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.
Keywords: Music entrepreneurship, musical labor, cultural entrepreneurship, symbolic entrepreneurship, arts entrepreneurship, musical careers
Marc Perrenoud is Senior Lecturer and Researcher in Sociology in the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lausanne.
Perrenoud, Marc. 2024–25. “Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Music Entrepreneurship.” Music Research Annual 5–6: 1–26. ISSN 2563-7290
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Making music and running an entrepreneurial career are dual roles now required of today’s artists. Wearing both hats successfully is a challenge. But, as CD Baby founder Derek Sivers notes, “The skills needed to make a living as a musician are the exact same skills required to be a successful entrepreneur.” According to Sivers, “Musicians don’t realize that they are already entrepreneurs!”
Eric Jensen, “Musicians Are Natural Entrepreneurs”
The above quotation (Jensen 2013) comes from a page on the website of the Berklee College of Music, one of the most prestigious professional music schools in the world. A private institution created in Boston in 1945 (and recognized as a college and funded by the government since 1973), Berklee established a degree program titled Music Business/Management in 2010. The school is not unique in this regard. Many colleges, universities, and other institutions of higher education specializing in the arts offer training programs in entrepreneurship, which is sometimes referred to as management or business (Toscher and Bjørnø 2019). The trend goes beyond music, but it is particularly developed in the musical domain: in the US, the UK, Australia, and most other Western countries (Ruyters 2006), the idea that musicians are or should be entrepreneurs is widely accepted and is massively reshaping the way music is taught in universities and vocational institutions. It is also changing the representation of the trade of music-making and the very idea of what it is to be a musician (Bridgstock 2013; Schediwy, Loots, and Bhansing 2018).1
The conception of a musician as an entrepreneur is very different from the idea of the artist as an eccentric individual, insensitive to material profit and social conventions, which came from romanticism and dominated Western music from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Elias 1993) to Django Reinhardt (Dregni 2004) or Jim Morrison (Davis 2004). Typical of contemporary perceptions of musical activities (Lindqvist 2011; Meisiek and Haefliger 2011; Schediwy, Loots, and Bhansing 2018; Toscher and Bjørnø 2019), the idea that musicians are entrepreneurs is a product of the neoliberal zeitgeist and its “new spirit of capitalism” (Boltanski and Chiapello [1999] 2005). During most of the twentieth century, the heritage of nineteenth-century romanticism endured to foster a bohemian conception of the artist as a singular being, one whose lifestyle contrasts with the standard values of bourgeois society (Bourdieu [1979] 1984; Heinich 1996). This shift to seeing the artist as an entrepreneur has only received attention in the past sixty years. Before this, academic research long ignored the social conditions of the production of “art,” and during most of the twentieth century, only art historians and aesthetic philosophers were considered to have the legitimate authority to discuss “art” (Bourdieu [1980] 1993). The making of art was seen to be a special activity, carried out by a distinctive category of people, called “artists,” with a singular “talent” (H. Becker 1982). The uniqueness of the artist and the nature of art as an activity were, on this view, not amenable to sociological analysis (Bourdieu 1980, [1980] 1993). Only since the mid-1960s has the romantic conception of the singular genius been placed in its historical context and questioned. The works of sociologists Harrison and Cynthia White ([1965] 1993), Raymonde Moulin ([1967] 1987), and later Pierre Bourdieu (1980), Howard S. Becker (1982), Paul DiMaggio (1982), Vera Zolberg (1990), and Tia DeNora (1991) are considered to be the roots of this new approach to art. They see artworks and artistic careers as the result of networks, chains of collaboration, and competition between peers—that is, collective and highly social forms of cultural production that are tied to a specific historical context.
This essay examines the notion of “music entrepreneurship,” aiming to present the main approaches that have developed in recent years from scholars in the disciplines of business and management, economics, education, psychology, and sociology. The task is not easy, for many studies in the past forty years have analyzed the relationship between music and entrepreneurship, and even more have discussed “the arts and entrepreneurship” or theories of entrepreneurship in general. This essay reviews more than two hundred written works, which have largely been sourced from Google Scholar and JSTOR. The vast majority of these are English-language works from scholars in the US, UK, and Australia, but the essay also discusses sources in French, German, Italian, and Spanish from researchers in Continental Europe. In the following pages, the essay will synthesize the results and conclusions of this work and suggest new directions for research.
To tackle the vast issue of music entrepreneurship, it is important to remember that the definition of entrepreneurship differs across academic disciplines. Likewise, the nature of musical labor varies across time periods and national contexts and is shaped by the wider employment conditions found there. The first part of this essay examines these topics, discussing the main theories of entrepreneurship and the ways that employment conditions for musicians have changed in the Western world from the early nineteenth century to the present. The next part of the essay examines how music entrepreneurship has come to be a highly valued quality by many contemporary scholars, especially those in business and management and in psychology, who assert (with enthusiasm or reluctance) that entrepreneurship is the most important skill that the professional musician can develop. The essay continues by examining the very different perspectives of scholars in social philosophy, which are often informed by Frankfurt School critical theory. Here, entrepreneurship is seen as a form of commercial activity and criticized as the opposite of “free” artistic activity (in both senses of the word “free”). This part also shows that works coming from pragmatist social philosophy can give important insight into the ways musical labor is valued, even if they do not directly address “music entrepreneurship.” The last main part of the essay deals with the constructivist perspective promoted by many contemporary sociologists of artistic work. Informed by the research of Howard S. Becker and Pierre Bourdieu in the 1980s, this approach goes beyond both the narrow, economic understanding of entrepreneurship and romantic, “enchanted” visions of the “artist.” The implications that this conceptual widening has for contemporary research are discussed in the conclusion.
