Music and Wellbeing vs Musicians’ Wellbeing: Examining the Paradox of Music-Making Positively Impacting Wellbeing, but Musicians Suffering from Poor Mental Health

This paper interrogates two different perspectives on music and wellbeing. The first positions musical practice as being beneficial for emotional wellbeing and mental health, whilst the second positions musical work – building a career as a musician - as potentially detrimental. This apparent paradox matters because the clinical findings which establish a causal link between music and wellbeing are being disembedded from the contexts in which those links are manifesting by charities, social enterprises, advocacy organisations, educational institutions, governments and international bodies, and fuelling normative sociological prescriptions which encourage participation in music making. For those who go on to develop career ambitions, wellbeing outcomes are far less clear. Therefore, a more sophisticated appreciation of the uses of music and its impact on wellbeing is required. This paper provides a more balanced view of the connections between music, wellbeing and health and reflects on how this paradox might be resolved

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

Lessons from the Loss of Avicii: Business Ethics, Responsibility, and Mental Wellbeing

The popular music industries have long been synonymous - fairly or unfairly - with unethical business practices, from scandals surrounding payola in the 1970s to artists such as Prince, George Michael and more recently Kanye West lamenting their exploitative record contracts. However, when a musician loses their life in tragic circumstances such as in 2018 following the suicide of Tim Bergling – better known as the EDM (Electronic Dance Music) DJ Avicii – questions around whether certain business practices and decisions might have contributed towards his struggles with mental ill-health, and by extension whether such a loss might have been prevented, take on a painful and pertinent resonance. Following media portrayals such as that seen in the documentary Avicii – True Stories, many in the popular press, including the musicians’ own family (Williams, 2018), focused attention on decisions taken by his manager at the time, Arash Pournouri. Were the decisions he took necessarily in the best interest of the artist? Is there a tension between profit and the mental wellbeing of musicians? Do managers, record labels and other stakeholders bear a responsibility for the wellbeing of the artists they work with? This case asks students to weigh the moral and legal responsibilities of those in the music industries, encouraging them to ask challenging and at times uncomfortable questions around ethics, responsibility and mental wellbeing

Musicians, their Relationships, and their Wellbeing: Creative Labour, Relational Work

Evidence points towards the key role that networks of both formal and informal relationships play in musicians’ careers. Alongside this, these careers have in recent decades become increasingly understood as engendering emotional stressors around mental health and wellbeing. However, what is the relationship between these two phenomena? In other words, what is the affective impact on musicians’ mental health of maintaining, understanding and negotiating the most proximate relationships in their lives? This paper seeks to answer this by employing the conceptual architecture of relational work, focusing in particular on the experiences of ‘mismatches’, to interpret insights from semi-structured interviews with twenty-eight musicians working in the United Kingdom. The findings suggest that that the relational work of ‘matching’ relationships to appropriate understandings and methods of transactional exchange is enormously complex for musicians given that that their economic relationships often are intimate personal relationships, and vice versa, leading to frequent ‘mismatches’ in musicians’ methods of relationship management which can be upsetting or emotionally destabilising. This is revealed by exploring the overlapping and interconnected forms of relational work employed by musicians amongst both their family and their musical colleagues. The findings contribute towards scholars adopting an affective frame of analysis towards practices of relational work, an emerging body of work primarily from Eastern Europe applying relational work analysis towards musicians, and more broadly researchers interested in understanding the psychosocial causes of mental ill-health amongst musicians

Can Music Make You Sick? Mental health and working conditions in the UK music industry

In recent years there has been a growing body of research that has begun to examine the dark side of our relationship to music. The media understandably concentrate on the more sensational aspects of rock and roll; membership of ‘27 Club’, or the recent public declaration of critically acclaimed dubstep producer Benga as suffering from schizophrenia (Hutchinson, 2015). There is then a tension emerging between the notion that artistry is positive both for the economy and for well-being, and a growing awareness that a musical career is a risky business. ‘Can Music Make You Sick?’ surveyed over 2,200 musicians working in the United Kingdom, and interviewed more than 25 musicians and industry professionals, to explore how they are emotionally experiencing working in the music industry in the United Kingdom. This paper presents findings from this project, which seeks to ask challenging questions of music, and specifically musical ambition and aspirations, in the current climate of precarious labour and hyper competition. Is it possible that musical aspirations are potentially making artists sick

Can Music Make You Sick?

