Atana Data compiled 28 schemas and approximately 265 public tables covering thirteen of the fourteen cultural domains defined by UNESCO. Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, and Costa Rica have confirmed national satellite accounts. Brazil developed the SIIC from 2004 onwards and established a committee in 2010 tasked with creating a cultural satellite account. In some Latin American countries, the number of jobs linked to local music or the revenue figures for national publishing remain fragmentarily documented.
The essentials
- In the absence of detailed public statistics, governments risk aligning their cultural policy with platform metrics.
- Atana Data identifies 28 schemas and approximately 265 public tables covering 13 of the 14 UNESCO cultural domains. At least nine Ibero-American countries had a cultural satellite account according to ECLAC’s census, including Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Uruguay (Atana Data, 2026).
- Satellite accounts translate into measurable economic value, jobs, revenues, and value added—cultural activities that remain invisible to standard GDP.
- The absence of comparable public statistics gives the audience metrics of major platforms disproportionate weight in public decisions affecting creators and local industries.
- The question for the next decade: whether other countries in the region will build comparable measurement tools or whether platforms will strengthen their de facto position in evaluating cultural value.
Five countries have satellite accounts; the others measure with what they have
In the absence of satellite accounts, platform indicators influence cultural funding decisions.
A film or album without quantifiable digital audience data faces difficulty finding advocates in budget arbitration.
A cultural satellite account is an economic dashboard built by the state to make visible what the cultural sector produces in added value, jobs, and revenues. Without it, culture exists in budgets as a line item, rarely as a sector whose contribution to the national economy is measured.
Mexico built its own in the 2010s and updates it regularly through its statistical institutions. Colombia initiated its satellite account in October 2002, then consolidated and updated it in subsequent years, supported by methodological frameworks provided by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). Argentina and Costa Rica advanced more recently, with still-partial scopes. Several other countries in the region have undertaken work on cultural satellite accounts, notably Uruguay and Chile, which launched a pilot in 2024, though their scopes and degrees of completion vary.
Atana Data mapped this gap by aggregating publicly available data at the regional level. The corpus brings together 265 tables in thirteen cultural domains. But the map reveals as much by its blanks as by its data: where satellite accounts are missing, available data are partial or rely on substitute sources. Measurement is not neutral. It determines what can be defended.
Platform metrics and their blind spots
Spotify publishes its listening data by country and genre each year. Netflix communicates about viewing hours for its local productions. YouTube provides creators with detailed dashboards on their audiences. These figures are precise and accessible. Their design prioritizes platform valuation rather than that of the cultural ecosystems in which they operate.
A Colombian song listened to a million times on Spotify generates an audience data point. It does not generate data on the number of musicians involved in its production, on the share returned to composers, on the recording studios that survived or closed, on the subcontracting chain running from arranger to sound technician. This information exists in scattered private accountings, rarely aggregated, never comparable from one country to another.
Diane Coyle, an economist at the University of Cambridge, built much of her work around this problem: standard economic indicators are structurally blind to entire swaths of actual activity, notably in digital and creative sectors. In The Measure of Progress (Princeton University Press), she argues that a democracy cannot steer what it does not measure, and that allowing private actors to define the metrics of a sector amounts to delegating part of political sovereignty to them. The argument applies directly to culture in Latin America: a Peruvian or Bolivian Culture ministry defending its budget against a Finance ministry generally has less detailed data than a Netflix report on subscriber engagement.
Measurement as a political issue, not a technical question
A cultural satellite account is an instrument of power in budget arbitration, not an additional bureaucratic tool.
Mexico has public data on its cultural and audiovisual sector, but the source consulted does not confirm a negotiation of local content quotas imposed on platforms. Countries lacking this data have less detailed arguments for negotiations. Urban music creation in Honduras, textile craftsmanship in Guatemala, community theater in Bolivia: these activities employ people, generate revenues, structure local identities. Yet they remain abstractions in national budget discussions.
A different reading of this state of affairs is possible. Market-liberal economists, notably in the tradition of Tyler Cowen, argue that platforms measure precisely what matters: the real preferences of consumers, expressed through their listening and viewing choices. In this reading, the absence of satellite accounts is not a deficit of sovereignty but healthy neutrality: the state should not determine which cultural forms merit defending against market preferences.
The argument deserves to be taken seriously. Platform metrics do measure something real: usage. But they measure usage in an environment shaped by their own recommendation algorithms. What Spotify highlights, what Netflix finances, what YouTube amplifies: these editorial choices remain largely opaque in the final audience data. An Ecuadorian artist who does not benefit from algorithmic recommendation does not accumulate listens, but this says nothing about the quality or value of their work.
