Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Music Entrepreneurship
Marc Perrenoud
Abstract: This essay aims to synthesize key elements in contemporary research on music entrepreneurship and provide a comprehensive understanding of current work on this topic. According to neoliberal ideologies, the advent of the digital age has transformed the music industry, and this is believed to have led to a paradigm shift in the way musicians approach their careers. Increasingly, musicians are told to embrace entrepreneurship, which will allow them to seize new opportunities and face the evolving challenges presented by the music economy. Discussing the work of scholars ranging from early theorists Max Weber and Joseph Schumpeter to those in the present, this essay offers a critical review of academic research from business and management, economics, education, psychology, and sociology. It focuses on English-language writings from the US, UK, and Australia, but also discusses scholarship in French, German, Italian, and Spanish from researchers in Continental Europe. After discussing the history of the social roles of musicians and artists, the essay examines the differing ways that entrepreneurship is defined in various academic disciplines and the political assumptions they bring to this topic. The essay concludes that these differences are the main obstacle to developing an integrated perspective on music industry workers today.
How to cite this article: Perrenoud, Marc. 2024–25 “Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Music Entrepreneurship.” Music Research Annual 5–6: 1–26. https://doi.org/10.48336/hhcj-x565
About the author: Marc Perrenoud is Senior Lecturer and Researcher in Sociology in the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Born in Toulouse in 1975, he made a living playing both upright and electric bass in the South of France while he was a student in the social sciences. His PhD research in social anthropology at l’École des hautes études en sciences sociale on “ordinary musicians” (Les musicos. Enquête sur des musiciens ordinaires, 2007) led him to approach service labor as the production of symbolic goods, and this research was inspired by both the heritage of Bourdieusian sociology and symbolic interactionism (Les mondes pluriels de Howard S. Becker, 2013). He developed this work in a variety of studies, including ones on craftspeople in the context of rural gentrification (Entre l’art et le métier, 2012), subcontracted computer engineers, and, more recently, community cooks (Une autre cantine est possible, 2021). Since 2010, he has also conducted studies of musical and artistic work in French-speaking Switzerland, mostly using mixed methods research (Vivre de la musique? 2019; Les talents en scène, 2025). His writings have appeared in a range of journals that includes Poetics, Cultural Sociology, and Popular Music and Society.
ISSN 2563-7290