FRAMING MUSIC ENTREPRENEURSHIP: THEORY AND HISTORY
THEORIES OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Among the first thinkers to have established a theory of entrepreneurship, sociologist Max Weber ([1904] 2002, [1921] 2019) and economist Joseph Schumpeter ([1911] 2004, [1939] 2017, [1950] 2008) impose themselves as the most significant (Hébert and Link 2006; Swedberg 2006; Galluzzo 2023). Although Weber did not develop an explicitly formalized theory of entrepreneurship, the entrepreneur (in German, Unternehmer) is a recurrent and essential figure in his understanding of modern capitalism (Swedberg 2000, 2006; Bastin 2014). Weber’s most precise discussions of the concept of the entrepreneur can be found in The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism ([1904] 2002) and in chapter 2 of Economy and Society ([1921] 2019). For him, an entrepreneur is, above all, a person who is involved in permanent forms of activity that are oriented toward economic profit (Bastin 2014). In this context, the entrepreneur’s assessment of a project’s profitability is the first step in engaging in a rationalized activity. This step includes controlling the environment as well as configuring the resources necessary for generating financial gains. In the second chapter of Economy and Society, Weber insists on the rational separation between the owner of the enterprise and the entrepreneur who runs the business, but he also sees the growth of bureaucracy in large firms as the main obstacle to the development of an entrepreneurial spirit. From this perspective, the entrepreneur is similar to the figure of the contemporary manager: both are led by intrinsic motivation to engage in work that organizes and develops the enterprise’s activities and leads to profit. The permanent enthusiasm of the “modern entrepreneur” for profit-making (Weber [1904] 2002) is deeply linked to their “ethical qualities,” which include a deep sense of responsibility and strong organizational skills. Under conditions of capitalism, the entrepreneur’s enjoyment of their work and the economic profit that they derive from it are interpreted as signs that the entrepreneur was elected by the divine to succeed.
While Weber’s political positions evolved during his life (Mommsen 2016), he is best understood as a classical liberal. Schumpeter was nineteen years younger than Weber, though the two are often considered to be intellectual contemporaries. Unlike Weber, Schumpeter is often seen as an important precursor to today’s neoliberal thinkers (Plehwe 2020), and he is probably the best-known theorist of entrepreneurship (Swedberg 2000; Lazear 2005; Hébert and Link 2006; S. Bureau 2013). His approach is congruent with Weber’s but stresses notions that have become essential for contemporary neoliberal definitions of entrepreneurship (Swedberg 2006; S. Bureau 2013). The Schumpeterian entrepreneur shares with the Weberian one a visceral opposition to bureaucracy. In Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Schumpeter ([1950] 2008) argues that the development of large firms like those started by John D. Rockefeller or Andrew Carnegie at the beginning of the twentieth century led to a bureaucratization, which comes to threaten the independent entrepreneurial spirit (Lamoreaux and Sokoloff 2005). For Schumpeter, entrepreneurs enjoy taking risks, and the bureaucrat is the entrepreneur’s worst enemy, because they seek to manage and avoid them. Thus, Schumpeterian entrepreneurs are necessarily stifled by bureaucrats, who impede their autonomy and search for self-fulfillment (Benz 2009). They have a special drive, a desire to develop something original, to innovate, and to destroy the old productive or commercial models and implement new ones, a process that Schumpeter calls “creative destruction.” There is something romantic in Schumpeter’s vision of “creative destruction,” which, in his words, is “incessantly destroying the old [economic structure], incessantly creating a new one.” For Schumpeter, “this process of creative destruction is the essential fact about capitalism” ([1950] 2008, 83). Here, the entrepreneur is a kind of epic hero, the great protagonist in the story of capitalism. As we shall see, this vision of the entrepreneur as a (super)natural inventor (Cloutier 2014)—an almost a demiurgic prophet who foresees the creation of new markets and trends—leads to the contemporary figure of the entrepreneur as a singularly talented creator (Anderson and Warren 2011).
In a recent book, management scholar Anthony Galluzzo (2023) explains that the figure of the entrepreneur has become the most desired and praised in contemporary Western societies. In the narratives of capitalism, the heroic entrepreneur does not exploit their employees but is viewed instead as a visionary creator. Conversely, the entrepreneur’s employees are seen as nothing more than a sterile and passive workforce, one that needs to be inspired and fertilized by the entrepreneur. This figure of the hero-genius entrepreneur is very trendy, for it fits perfectly with the need under contemporary capitalism for plain, inspiring storytelling (Anglin, Reid, and Short 2023; Srivastava, Oberoi, and Gupta 2023). Individuals such as Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Elon Musk perfectly embody this figure of the hero-entrepreneur. Driven by an inner force, they are depicted as rising from humble beginnings, and their quick striking successes are taken as proof of their talent. To work properly, this storytelling must ignore the huge starting resources that all of these “great entrepreneurs” inherited from their parents and focus on the origin myth of the garage, the site from which these young visionaries changed the world forever (Galluzzo 2023). The market thus functions as an instrument of justice, a democratic and egalitarian space where individuals are tested and proven. Indeed, the promotion of entrepreneurship in this way is central to ideologies of labor and subjectivity found widely under conditions of neoliberal capitalism (Carmo et al. 2021). Over one hundred years old, this vision of the entrepreneur emphasizes their need for innovation, a creative drive that consumes exceptional individuals, and their permanent desire for economic profit, which naturally flows from their quest for innovation.
Despite the dominance of this vision in contemporary media discourse, the academic literature on entrepreneurship is extremely diverse. Against the figure of the capitalist hero stands the paradigm of the “precariat,” which the economist Guy Standing has described as “a mass class defined by unstable labor arrangements” (2018, 1). In late twentieth and early twenty-first century societies, this precarious group has appeared as the breeding ground for another type of entrepreneurship, one that is not driven by an inner creative force but by necessity (Standing 2011). Economists Marc Cowling and William D. Bygrave (2007) use the term “necessity entrepreneurs” to refer to people who are self-employed and forced into self-entrepreneurship (Bröckling 2015). This process can be seen as a kind of “self-commodification” (Ursell 2000a, 2000b) in “which each [economically precarious] individual seeks to improve his/her chances of attracting gainful employment” (Ursell 2000b, 807). Following Michel Foucault’s theory of governmentality (Knights and Willmott 1989; Foucault 2007), media scholar Gillian Ursell understands this self-commodification as a kind of “apparent voluntarism”—a form of economic life that may appear to be freely chosen but in fact is thrust upon the individual by larger social forces. Whether it comes from Marxist thinkers or post-Marxists like the Foucauldians, this paradigm of necessity entrepreneurship is central to many studies of the past twenty-five years and challenges the upbeat image of the entrepreneur as a heroic visionary, a topic that will be discussed further in the next sections of this essay. (It is worth noting that a number of scholars have argued that Foucault’s thought has important links with neoliberalism. See, for example, Zamora and Behrent [2015].)