Platform data measure the result of a competition whose rules they set themselves. This is a methodological problem before it is a political one.
This question directly connects to what we explored in our analysis on recognizing and remunerating assisted creation: without a public framework for measuring value, debates about remuneration take place on terms set by platforms.
Atana Data as a partial response
The Atana Data project represents a technical response to this institutional void. By aggregating existing public data in a structured and comparable format, it offers researchers, policymakers, and cultural institutions a common entry point. The 265 tables cover thirteen of the fourteen cultural domains of UNESCO’s 2025 FCS. The ambition is to map what exists before filling what is missing.
The limitation is clear in the corpus’s very structure: where national satellite accounts exist (Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Costa Rica), data coverage is broader. Where they are absent, data are fragmentary, often produced by professional associations or universities, and difficult to aggregate. The corpus states the problem as well as the available solutions.
Atana Data functions less as a substitute for public statistics than as a revealer of their absence. It integrates data from five countries with national cultural satellite accounts, and makes visible the gap with others. This is useful. But a private corpus aggregated by a data studio, however rigorous, lacks the institutional legitimacy and methodological coverage that a national satellite account requires.
The book review on African Digital Cultures illuminates a complementary angle: in contexts where public measurement institutions are weak, it is often private or associative actors who become the default producers of cultural data, with all the limitations that implies for representativeness and sustainability.
Effects of current gaps on the 2030s
ECLAC published in 2026 its Latin American artificial intelligence index, documenting how countries in the region position themselves facing the next wave of automation. Some cultural professions are heavily exposed to generative AI, while others are far less so. Translation, graphic design, music composition, and video editing are among the cultural activities affected.
Faced with this pressure, two trajectories emerge for countries that have not yet built public cultural statistics.
In the first trajectory, the absence of public data persists, platforms strengthen their position as evaluators of cultural value, and policies supporting creation align with their metrics. Public funds tend to support formats that algorithms amplify, genres and practices without digital audience lose their institutional visibility, and debates on quotas or neighboring rights take place in a conceptual framework defined by companies headquartered in San José, California.
In the second trajectory, several countries are considering accelerating the construction of their measurement tools in response to AI’s effects on cultural employment. The argument of the moment is favorable: facing risks of job displacement and revenue losses, the absence of detailed statistics complicates assessment of automation’s effects and the design of appropriate public responses. AI makes measurement indispensable not only for defending culture but for anticipating its transformations.
Signals point in this direction. ECLAC has supported for several years the development of harmonized methodologies for cultural satellite accounts, drawing on UNESCO frameworks and the experience of the region’s five pioneer countries. Bilateral cooperations between Colombia and Ecuador, between Mexico and several Central American countries, aim to transfer methodological expertise. The Atana Data corpus itself could serve as a starting point for national statistical administrations seeking to build their own instruments from existing data.
Detailed analysis of creators’ revenues from streaming, direct sales, copyright, and live performances remains largely fragmented and scarcely comparable in most Latin American countries. This is precisely the gap that satellite accounts fill: they make dispersed cultural activities measurable, but comparability between countries depends on harmonized methods, scopes, and base years.
The objective is to have data enabling us to ask questions that Spotify has no interest in answering: how many musicians live from their work in this country, what share of the market do local productions represent against international catalogs, which genres or practices remain absent from the digital while still structuring vibrant local economies. These answers fall within the state’s responsibility.
As our analysis on AI professions remaining captive to metropolises shows, the concentration of measurement tools and analytical capacity in a few poles creates lasting asymmetries between those who define indicators and those who suffer their consequences. The cultural question in Latin America follows the same logic at the state scale.
The 2030-2040 horizon will likely be decisive. Countries that have built their public cultural statistics will have more detailed arguments for negotiations with platforms and the design of creation support policies. Those that have not done this work will not be without culture, but will have more limited quantified arguments.
Sources
- Atana Data, Corpus of Latin American Cultural Data
- Diane Coyle, The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters, Princeton University Press
- ECLAC, Latin American Artificial Intelligence Index 2026
- ECLAC, Methodological Frameworks for Cultural Satellite Accounts in Latin America (no URL: series of technical publications available on the ECLAC portal)
- UNESCO, Framework for Cultural Statistics 2009 (no URL: reference document for the definition of 14 cultural domains)
