Creative Industries—The Arts in our Community

[Gina Harrison]

The Americans for the Arts website has posted a fascinating new report,"Creative Industries: Business & Employment in the Arts reports offer a new, research-based approach to understanding the scope and importance of the arts to the nation's economy. While most economic impact studies of the arts have focused on the nonprofit sector, Creative Industries is the first national study that encompasses both the nonprofit and for-profit arts industry. The source of the data is Dun & Bradstreet—widely acknowledged as the most comprehensive and trusted source for business information in the United States—which provides very specific and reliable data about employment and the number of arts-centric businesses in both the nonprofit and for-profit arts.

Two of the important points this research makes…
• Formidable industry . . . The creative industries are a formidable industry in the U.S.—2.98 million
people working for 612,095 arts-centric businesses (2.2 percent and 4.3 percent, respectively, of U.S.
employment and businesses). These findings are larger than most people expected.
• Arts education . . . With nearly three-million people working for arts businesses—arts education is a
critical tool in fueling the creative industries with arts-trained workers as well as new arts
consumers. Alan Greenspan, U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman, notes, “The arts develop skills and
habits of mind that are important for workers in the new economy of ideas.”

The really neat part is that you can download statistics about these industries and their employees for each congressional district.
Go here to see the report for NC Congressional District 2 (US Representative Bob Etheridge)
and here to see the report for Congressional District 4 (US Representative David E. Price)