Despite their differences, all of the scholars discussed above see entrepreneurship as intrinsically related to economic profit, envisioning the entrepreneur either as a conquering tycoon or a self-employed worker trying to survive. Nevertheless, we should not see the motivations of entrepreneurs in exclusively material terms. Following the work of neoclassical economist Gary S. Becker (1994) and his theory of “human capital,” we should instead acknowledge that the entrepreneur’s need for autonomy and innovation can be more important than their desire for financial profit-seeking (Young 1984; Benz 2009). For many authors, especially in sociology, the paradigm of entrepreneurship can be useful for analyzing the development and implementation of new ideas, new values, and new practices beyond the economic sphere—ones that challenge older approaches in any social space or social group.
Among the pioneers of research in this area is sociologist Howard S. Becker. In a 1963 study of deviance, he identifies what he calls “moral entrepreneurs,” innovators who are not oriented toward economic profit but instead work to develop new definitions of what is good or bad in their society. In his book Outsiders, Becker shows how the US prohibition against marijuana of the mid-twentieth century was a moral enterprise conducted by reformers who acted “as crusaders because they believe[d] their mission…[was] a holy one” (H. Becker 1963, 148). Casting this topic more broadly, we can observe that defending and promoting a cause or working for change in the interest of the greater good is not only a question of morality. In this context, a vast corpus of academic research has developed on what scholars call “social” or “non-profit entrepreneurship” (Young 1986; Badelt 1997). Growing spectacularly since the turn of the twenty-first century, this literature addresses the motivations that drive people to be involved with NGOs and the ways that work in nonprofit organizations is managed and valued (Austin, Stevenson, and Wei-Skillern 2006; Shockley et al. 2006; Shaw and Carter 2007; Andersson and Self 2015). This research is not without its critics, and several authors have pointed out the lack of robust frameworks for studying social or nonprofit entrepreneurship and the crucial need for developing such foundations (Tan, Williams, and Tan 2005; Peredo and McLean 2006).
Another important approach to this topic is the notion of “cultural entrepreneurship,” which has been promoted by scholars interested in the way art movements and new aesthetic trends are promoted within and impose themselves upon the cultural landscape. Here, scholars are less interested in practices that define what is moral or immoral but instead study the cultural and artistic fields and the ways that entrepreneurs there seek to define what kinds of works are valuable or worthless. Among the best-known sociologists of cultural entrepreneurship are Paul DiMaggio (1982), who worked on the advent of “highbrow” culture in the US; Pierre Bourdieu ([1992] 1995, [2013] 2018), who studied changes in the fields of literature and painting in France; and Vera Zolberg (Zolberg and Cherbo 1997), whose work examines “outsider art.” This scholarship has shown how “cultural fields” (Bourdieu [1979] 1984) or “art worlds” (H. Becker 1982) have been changed by the arrival of new protagonists (Olive-Tomas and Harmeling 2020) and how those protagonists have implemented new kinds of artistic practices, such as the social organization of artistic work, the kinds of topics artists may address, the techniques they use, and aesthetics that they promote—what Becker (1982) calls “conventions.”
Moral, social, and cultural entrepreneurship can be found in many kinds of musical production. These include situations in which minorities use music to struggle for social recognition. One example is the gay club cultures and electronic music scenes that emerged in the US and Western Europe in the 1980s and 1990s (Bennett 2001; Kavanaugh and Anderson 2008). Another example is the rise of the gaïta tradition, an Afro-Caribbean music that emerged in a White-dominated region of Colombia (Ruiz 2009). Of course, material means are always necessary to produce music, so moral, social, or cultural entrepreneurship cannot be completely detached from economic exchange, even if profit-seeking is not the main goal of these kinds of entrepreneurs. Examining the tangled relationships among the different forms of entrepreneurship can be challenging, and, as we will see, these relationships have been too often overlooked in the academic literature.
Having shown the differing ways in which the term “entrepreneurship” is used, we must put this issue into a wider perspective. To do that, we need to examine the way that “being a musician” evolved in the past two centuries and the historical, economic, and cultural contexts that foster or inhibit the flourishing of “music entrepreneurship.”
A BRIEF HISTORY OF MUSICAL LABOR IN MODERN EUROPE AND NORTH AMERICA
While performing musicians in Europe have long been considered to be employees, composers have often worked under the protection of an aristocratic patron, such as a prince or religious dignitary. In his famous book on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, sociologist Norbert Elias (1993) explains that, in the mid-1700s, Leopold Mozart was among the first composers who sought to escape this fate. He toured Europe with his children Maria Anna and Wolfgang, exhibiting the young musical prodigies for the entertainment of the courts, thus prototyping the career of the traveling showman. Leopold’s will to make a living as a musician outside the patronage system was a crucial model for his son, who was always reluctant to work for a single, commanding sponsor and was consumed by his dissatisfaction with this kind of arrangement.
Only twenty years after W.A. Mozart’s premature and miserable death, the conditions of possibility for an entrepreneurial career in music had become very different. Elias, as well as the sociologists Tia DeNora (1991, 2003) and Pierre Bourdieu (2001), has shown that Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) can probably be considered as the first truly successful “music entrepreneur,” and this came about because of historical conditions—the social, cultural, technical, and economic contexts of his time. Indeed, the improvement in piano making techniques between 1780 and 1790 and again between 1810 and 1820 had revolutionized the market for musical performance (Chimènes 2004). At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the salons of the bourgeoisie, who were becoming the new ruling class, were conquered by pianos, as thousands from the rising capitalist class bought these reliable new instruments with their steady tuning. On these pianos were placed printed sheet music, which was also a novelty, as the score publishing business grew massively in tune with the proliferation of domestic pianos (Parakilas 1999).
It was not only music that changed in the nineteenth century; this period is marked by the advent of a completely new organization for all forms of artistic work. H. White and C. White ([1965] 1993), Moulin ([1967] 1987), Bourdieu ([1992] 1995), and DeNora (1991) have shown that the advent of an “art market,” in which the new figure of the gatekeeper intermediary was the key entrepreneurial actor, came about due to the ending of the ancien régime and its patronage system. The figure of the artist remained important but developed a completely new function. Here, the artist was conceived in romantic terms as a “pure and free” creator, one that was incompatible with the figure of the entrepreneur, who only sought financial profit (Heinich 1996). Owners of art galleries, concert halls, and sheet music publishing houses were seen to be the people who turned the artist’s talent into money—promoting, advertising, and selling art—while the artist stayed pure and disinterested.
