Events Management and ArtistWellbeing
Wellbeing
in the Arts
IT'S NOT ALL GLITTER AND APPLAUSE.
HERE'S THE REAL PICTURE AND
WHY IT ISN"T YOUR FAULT.
The gap
between
the image
and
the reality
From the outside, a life in the arts looks like the dream. The lights, the applause, the freedom of doing what you love for a living. And there's truth in that, it's a life most artists wouldn't trade.
But there's a quieter truth underneath and most people never see it. Being an artist in Australia is, for a lot of people, one of the hardest and most precarious ways to make a living there is. Not because artists aren't talented or hardworking, they're some of the most driven people you'll ever meet, but because the industry they pour themselves into too often gives very little back.
This page lays this out honestly. Not to frighten anyone off and not to wallow, but because naming the thing is the first step to surviving it and because if you're an artist who's been quietly struggling, you deserve to know it's not just you.
The numbers nobody
puts on
the poster
The most thorough look at this came from Working in the Australian Entertainment Industry (Entertainment Assist & Victoria University, 2016). The findings were stark, and they haven't gone away:
-
70% of artists earn less than $30,000 a year before tax. One in five earns no other income on top of that.
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Symptoms of moderate-to-severe anxiety affect 44% of artists, versus around 3.7% of the general population.
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Sleep disorders are diagnosed about seven times more often among artists.
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Suicide attempts among artists occur at roughly double the rate of the wider community.
More recent research confirms that little has changed. Support Act's 2024 survey of more than 1,500 creative workers found that almost one in five still earns below the poverty line and this in a year the industry was supposedly 'recovered' from the effects of a global pandemic. Read those numbers and it's easy to come away thinking artists are somehow fragile or that the arts attract troubled people. That's the wrong conclusion and it's worth understanding why.
Why it's
the system,
not you
Here's the thing almost nobody says out loud. You make the thing everyone else profits from. Think about it. A great live scene fills the bars and restaurants around the venue. A successful show raises the profile of the suburb it runs in. Cultural production, the music, the performance, the stories, is what makes a city worth living in and visiting. The economic and social value is real and it is enormous. Artists generate that value. They rarely share in it.
Instead, what artists typically get is low or irregular pay, no sick leave, no superannuation, no guarantee of next month's work and a professional culture that treats the willingness to endure all of this as a measure of your dedication to your craft. If you complain, you risk the gig. If you ask for more, you risk the relationship. That's not a character flaw in artists. That's a structural trap, one that research into arts funding and value circulation shows is baked into the economics of how the industry works.
The financial precarity isn't a side effect of working in the arts. It's upstream of everything else, the anxiety, the burnout, the rates of depression and substance use that the data keeps turning up. You are not struggling because you chose the wrong career. You are struggling, in many cases, because you are doing the right work in a system that wasn't designed to sustain you.
What this
means for
how you
look after yourself
None of this means the situation is hopeless, but it does mean the usual advice ('take care of yourself', 'set boundaries', 'ask for help') can only get you so far if the conditions haven't changed. What we know helps:
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Connection with other artists. Isolation is one of the most consistent risk factors in the data. People who feel part of a community both professionally and personally, do better.
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Knowing your rights. Not having the information you need to advocate for yourself is itself a source of stress. Contracts, pay rates, incident reporting, these are things you're allowed to know about and ask for.
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Having somewhere to go. Whether that's a mentor, a counsellor or a wellbeing line, knowing there is someone available makes a material difference.
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Being allowed to leave a bad situation. This one is harder, and it requires structural change as much as individual choice. But it starts with knowing that your safety and your mental health take precedence over any single job.
What
Cherri On Top
is doing
about it
We built the Wellbeing First Responder program because we were living this problem ourselves and we couldn't keep watching colleagues struggle with nowhere to turn. It's an award-winning program that provides trained on-set wellbeing support, a safe reporting pathway and connection to professional services, so that if something goes wrong in a production we're part of, there's a process and a person, not just a hope that things will sort themselves out.
We're also trying to change the conditions. That means producing events where artists are paid properly. It means having a Code of Conduct that actually gets enforced. And it means being honest, including on this page, about what the industry puts artists through.
If you're an
artist and
you need
support
right now
You're allowed to value your work and ask to be paid properly for it — in fact, doing so is part of changing the very system this page describes. If you book, produce or run a venue: you have more power to change this than almost anyone. And if right now you're in a hard place, you don't have to sort it out alone.
SOURCES
-
Working in the Australian Entertainment Industry: Final Report,
Entertainment Assist & Victoria University, 2016. -
Mental Health and Wellbeing in Creative Industries Australia,
Support Act & Centre for Social Impact, Swinburne, 2024. -
Promoting Mental Health through accessing the Arts, VicHealth, 2006.