On February 18, 2026, UNESCO released the 2026 edition of Re|Shaping Policies for Creativity, its flagship monitoring report, and UN News led with the headline number: by 2028, generative AI outputs are projected to cut global revenues for music creators by 24 percent, with audiovisual creators facing a 21 percent loss. This is the fourth edition of the series, tracking implementation of the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions across more than 120 parties, with support from the Government of Sweden and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency.
For the AI industry, the value of this report is that it turns the “does AI hurt creators” debate into a risk assessment with concrete numbers and a timeline: a quarter of music revenue, gone within three years. Any product that treats creative content as training material or output — music generation, video generation, licensing platforms — sits directly in the path of the licensing negotiations, litigation, and regulatory pressure that follow.
The Two Numbers: 24% and 21%
The report names generative AI as the primary structural risk to the cultural and creative industries. The 24 and 21 percent figures measure the global revenue impact of generative AI outputs on music and audiovisual creators respectively, dated to 2028. The damage is not only content substitution: UNESCO also flags heavy market concentration among a handful of streaming platforms, with opaque curation algorithms that marginalize lesser-known creators — a visibility problem that gets worse as AI-generated content floods the catalogs.
Another number that gets less attention: only 48 percent of countries are developing statistical systems to monitor digital cultural consumption. More than half the market cannot even measure the size of the impact, which is one reason policy responses lag.
Digital Is Now a Third of Creator Income
Digital revenues now account for 35 percent of creators’ income, more than double the 17 percent recorded in 2018. That is a structural shift: income has concentrated onto platforms and algorithmic distribution, bringing income instability and increased exposure to intellectual property violations. The 24 percent generative AI shock lands on an income base that is already heavily digitized and governed by platform rules.
The skills picture is similarly lopsided: 67 percent of people in developed countries have essential digital skills, against 28 percent in developing countries. Once both creation and distribution are digital, a skills gap converts directly into an income gap.
The Creative Digital Divide
The trade numbers look bright: global trade in cultural goods doubled to $254 billion in 2023, and 46 percent of exports came from developing countries. But in cultural services trade — where the market is shifting as content goes digital — developing countries hold just over 20 percent, so the gap widens precisely during the digital transition.
Mobility has its own wall: 96 percent of developed countries support outward mobility for their own artists, while only 38 percent facilitate inbound mobility for artists from developing nations. Add direct public funding for culture sitting below 0.6 percent of global GDP and declining, and creators in the Global South face a triple squeeze.
8,100 Policy Measures and Still Not Enough
The report catalogs more than 8,100 cultural policies and measures adopted by parties to the 2005 Convention, and 85 percent of countries include cultural and creative industries in national development plans — but only 56 percent set specific cultural objectives. UNESCO Director-General Khaled El-Enany frames the moment as critical for the creative economy. The safety net for artistic freedom is thin: only 61 percent of countries maintain independent monitoring bodies for artistic freedom, and just 37 percent report measures to protect cultural professionals at risk. The gender trend improves slowly: women lead national cultural institutions at 46 percent in 2024, up from 31 percent in 2017, but with a stark split between developed (64 percent) and developing (30 percent) countries. UNESCO itself has helped more than 100 countries design or reform cultural policies, and its International Fund for Cultural Diversity has backed 164 projects across 76 Global South countries.
What It Means for Content Platforms and AI Teams
Three practical conclusions. First, treat creators as a supply chain, not free corpus: a projected 24 percent revenue hit will harden into collective licensing, royalty distribution, and provenance requirements, and the earlier a product builds revenue-sharing and labeling mechanics, the stronger its negotiating position. Second, measurement is a product feature: even governments lack digital consumption statistics, so a platform that gives creators transparent, verifiable distribution and payout data has real differentiation. Third, policy risk is getting priced in: cultural policy has long been treated as a soft issue, but once the damage is quantified at industry scale, countries upgrading cultural policy to a strategic priority — the report’s core call — is a matter of when, not if.
Sources
- Artists face steep income decline due to AI, UNESCO finds — UN News
- Creators face projected global revenue losses of up to 24% by 2028 — UNESCO
- Re|Shaping Policies for Creativity — UNESCO
AI-assisted summary compiled from the sources above, reviewed by a human before publishing.