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Moral Music Management: Ethical Decision-Making After Avicii

Following the tragic suicide of Avicii (Tim Bergling) in 2018, many in the popular media, and reportedly the musician’s own family, were seen to question the ethics of decisions taken by his manager (Williams, 2018; Ralston, 2018). By applying a moral intensity test (Jones, 1991) in the form of a scenario-based questionnaire to six music managers based in London (UK), this article interrogates how and why music managers make the moral and ethical choices they do. The findings suggest that music managers are aware of ethical challenges emanating from their work, but that the relatively informal, loosely regulated nature of the music workplace complicates the negotiation of ethical and moral tensions. However, music managers’ close awareness of the ‘social consensus’ and ‘proximity’ of moral intensity suggests that cultural (as opposed to regulatory) change can help guide and inform managerial decision-making

Creativity, Capital and Entrepreneurship: The Contemporary Experience of Competition in UK Urban Music

This thesis explores how a competitive marketplace is experienced by creative labour in the context of UK urban music by employing an experimental ethnographic research approach. Between 2010-2013, observations, interviews and textual analysis were conducted with two case-study ‘MCs’, alongside reflexive autoethnographic analysis of the author’s own career as an unsigned artist. The findings contribute to the study of competitiveness by highlighting how it is understood from the perspective of producers, as well as to a wider body of qualitative academic literature exploring the ways in which creative labour operates in advanced markets. It is proposed that in an increasingly competitive context, cultural intermediaries assume a crucial role in the lives of artists for their ability to act as both a distributor and a distinguisher, thereby addressing the work of cultural sociologists and creative labour scholars that debates the role of intermediaries in cultural markets. The methods of artistic collaboration which creative labour employ to capture the attention of these intermediaries, demonstrates that competitiveness can engender collaboration. However, this co-operation often takes place for self-interested reasons, challenging the oppositional dynamic between self-interest and cooperation. Furthermore, the ways in which creative labour acquires, maximises and converts forms of Bourdieu-defined capital today is illusory, as artists can acquire large amounts of institutionalised cultural capital and thus appear very successful, while struggling to monetise this success. The thesis thus highlights how technological changes in the marketplace have altered processes of capital transubstantiation. Finally, this research proposes that the behavioural responses to competitiveness by contemporary creative labour can be understood as an entrepreneurial orientation towards creativity. It contributes to debates about the impact of entrepreneurship on artists, by suggesting that whilst it can have damaging emotional implications evidenced in frustration and disillusionment, it largely helps creativity for the way in which it motivates artists

Suicide, the music industry, and a call to action

Dr George Musgrave is both a musician and an academic, with first-hand experience of the music industry’s challenges. In this guest editorial, inspired by their moving and urgent new article in Frontiers in Public Health, he and co-author Dr Dorian Lamis, who is a clinical psychologist and suicide prevention expert, turn the spotlight on the toll of death by suicide in the music industry, and call for immediate action to support vulnerable artists

Moral Music Management: Ethical Decision-Making After Avicii

Following the tragic suicide of Avicii (Tim Bergling) in 2018, many in the popular media, and reportedly the musician’s own family, were seen to question the ethics of decisions taken by his manager (Williams, 2018; Ralston, 2018). By applying a moral intensity test (Jones, 1991), in the form of a scenario-based questionnaire, to six music managers based in London (UK), this paper interrogates how and why music managers make the moral and ethical choices they do. The findings suggest that music managers are aware of ethical challenges emanating from their work, but that the relatively informal, loosely regulated nature of the music workplace complicates the negotiation of ethical and moral tensions. However, music managers’ close awareness of the ‘social consensus’ and ‘proximity’ of moral intensity suggests that cultural (as opposed to regulatory) change can help guide and inform managerial decision-making

Collaborating to Compete: The Role of Cultural Intermediaries in Hypercompetition

This article explores the role that cultural intermediaries, defined primarily as radio DJs and journalists, play in the lives of three unsigned UK urban music artists. Using semi-structured interviews, textual analysis of social media usage, and observation notes, as well as auto-ethnographic examination of the author's own career as a musician over a four-year period between 2010-13, it is suggested that intermediaries are of crucial importance in the lives of artists largely as distinguishers in an environment of ferocious competition, which anonymises via abundance. Their role is therefore deeply symbolic, providing credible eminence. By interpreting these findings through a Bourdieusian lens, it is suggested that these collaborative processes of intermediary engagement, which allow musicians to acquire large reserves of institutionalised cultural capital, problematise notions of success by masking the profound difficulties they have in converting this prestige into material rewards. There is therefore, for these musicians, a worrying ambiguity relating to how others understand and value what they do, and a tension between this perception and their material reality