Sector portal

Media, culture, sports and entertainment

The media, culture, sports and entertainment sectors represent dynamic and rapidly evolving industries that provide inspiration, entertainment, and employment to millions worldwide. Creators, performers, professional athletes and media professionals are vital to the cultural, sports and entertainment landscape—including live events and television, radio, film, publishing, and digital media.

These sectors are undergoing profound transformations due to digitalization, which has reshaped how content is produced, distributed, and monetized, giving rise to new business models and remuneration systems. These shifts have brought increased attention to the potential of these sectors for job creation and innovation. They have also highlighted challenges to human and labour rights of workers across the sectors, including decent work deficits, violence and harassment, gender inequalities and unequal access to social protection.

Drawing on the conclusions of tripartite international sectoral meetings in the fields of media, culture, sports and entertainment, the ILO promotes social dialogue, implementation of international labour standards, skills development and capacity-building initiatives to address these challenges. It also continues to assess the employment impacts of digitalization, globalization, demographic changes and the green transition on these sectors.

Technical meeting on the future of work in the arts and entertainment sector

The meeting discussed opportunities and challenges for decent work in the sector in the context of digital technologies, globalization, environmental sustainability, demographic changes and a human-centred COVID-19 recovery.

Conclusions adopted by the meeting

Leaving your country to become a professional footballer - All you need to know, all you gotta do

This brochure and comic book alerts youth to the dangers of fake football recruiting agents, and provides tips on how engage in labour migration for sports safely.

Key resources

ILO/UNESCO/WIPO Rome Convention for the Protection of Performers, Producers of Phonograms and Broadcasting Organizations, 1961

ILO Publications:

Briefs:

Self-guided course: Advancing Decent Work in the Culture and Creative Sector

Data and statistics

The bar charts show global and regional point estimates at the sectoral level, based on data from the ILO Harmonized Microdata collection. These estimates cannot be directly compared across different periods and may be updated as new information becomes available. The estimates provided and published by the ILO may differ from those produced and released at the national level.

For more detailed labour market indicators and country-level data, visit the Sectoral Employment Statistics page of the ILOSTAT database.