This trend increased during the twentieth century, which is often seen in socioeconomic history as the age of the “salary society” (Piketty 2014). Up to at least the mid-1960s, the countries in Western Europe and North America had seen a long period of increasing regulation in the conditions of employment and improvement in the rights of wage earners, including those in music. In the early years of the century, musician trade unions formed across Europe (Cloonan and Williamson 2016; Silva 2017). These unions defined the employment status, minimum fees and wages as well as rights and duties for performing musicians working in settings like orchestras, radio, and music halls (H. Becker 1963; Lehmann 2002; Perrenoud 2021). Musicians’ unions also had an impact for composers, who dealt essentially with gatekeeper intermediaries, producers, record companies, and sheet music editors (Maguire and Matthews 2010; Jeanpierre and Roueff 2014; Lizé 2016). Through the 1970s and early 1980s, scholars largely saw musicians and composers as employees of the cultural industries—professionals who operated in the political context of a strong, Keynesian state and an economic context of large firms (Piketty 2014). In his work on the “professionalization” of labor, sociologist Eliot Freidson (2001) argues that artists and scholars in this period had largely become autonomous professionals, ones who combine profit-generating service activities (e.g., teaching, work for hire) with largely unpaid labor in the areas of research or artistic creation (Freidson 1986).
Preceding this work, sociologists Richard A. Peterson and David G. Berger (1971) were among the first to address the idea of entrepreneurship in popular music, but for them the entrepreneurs were not musicians but those who worked for record companies. In France, Moulin published a famous 1983 article titled “De l’artisan au professionnel: L’artiste” (From artisan to professional: The artist). Largely focused on the visual arts, the piece describes a possible future in which artists would be professionals who worked in an environment regulated by the state. In the US, the sociologist Robert R. Faulkner (1983) argued that in Hollywood, composers operated as employees, who produce “music on demand” for the film industry. Thus, in the paradigm that dominated twentieth-century sociological research on the arts, entrepreneurs are the intermediaries—promotors, producers, booking agents—but the musicians themselves, even when they compose, are merely employees.
While scholars were imagining a future in which musicians were professionalized, their status as salaried workers rapidly eroded during the late 1960s and the 1970s, a time that can now be seen as a period of “pop de-professionalization” (Perrenoud 2021). The advent of the so-called youthquake dramatically changed the pop music business across the planet, as hundreds of thousands of untrained teenage musicians started to play music, performing for audiences in venues like bars, clubs, and private parties. For them, being a musician meant participating in a movement and not “doing a job” (Azerrad 2001; Reddington 2007; Crossley 2015). This romanticization of the relations of production in the popular music sector fundamentally contributed to spoiling of the trade for the professional musicians of the previous generation (Perrenoud 2021), but it also contributed to the negative image of gatekeeper intermediaries as greedy exploiters of innocent artists who were naive about the music industry (Stahl 2013). The Pink Floyd song “Have a Cigar” (from the 1975 album Wish You Were Here) expresses this idea most clearly. Few musicians in this period had even a measure of control of the artistic and economic processes of music production. At the time, only rare performers like David Bowie and Frank Zappa were recognized both as singular musical innovators and musical entrepreneurs, in all of the senses of the term. For the vast majority of musicians, sometimes even famous ones, being a musician meant that one was no longer a member of the “salariat” but instead were part of the precariat (Stahl 2013).
In the ideologic context of the so-called new spirit of capitalism that had come to dominate the economy since the end of the twentieth century (Boltanski and Chiapello [1999] 2005), the solution to employment issues in music seemed similar to that in any other sector of the economy: to remedy the erosion of wage-earning positions, people were urged to become self-employed (Abdelnour 2017)—that is, to become entrepreneurs. In this context, most musicians became necessity entrepreneurs, as the majority now earned less money than they had in the past. Informed by the promises of the digital age and, above all, the development of social media in the past twenty years, the paradigm of music entrepreneurship has been reinforced by the ideology of self-entrepreneurship. Starting in the early 2000s, Myspace and later YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok gave the impression that they provided direct contact between artists and audiences (Beer 2008; Chambers 2022). This sense of intimacy—of a private relationship between musician and listener—is as important for artists as it is for audience members, and it nurtures the idea that gatekeeper intermediaries have disappeared (Morris 2013). In fact, social networks and other platforms are the new gatekeeper intermediaries (Airoldi 2021), and musicians have to learn how to use them as part of their entrepreneurial skills (Bonini and Gandini 2019). Musicians have become what we might call “neo-Schumpeterian” entrepreneurs, actors who are driven by their need for innovation and their natural “creativity” and who are forced to embrace self-management and profit-seeking.
As discussed in the introduction, the contemporary, naturalized version of music entrepreneurship is frequently celebrated in institutions for professional music training. Next we will show that this perspective is also frequently taken for granted in contemporary academic publications.
PRAISING MUSIC ENTREPRENEURSHIP: THE PARADIGM OF “CREATIVITY”
MUSICIANS AS “NATURAL ENTREPRENEURS”
Describing musicians as “natural entrepreneurs,” the quote at the start of this essay reflects the opinion of many academics writing on music entrepreneurship in the past twenty years. Indeed, starting around the turn of the twenty-first century, a whole academic subfield emerged that follows neoliberal ideologies and the paradigm of Schumpeterian “creative entrepreneurship” (Boltanksi and Chiapello [1999] 2005). Such work can be found in journals like Creativity and Innovation Management, the Journal of Creative Behavior, Creativity Research Journal, Creative Industries Journal, Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts, the Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, and many others. Beyond these specialized publications, neo-Schumpeterian studies of entrepreneurship can also be found in the vast corpus of journals in business and management, which developed as an autonomous academic discipline over the twentieth century and has become highly influential.
