Spring has sprung, and with it comes that familiar urge to throw open the windows and clear out the clutter. Out with the old, in with the new, or so the saying goes.
But this month’s stories suggest the opposite might be true. Some of the smartest moves in creative business right now involve doing more with what’s already there: old toys, old buildings, and potential partners you’ve never thought to call. Even the audiences of the future, it turns out, are hankering for something decidedly old-fashioned.
Before we get to all that, there’s a problem much closer to home that needs our attention. Let’s jump into this month’s Creative Business Wrap.
Payday super hits the grassroots
Regular readers will know I’ve been keeping an eye on payday super. In July I wrote a short implementation guide for music festivals, and the early signs weren’t great. Now the impact is becoming clearer, and it isn’t pretty.
Writing for The Music, Tyler Jenke looks at how the new payday super rules are hitting grassroots Aussie musicians. Since 1 July, anyone who engages musicians, whether for live performance or songwriting, has to pay them 12% superannuation within seven days. The obligation itself isn’t new. A special provision in the 1992 Superannuation Guarantee Act has long treated musicians as employees for super purposes, even when they’re sole traders with their own ABN. What’s changed is the removal of the old $450 monthly threshold, combined with a very tight payment window.
The result has been administrative chaos. The Newcastle Hunter Jazz Festival and the Inverloch Jazz Festival have both cancelled their 2026 editions, citing the sheer impossibility of processing super details for hundreds of sole trader musicians. A survey by the Australian Live Music Business Council (ALMBC) found venue operators facing up to 50 hours of unpaid admin a week. Band leaders are paying super out of their own pockets or cutting what they pay the rest of the band, and some venues are simply refusing to book sole trader acts at all.
ALMBC Treasurer Kylie Thompson is lobbying the ATO and Treasury for a $5,000 performance fee threshold for sole trader musicians. Her argument is that a small, well-aimed exemption would protect the artists at the bottom of the income ladder, where the median annual income is just $14,800. Protecting musicians’ retirement savings is a worthy goal. But if the price is fewer gigs for emerging artists, some of them may never earn enough to have a retirement worth saving for.
Stronger together: partnerships in the performing arts
In the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Jessica Phillips, Christine Chen and Julian Chender argue that the future of the performing arts depends on strategic partnerships. They point to two long-standing pressures. The first is the “Baumol effect”, where the cost of labour-intensive live performance rises faster than general inflation (you can’t make a string quartet more productive by asking it to play faster). The second is what the authors call “institutional exceptionalism”: arts organisations competing in isolation for the same scarce resources.
Before any partnership can work, the authors say, an organisation needs genuine clarity about its purpose and a matching business model. Opera Philadelphia is their case in point. A shift to a “Pick Your Price” ticketing model helped turn a $4 million deficit into a $1.5 million surplus. (Caveat: think carefully before you follow suit.)
From there, they offer a handy matrix that sorts partnerships by how long they last and how deeply the partners integrate. At the lighter end are coordinated partnerships, such as joint productions between Dance Theater of Harlem and Gateways Music Festival. Next come interlocking initiatives like co-commissions between the Metropolitan Opera and MoMA, where partners share the risk and cross-promote each other’s work. At the deep end are shared back-office arrangements, like Atlanta’s Woodruff Arts Center, and full mergers such as the one that created the Toledo Alliance for the Performing Arts.
Maybe it’s time to pick up the phone to the company down the road.
What will audiences look like in 2040?
Who will be sitting in our seats in 15 years’ time? At Arts Professional, Nicolle Cannock of Dewynters has been digging through demographic and economic data to answer the question: what will arts audiences look like in 2040? Her focus is the UK, but plenty of these trends will feel familiar here.
With birth rates falling, population growth will come almost entirely from migration, so audiences will become more diverse. Families will be smaller, and people will be having children later. Meanwhile, money is steadily shifting up the age brackets. By 2040, UK consumers aged 50 and over are projected to account for 63% of all consumer spending (around £550 billion), with recreation and culture among their fastest-growing spending areas.
The more surprising finding concerns Generation Alpha, born between 2010 and 2025, who will be entering their prime spending years by 2040. Having grown up swamped by digital content and a relentless news cycle, they’re increasingly looking for calm in the physical world. Board games, toys and in-person catch-ups are all on the rise.
That’s good news for live performance, which offers something a screen can’t: a shared, analogue experience you can’t scroll past. The catch is that organisations will need to keep prices within reach and stay genuinely relevant to their communities.
A second life for old bricks
But enough about the arts: let’s talk about Lego. For the BBC, Ollie Samuels and Haider Saleem report on how an AI machine is helping save 25 million Lego bricks from landfill. WeBuyBricks, a re-commerce business based in Rawtenstall, Lancashire, has built a sorting system called the Brick-O-Matic. Using cameras, machine learning and carefully aimed jets of air, it can identify more than 60,000 different Lego pieces and send each one down the right chute at a rate of two pieces per second.
The machine can process up to 100,000 bricks a day, more than 100 times faster than sorting by hand. Once sorted, the bricks are cleaned, checked and rebuilt into complete sets or custom bundles, which sell for 40% to 60% less than new. Head of Projects Brad Hacking also points out that all this cutting-edge technology lives inside a converted Victorian-era mill, giving an old industrial building a brand new purpose.
For creative businesses, the lesson is less about robots and more about the circular economy. Real commercial value hides in things that have already been made; the trick is finding a smart way to unlock it. And if you’ve ever stepped on a stray Lego brick in the dark, you’ll agree that every one of them safely sorted into a box is a win.
Vic Mensa on the business of creativity
Finally, something a little more personal. In a short video for Fast Company, Vic Mensa talks about the business of creativity. The musician and entrepreneur, known lately for his Orange Tree series, makes the case for passion projects pursued without first worrying about whether they’ll pay. He draws a line from African oral storytelling traditions through to classical philosophy, arguing that real creative breakthroughs happen when artists put honest self-expression and human connection ahead of commercial expectations.
He also talks about how grief has shaped his songwriting. After losing his close friend and mentor, Dare, Mensa wrote a two-part song: in the first verse, he speaks to his friend, and in the second, his friend answers from heaven. It’s a moving example of how creative work can help an artist process something painful and, at the same time, become something of lasting value.
It’s also a good reminder that the most valuable thing a creative business owns is its voice, the one thing nobody else can copy.