In recent years there has been a growing body of research that has begun to examine the dark side of our relationship to music. The media understandably concentrate on the more sensational aspects of rock and roll; membership of ‘27 Club’, or the recent public declaration of critically acclaimed dubstep producer Benga as suffering from schizophrenia (Hutchinson, 2015). There is then a tension emerging between the notion that artistry is positive both for the economy and for well-being, and a growing awareness that a musical career is a risky business. ‘Can Music Make You Sick?’ surveyed over 2,200 musicians working in the United Kingdom, and interviewed more than 25 musicians and industry professionals, to explore how they are emotionally experiencing working in the music industry in the United Kingdom. This paper presents findings from this project, which seeks to ask challenging questions of music, and specifically musical ambition and aspirations, in the current climate of precarious labour and hyper competition. Is it possible that musical aspirations are potentially making artists sick

Can Music Make You Sick? Measuring the Price of Musical Ambition

Grant Hutchison (Frightened Rabbit): “This book should be mandatory reading for every label, booking agent, manager and tour manager in the business of music and touring so we can all better understand what’s really involved in living the life of a professional musician and the role we all have in making that life as liveable as possible” Emma Warren (Music journalist and author): "Musicians often pay a high price for sharing their art with us. Underneath the glow of success can often lie loneliness and exhaustion, not to mention the basic struggles of paying the rent or buying food. Sally-Anne Gross and George Musgrave raise important questions – and we need to listen to what the musicians have to tell us about their working conditions and their mental health" Crispin Hunt (Multi-Platinum Songwriter/Record Producer & Chair of the Ivor’s Academy): “Singing is crying for grown ups. To create great songs or play them with meaning music's creators reach far into emotion and fragility seeking the communion we demand of it. The world loves music for bridging those lines. However, music’s toll on musicians can leave deep scars. In this important book, Sally Anne Gross and George Musgrave investigate the relationship between the well-being music brings to society and the well-being of those who create. It's a much needed reality-check, deglamorising the romantic image of the tortured artist” Adam Ficek (Psychotherapist [Music and Mind]/BabyShambles): “ A critical and timely book which is sure to kick start further conversations around musicians, mental health and the music industry” Joe Muggs (DJ, Promoter, Journalist [Guardian, Telegraph, FACT, Mixmag, The Wire]): “The best guide to what being a musician, and what "the music industry" actually are that I can remember reading... it manages to capture and quantify so much about how we value emotion, creativity, labour, relationships, time, other people, [and] ourselves, in the information economy” Mykaell Riley (Bass Culture, Director of Black Music Research Unit): ‘Whether you’re 16, 60 or any age, one’s relationship with music is for life. For many creatives, for better or for worse, that relationship is the meaning of life. Music might be a universal language, but we could all benefit by being a little more fluent. Can Music Make You Sick … is a great place to start’. ----- It is often assumed that creative people are prone to psychological instability, and that this explains apparent associations between cultural production and mental health problems. In their detailed study of recording and performing artists in the British music industry, Sally Anne Gross and George Musgrave turn this view on its head. By listening to how musicians understand and experience their working lives, this book proposes that whilst making music is therapeutic, making a career from music can be traumatic. The authors show how careers based on an all-consuming passion have become more insecure and devalued. Artistic merit and intimate, often painful, self-disclosures are the subject of unremitting scrutiny and data metrics. Personal relationships and social support networks are increasingly bound up with calculative transactions. Drawing on original empirical research and a wide-ranging survey of scholarship from across the social sciences, their findings will be provocative for future research on mental health, wellbeing and working conditions in the music industries and across the creative economy. Going beyond self-help strategies, they challenge the industry to make transformative structural change. Until then, the book provides an invaluable guide for anyone currently making their career in music, as well as those tasked with training and educating the next generatio

Can Music Make You Sick? Music and Depression

In recent years there has been a growing body of research that has begun to examine the dark side of our relationship to music. The media understandably concentrate on the more sensational aspects of rock and roll; membership of ‘27 Club’, or the recent public declaration of critically acclaimed dubstep producer Benga as suffering from schizophrenia (Hutchinson, 2015). There is then a tension emerging between the notion that artistry is positive both for the economy and for well-being, and a growing awareness that a musical career is a risky business. ‘Can Music Make You Sick?’ surveyed over 2,200 musicians working in the United Kingdom, and interviewed more than 25 musicians and industry professionals, to explore how they are emotionally experiencing working in the music industry in the United Kingdom. This paper presents findings from this project, which seeks to ask challenging questions of music, and specifically musical ambition and aspirations, in the current climate of precarious labour and hyper competition. Is it possible that musical aspirations are potentially making artists sick