As one might expect, literature from these fields on artistic entrepreneurship in general and music entrepreneurship in particular straightforwardly and enthusiastically posits an equivalence between art and entrepreneurship. Writing in Creativity and Innovation Management, for example, economic historian Staffan Albinsson states that “both entrepreneurs and musicians are broadly considered to be creative people” (2018, 355). Writing about his fieldwork in Sweden, he shows that while most of the oldest musicians there reject the term “entrepreneur,” this expression is accepted by younger musicians, and he concludes that training in entrepreneurship should be fully integrated into professional music education. Academic journals in the educational field, which draw on diverse intellectual traditions (mainly psychology, sociology, pedagogy, and management), also regularly publish papers that hold that entrepreneurship is essential for musicians. For example, Music Education Research frequently publishes articles such as “Entrepreneurial Identity Formation through Musical Identity Formation,” by education scholars Lenita Hietanen and Heikki Ruismäki (2021). Based on a Finnish case study, they argue for “the importance of ongoing support for an individual’s displays of initiative, original ideas and creativity when dealing with opportunities during the entire educational path” (443) and emphasize the value of training in entrepreneurship.
Articles from business and management and, to a lesser extent, from music education, usually take for granted that the growing emphasis on entrepreneurship is a good and a necessary trend for “creative workers,” and especially musicians (Barry 2011; Canham 2022). For these scholars, a successful career in arts and music cannot be achieved today without self-management and profit-seeking, and many works discuss the importance of developing an “entrepreneurial spirit” for artists or art students in general (Ruyters 2006; Lindqvist 2011; Meisiek and Haefliger 2011; Bridgstock 2013; Patten 2016) and musicians in particular (Clague 2011; J. White 2016; Toscher and Bjørnø 2019; de Reizabal and Gómez 2020; Everts and Haynes 2021). Here, researchers examine ways to assess and encourage entrepreneurship among musicians or music students (Schediwy, Loots, and Bhansing 2018), and this work is often carried out in the subfield of “entrepreneurship education” (Fleck, Kakouris, and Winkel 2021). In the large corpus of articles published in management journals, one can also find case studies of famous international artists (Hjorth and Holt 2016), and even sports champions. This work seeks to understand what makes “talented people” good entrepreneurs (Stewart, Lee, and Konz 2008).
Publications in business and management frequently use ideas from psychology to explore the “personality of the entrepreneur” (Hoyte 2018) and, more generally, rely on approaches from the cognitive and behavioural sciences (Ward 2004; Hagtvedt et al. 2019). For example, several management scholars frame their research on music entrepreneurship in terms of “effectuation theory” (Salmela 2017; Bissonnette and Arcand 2018; Gangi 2021). (According to the website effectuation.org, “effectual reasoning is a type of human problem solvingdeveloped from a cognitive science based study of 27 founders of companies ranging in size from $200M to $6.5B conducted by…[University of Virginia Darden School of Business] Professor Saras Sarasvathy” (Effectuation.org n.d.).2 Few publications from business and management consider the paradigm of necessity entrepreneurship, and this is also true of the related work in education and psychology. When these authors do acknowledge that most musicians are not comfortable with the discourses of entrepreneurism, self-management, and profit-seeking, they still seem to argue that performers have no choice other than to become entrepreneurs (Canham 2016; Albinsson 2018). Entrepreneurship is “required,” as this essay’s epigraph asserts, and the nature of this requirement is never addressed. In most of the management literature, necessity entrepreneurship is framed as an issue of “resilience” (Bullough, Renko, and Myatt 2014; Korber and McNaughton 2018; González-López, Pérez-López, and Rodríguez-Ariza 2019; Anwar, Coviello, and Rouziou 2023): musicians must adapt to survive, and they should be able to do so because they are “creative” people.
MUSIC ENTREPRENEURS AS CHAMPIONS OF THE “CREATIVE CLASS”
Published at the beginning of the twenty-first century, The Rise of the Creative Class and How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life, by urban geographer Richard Florida, sought to conceptualize creatives as a new kind of social “class,” one comprised of “people in design, education, arts, music and entertainment, whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology and/or creative content” (2002, 8). (For Florida, scientists and intellectuals are also part of the creative class.) The book was a huge success and read widely outside of the social sciences, where it was more contested (see, for example, Marcuse 2003; Peck 2005; A. Scott 2006; Krätke 2010; Martin-Brelot et al. 2010; Tremblay and Tremblay 2010; Lawton, Murphy, and Redmond 2014). For example, critics of the book from urban studies and sociology often pointed to the fact that the notion of the creative class was not particularly original. Geographer Jamie Peck observed that “the new-economy discourse of the late 1990s…was replete with paeans to the creativity, if not artistry, of its casually-dressed entrepreneurial heroes” (Peck 2005, 741). Others, like Florida’s former professor Peter Marcuse, noted that the book “reads like a series of well-crafted after-dinner speeches at various chamber of commerce dinners” (Marcuse 2003, 40), and many saw the paradigm of the creative class and “creative cities” (Florida 2005) as a user’s manual for gentrification (A. Scott 2006; Lawton, Murphy, and Redmond 2014). The debate about the book reached even wider audiences in the mass media, with stories such as a 2017 retrospective about the book published in the Guardian, titled “ ‘Everything Is Gentrification Now’: But Richard Florida Isn’t Sorry” (Wainwright 2017).
Despite its critics, the notion of “the creative class” imposed itself as a central paradigm for most academics working on entrepreneurship in the fields of business and management as well as cognitive and behavioural psychology. In this literature, “open-mindedness” (Eikhof and Haunschild 2006), readiness to address the unexpected (Dew 2009; Kirzner 2009), a taste for challenge and risk-taking (S. Bureau and Zander 2014), natural curiosity (Hagtvedt et al. 2019), and an inclination toward innovation (Gouvea et al. 2020) are depicted as elemental shared characteristics of artists and entrepreneurs (Lee, Florida, and Acs 2004; Fillis and Rentschler 2010). Emerging from the context of neoliberalism and its “new spirit of capitalism,” these works are consistent with Schumpeter’s vision of the heroic entrepreneur, a figure with an inner drive for innovation and profit and a mysterious, almost demiurgic power, one that is also seen as the magic and sacred gift of the artist: the power of the “creator” (Mace 1997). With the emergence of these ideas, the equation of art and entrepreneurship is now complete, and, as a result, the two terms can be reversed: artists are natural entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs are natural artists. Entrepreneurship can be seen as “a subversive activity” (S. Bureau 2013), even “an art of subversion” (S. Bureau and Zander 2014), because entrepreneurs are “the artists of the business world” (Daum 2005).
