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