How Are Creative Arts and Entertainment Classified in ISIC Rev. 5?

Creative arts and entertainment in ISIC Rev. 5, UN Statistics Division, cover the creation and performance of artistic works, including performing arts, literary and artistic creation, and support activities for the arts. This includes actors, musicians, dancers, writers, composers and visual artists creating or performing work, and the operation of arts facilities and support services that make performances possible. The activity is the artistic work itself, not the broadcasting, publishing or recording of that work, which are described elsewhere.

Where does a live performance end and a broadcast begin?

A play on a stage and the same play on a screen can look like one event to an audience, yet Rev. 5 puts them in different places. The stage work belongs here: rehearsal, performance, and the backstage labour that keeps a show running night after night. Once that performance is transmitted, recorded for broadcast, or issued as a publication, the work has changed. It is distribution, and Rev. 5, UN Statistics Division, describes distribution in Section J. That split stops a single evening in a theatre from swelling three different totals at once. The same logic separates teaching from performing. A dancer who teaches a class is doing education work, even if the classroom is inside a theatre building. A dancer who performs for an audience is doing entertainment work, even if the same person does both jobs in one week.

Who is making the art, and who is making the performance possible?

Inside this scope there are two kinds of contribution, kept visible without merging them. The first is creation and performance itself: actors speaking lines, musicians playing, dancers moving, writers drafting a text, composers scoring a piece, painters and other visual artists producing original work. The second is the work around that core: operating an arts facility where performances and exhibitions happen, and providing stage and production support that lets a show open at all.

• Theatre, music and dance performance, from rehearsal through the run
• Literary and artistic creation by writers, composers, painters and other artists
• Operation of arts facilities for performances and exhibitions
• Stage and production support, including set building, lighting operation and stage management

Those strands often belong to different units working on one production. A touring company, a venue, and a freelance lighting team may all touch the same show, and each is counted for its own strand. That matters because cultural employment is so often project based: people assemble for a production, disperse, and reassemble elsewhere.

A theatre company, a composer and a stage crew, read side by side

Take the three figures already named in this guide and slow them down. A theatre company spends weeks rehearsing a play: blocking scenes, learning lines, testing pace, and then staging it for an audience. The product is the performance, repeated but live each time. A composer, working alone or with collaborators, writes a new score, shaping structure and delivering a work that can then be performed, published, or recorded by others. A stage crew builds sets, hangs and operates lighting, manages entrances and exits, and strikes the set when the run ends. None of those three does the others job. Each strand stands on its own because each is a different kind of work, even when the audience experiences them as one seamless evening. Manufacturing sits outside this picture: making an instrument, or fabricating stage equipment in a factory, creates a physical object that can be sold and shipped. It is not a performance, and Rev. 5 places it with manufacturing, classified by product.

Why do cultural funders need live arts counted on their own?

Freelance and project based creative work is poorly captured by employment data alone, because a contract may last weeks and a performer may work for several units in a year. Activity statistics fill that gap, but only if creation and performance are not folded into broadcasting and publishing totals. If they were, a funder looking at the size of live arts would see a figure inflated by television, radio and book sales, and would have no clean way to judge whether theatres, concert halls and independent artists were growing or shrinking. Rev. 5, UN Statistics Division, contains 22 sections from A to V, with 87 divisions, 258 groups and 463 classes in total. A boundary moved by one group or one class therefore changes a published aggregate in a way readers can see. A practical check starts with the UNSD classification detail page and the Rev. 5 publication, reading the entry for the artistic work in full, then the neighbouring entries for broadcasting, publishing, recording and education. If a unit both performs and broadcasts, treat those as two activities to be read separately.

This guide offers statistical description only, and it cannot settle which code, principal activity or registration applies to any particular theatre company, composer, venue or crew. That decision belongs to the national statistical institute or business register that holds the record, which should be asked to confirm it before the code is used in a return.