In sum, the literature on creativity that draws on ideas from business and management, which takes for granted the equivalence between “the arts” and “entrepreneurship,” constitutes the theoretical base for narratives that praise the “entrepreneurial spirit” in music. These ideas can be found widely today, from media written for working musicians (such as the countless music websites that celebrate music entrepreneurship),3 to the case studies in the academic research literature discussed above, to the abundant postsecondary training programs in arts or music entrepreneurship across the Western world examined in the opening section of this essay.
LIMITS OF THESE APPROACHES
From a social science perspective, the success of the paradigm of creative entrepreneurship, which arose in the wake of Florida’s best seller and its prophetic claims, raises many questions (Marcuse 2003; Peck 2005). For example, the methods used in the literature on music entrepreneurship from business and management and from music education call out for careful scrutiny (see, for example, Martin-Brelot et al. 2010). Considered in light of well-established ideas about research methods in the social sciences, the data collection in many of these studies would be considered to be empirically fragile and the sample sizes would not be seen as representative. An article published in Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts (Patten 2016), for example, is based solely on the narrative analysis of interviews with three individuals, while an article on identity and musical entrepreneurship (Hietanen and Ruismäki 2021) is based on only two interviews with one person. It is difficult to imagine that studies such as these would be published in prominent social science journals. Regarding the theoretical foundations of this work, scholars in this area seem to be mostly unaware of the concept of symbolic entrepreneurship (discussed further below), which challenges the idea that entrepreneurship is solely motivated by profit. When this literature discusses “moral entrepreneurship,” Becker’s work is not cited and the literature instead discusses only the much narrower notion of “ethical leadership” (Kaptein 2019). When authors talk about “cultural entrepreneurship,” it is mainly addressed in terms of profit-seeking in the cultural sector (Lounsbury and Glynn 2001; Lindqvist 2011). When these scholars seem to “discover” the work of DiMaggio and Bourdieu—and it is likely that they mention Bourdieu because DiMaggio cites him—it is not clear that they understand the larger thrust of their work, and they also ignore other important authors on the topic like DeNora or Zolberg (Klamer 2011). In general, articles in business and management journals do not mention the social identities of the individuals that they profile (e.g., their gender, age, their self-identification in terms of race or ethnicity, or material resources) and do not consider how these factors may be determining variables in their studies, preferring instead to focus on personality models. Coming from fields where scholars are rarely concerned with class disparities or social justice (Zipp and Fenwick 2006; Rothman, Kelly-Woessner, and Woessner 2010), this work reflects the dominance of neoliberal ideologies there.4 A very different approach is found in academic disciplines more accustomed to critiques of capitalism, and this approach is the focus of the next section of this essay.
DECRYING MUSIC ENTREPRENEURSHIP: SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY AND BEYOND
CRITICAL THEORY
If scholars in business and management tend to believe in “free enterprise” and the “invisible hand” of the market (van de Werfhorst 2020), those from philosophy and the branches of the social sciences associated with critical theory emerge from the Marxist intellectual tradition and other strains of anticapitalist thought. In the early and mid-twentieth century, a group of scholars from the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt in Germany (which came to be known collectively as the Frankfurt School) such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (see, for example, Adorno 1991; Adorno and Horkheimer [1944] 1992), Herbert Marcuse (2001), and Walter Benjamin ([1935] 2008) developed a conceptual corpus for analyzing the relationship between culture and capitalism. Their interest in Freudian psychoanalysis drove them away from the traditional economic analysis of classical Marxism and toward an approach chiefly centered on “culture.” Here, this word is understood in terms of the broad, German concept of Kultur, which encompasses affect as well as tastes and practices, and led to a model of social life that integrated anthropological and political perspectives (Henning 2017). One of the central concerns of Frankfurt School critical theory is the “corrosion of culture” (Adorno and Horkheimer [1944] 1992), which its theorists believed to occur under conditions of capitalism and modern “technological society” (Marcuse 2001, 35). In this context, the arts are seen as especially endangered, for their symbolic function, which is seen as pure and almost sacred, is corrupted by capitalism, which transforms everything it touches into a commodity. One of the best-known writings from this body of work is Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Richly discussing recorded music, Benjamin argues that mechnical reproduction destroys a work’s “aura”—the symbolic value attached to its unicity, and the fact that a single artistic creator brought it into being (Benjamin [1935] 2008). In related work, Adorno and Horkheimer developed the concept of the “cultural industry,” which they intended as a deliberate oxymoron, to identify the source of cultural decline under capitalism (Adorno and Horkheimer [1944] 1992).
The critical philosophy that Adorno, Horkheimer, and their colleagues developed rests on the idea that artistic purity is soiled by the commercial rules of the market, and their thought was also nourished by the aesthetic standards of their times and their life experiences. Indeed, Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer, and Marcuse were all German intellectuals born into upper-class families at the end of the nineteenth century. All but Benjamin (who died in Spain in 1940 after trying to escape Vichy France) fled Germany in the 1930s and taught in the US, where they interpreted the popular culture that they found there as vile commercial products, symptoms of the same capitalist cultural disaster that had led to European fascism. The most famous example of Frankfurt School critical theory’s critique of American popular culture is probably Adorno’s attacks on jazz (Béthune 2003), which the philosopher, who was a classical music lover and son of an opera singer, despised till his death in 1969.
The ideas of Frankfurt School critical theory address many of the themes we have seen in the literature on entrepreneurship in music. From a Frankfurt School perspective, entrepreneurship is by nature a form of capitalist activity, and the Schumpeterian entrepreneur-hero is simply an exploiter of the proletarian workforce. Their ideas about the commodification of culture highlight the ways in which capitalism colonizes all the aspects of social life, and they would have interpreted the idea of necessity entrepreneurship (in music or elsewhere) as “self-commodification” (Ursell 2000a, 2000b). Echoed by the theory of governmentality developed many years later by Michel Foucault (2007), a Frankfurt School approach would see the necessity entrepreneur simply as an exploited worker. The legacy of first-generation Frankfurt School critical theory was carried forward in the 1970s and 1980s by French political philosophers such as Foucault (1988, 2007) and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari ([1972] 2009), whose works are still nourishing contemporary research, notably for analyzing the logics underlying contemporary dynamics in culture and economics. Although these authors did not directly address the contemporary concept of music entrepreneurship, their ideas have shaped much of the social science research on this topic today.
TOWARD A CONTEXTUAL AND EMPIRICAL APPROACH
The idea of the “creative industries” had a powerful impact on the way that music entrepreneurship was understood in government policy and the business and management literature at the end of the twentieth century. (For critical work on this topic, see Caves 2000, Hartley 2005, and Banks and Hesmondhalgh 2009.) This idea was in no way a replacement for the critical theory notion of the cultural industries. For exampe, media studies scholar Nicholas Garnham (2005) has shown that, in the UK of the late 1990s, the Labour Party promoted the idea of the creative industries, and the notion that Britian was a “creative country,” as part of their broad “New Labour” agenda. Starting in 1998, government agencies, trade groups, and scholars in business and management used these expressions to amalgamate the video game business, advertising, traditional forms of culture, and any other kind of economic activity that could be celebrated as “creative.” An inversion of the Frankfurt School idea of the cultural industries, the notion of the creative industries was a mainly positive one and sought to promote the British economy. Scholars such as Garnham as well as Mark Banks and Michael Justin O’Connor (2017) have explored these processes in detail.
The work of contemporary inheritors of critical theory can also be found in journals that foster unorthodox (i.e., non-neoclassical) economics. These studies offer radical critiques of the rise of “creativity” and see it as a central feature of neoliberal ideology. For example, in the first years of the new century, the journal Economy and Society published an article titled “Against ‘Creativity’: A Philistine Rant” (Osborne 2003), which offered a strong criticism of the discourses of creativity and the creative industries. Likewise, the sociologist Arlie Hochschild (2001) showed how the cultural mandate to be “creative” is part of the commodification of intimate life processes. Quite surprisingly, one of the most straightforwardly critical articles on creativity in this period was published in a business and management journal founded in the early 1990s—Creativity and Innovation Management. Relying on Foucault, , critical management scholar Craig Prichard’s article seeks to “draw attention to the effects of subjection [the process by which power relations create forms of identity] as a mode by which the intensification and exploitation of available labour is attempted and variably achieved” in the creative industries and thus addresses “the debilitating and destructive effects” of the paradigm of creativity (2002, 274). More recently, social philosopher Mischa-S. Piraud (2017) has written about the “creativity trap” and the pitfalls of “creative capitalism,” which “reduces creativity to productivity” (“réduction de la créativité à une productivité”) and confuses creativity with innovation (Piraud 2017, para. 13, translation mine). This work incorporates ideas from second-generation Frankfurt School critical theory, notably those of Jürgen Habermas, as well as ones from American pragmatism.
Such pragmatic, empirical work has led to ethnographic studies that address the meaning and tangible manifestations of music entrepreneurship and richly analyze their materiality. Influenced by the foundational ideas of sociologist Bruno Latour (Latour and Woolgar 1986), Antoine Hennion’s research on musical mediation ([1993] 2005) and amateurs in classical music (Hennion, Maisonneuve, and Gomart 2000) has served as a model for this work, not because of its use of actor-network theory, which is widely debated, but for the thick descriptions it provides of the ways that musical activity is bound up with forms of technology (e.g., hardware, software, and wider Internet ecosystems) and economic factors (e.g., revenue sources). As we have seen, market intermediaries were the main actors that revolutionized the art worlds of nineteenth-century Europe. Such intermediaries remained important in twentieth-century music cultures, where they were often depicted as villains, especially in the neo-romantic mythology associated with the popular music that emerged after the mid-sixties.
Around 2005, the advent of Web 2.0 promoted the idea that anyone could be their own publisher by releasing their artistic creations online, and music was at the forefront here. Platforms like Myspace and later YouTube, Spotify, and Bandcamp claimed to offer composers and musicians the opportunity to bypass market intermediaries and make direct contact with remote audiences. However, contemporary empirical studies, particularly ones using ethnographic methods, have shown that these new platforms involve a wide range of new, invisible intermediaries—digital actors and processes in the chain of music production and distribution that are more powerful, opaque, puzzling, and demanding than the old-fashioned mediators, like venue-booking agents and record company managers. Illustrating the value of ethnographic fieldwork, some of these publications were directly inspired by the pragmatism of Antoine Hennion’s research in the 2000s, Latour’s work in science and technology studies, and sound studies (Pinch and Trocco 2002). These studies address a range of topics, from the ways that laptops can serve as musical instruments (Prior 2008), to the distinction between analog and digital in music (Ribac 2012), to the rise of “Music Tech” (Riom 2023). While this work does not necessarily address the idea of the music entrepreneur, it gives precious insights into the tangible music-making practices that performers engage in today. Drawing on a rigorous tradition of sociological research on artistic labor, other empirical studies explicitly address the various meanings that “music entrepreneurship” can have in particular situations and its implications for musical practice.
DECONSTRUCTING MUSIC ENTREPRENEURSHIP: FROM ARTISTIC WORK TO SYMBOLIC ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Grounded in the sociological work discussed above on the history of artistic practices (H. White and C. White [1965] 1993; Moulin [1967] 1987; Bourdieu 1980; H. Becker 1982; DiMaggio 1982; Zolberg 1990; DeNora 1991), contemporary research in economic sociology (Swedberg, Himmelstrand, and Brulin 1990; Zukin and DiMaggio 1990) and the sociology of the arts and artists (DiMaggio 1994; Alper and Wassal 2006) has shown how the “musician entrepreneur” has become the newest avatar of musical labor and the model for contemporary forms of employment in the music industries. This research highlights the contradictions between the romantic ideology of the pure and free artist, still vivid in the mindset of many musicians (Haynes and Marshall 2018), and the profit-oriented, entrepreneurial business activity that they must pursue on a daily basis. Published more than sixty years ago, Becker’s (1963) Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance examined the tension between creative freedom and commercial constraint in music, which is most notable in popular music, and showed how it served as a determining factor in the lives and careers of musicians. In the past twenty years, various ethnographic studies have shown that this conflict between being a musical artist and being an entrepreneur is still the source of many of the difficulties that musicians face today (Bodnar 2006; Perrenoud 2007; Banks and Hesmondhalgh 2009; Banks 2010; Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2010; Coulson 2012; Umney 2017; Casula 2019; Perrenoud and Bataille 2019). In this context, sociologists Jo Haynes and Lee Marshall (2018) have come to conceptualize musicians as “reluctant entrepreneurs,” and this work offers a critical analysis of the idea of the creative class, discussed above. The notions of entrepreneurship and creativity are not taken for granted in these studies, and high-quality empirical research, including ethnographic fieldwork, allows scholars to better understand the complex, ambivalent ways that these terms are used in particular social situations, replacing the clearly ideological use of the term “music entrepreneurship” in neoliberal discourse (Chapman 2013; Moore 2016).
Our examination of empirical, ethnographic, and constructivist approaches to the topic of musicians as entrepreneurs would not be complete without a discussion of what is often called the “portfolio career”—the phenomenon in which artists in general, and musicians in particular, are forced to hold down several jobs at once to make a living. Numerous works have shown that holding multiple jobs is the norm in many artistic careers, including music (Freidson 1986; M-C. Bureau, Perrenoud, and Shapiro 2009; Lindstrom 2016; Bartleet et al. 2019; Barker 2021), and this phenomenon has become a core notion in the sociology of artistic work. In the above discussion of the 1980s literature on music professionalization, we saw that Eliot Freidson depicted multiple job holding as the way to solve the paradox of artistic work. Here, participating in profit-making service activities like teaching, composing, or playing commercial gigs provides musicians with the support that they need to engage in free and autonomous music-making activities, such as composing idiosyncratic forms of music, avant-garde improvisation, or other forms of noncommercial “musicking” (see Rouget [1980] 1985; Small 1998). Despite the opportunities that all of this affords, the same tension between chosen entrepreneurship and necessity entrepreneurship shapes the practices of multiple-job-holding musicians:the diverse activities here can be the result of a “creative” strategy, but they are just as likely to come from enforced necessity (M-C. Bureau, Perrenoud, and Shapiro 2009). Many “great artists” ensure their position in a field by developing expertise in remunerative endeavors like editing music, working as a producer, teaching in prestigious conservatories, and giving master classes, and in some cases, the diverse activities that the musician pursues end up strengthening each other.5 Indeed, for the vast majority of “ordinary musicians” (Perrenoud 2007; Faulkner and Becker 2009),6 having a portfolio career is a common way to make a living (H. Becker 1963): for a musician who is not a regular employee in an orchestra, the multiplication of activities occurs out of necessity, forcing them turn down gigs with certain bands in favor of other ones and routinely juggle many teaching hours. In its most contemporary form, necessity multiple job holding means struggling with “platform labour” (Heiland 2020; Umney 2017) on digital platforms like Fiverr.com, which connects musical service providers with potential clients (Umney 2017; van Doorn 2017), and working hard to get by in the “gig economy” (Woodcock and Graham 2019; Cloonan and Williamson 2023).
Recent publications in business and management have introduced the idea of the “post-portfolio” career (Canham 2022), in which all of a musician’s activities are linked to each other and are seen to make sense together. Other studies examine what are called “platform careers” (Clague 2024), where the musician’s many activities are centered on a single online platform, which gathers together the income streams from all of their diverse activities and, in certain contexts (such as the French intermittents du spectacle system), also includes the forms of government support that they receive. Unlike the musician who pursues a portfolio career and juggles between many platforms (e.g., one to sell recorded music, one to get hired for live performances, and one to give online lessons), the musician pursuing a platform career has a single website, which centralizes all their professional activities. Although scholars in business and management depict the platform career as the rosy future of musical self-entrepreneurship, sociologists see this kind of integration as the rationalization of music-making activities, which imposes a particular constraining form of self-management (Sinigaglia 2021). Here, musicians are forced to constantly improve their economic rationality and think about the profit-making potential of any activity they might pursue. Requiring a rigorous form self-discipline and forcing the musician to spend time and energy in nonmusical administrative labor (e.g., reviewing contracts), the forms of communication that social networks impose make the contemporary musician into an overworked necessity entrepreneur, one who is far from the heroic figure that Schumpeter imagined (Chapman 2013; Sinigaglia 2021; Chambers 2022). Contemporary ethnographic research has examined how musicians deal with digital actors like platforms and algorithms, rather than human market intermediaries, and how all of this has transformed the experiences of contemporary freelance musicians (Beer 2008; Airoldi, Beraldo, and Gandini 2016; Umney 2017; Bonini and Gandini 2019; Airoldi 2021; Gandini 2021). It is remarkable that most of these works do not use the term “entrepreneur,” despite the fact that necessity entrepreneurship is their central concern.
At the opposite end of the entrepreneurial spectrum, we find musicians who are driven by symbolic, cultural, and/or political motivations, rather than economic ones, and fit within Weber’s ([1921] 2019) definition of “political entrepreneurs.” The approaches that Becker, DiMaggio, and Bourdieu take to this topic are compatible with one another and could all be seen as fitting within Bourdieu’s (1971) notion of “symbolic” entrepreneurship, which is oriented toward the accumulation of symbolic capital more than economic capital. Thus, the moral and cultural entrepreneurs discussed in Becker’s books Outsiders (1963) and Art Worlds (1982) are all engaged in the kind of enterprise that Bourdieu (1980) would call the “production of belief,” as they are not motivated by profit but rather seek to persuade others to adhere to their cultural or moral beliefs. Similar dynamics can be found among the amateurs that DiMaggio (1982) discussed in his work on the promotion of highbrow arts in nineteenth-century Boston.7 (It is worth noting that Bourdieu’s ([2013] 2018) writings on the nineteenth-century painter Édouard Manet and the writer Gustave Flaubert, which discuss the socio-genesis of the figure of the symbolic entrepreneur (Bourdieu [1992] 1995, [2013] 2018), are quite different from his approach to Beethoven, whom he sees as an “artistic entrepreneur” (2001) and which focuses on the commercial aspect of his entrepreneurial practices.) The contemporary sociology of cultural entrepreneurship addresses the ways new aesthetics and new ways of doing and thinking—new “conventions” (H. Becker 1982)—appear and impose themselves in art worlds or fields of artistic production (Karmel 2003; Crossley 2015; Olive-Tomas and Harmeling 2020). Of course, for ethnographers, artists are not regarded as demiurgic heroes, and the processes of evolution, “innovation,” or “revolution” in art are treated as collective achievements situated in historical contexts. All of these “great artists” were, above all, at the right place at the right time, with the right social dispositions and resources, engaging with the right partners and intermediaries (critics, agents, gallery owners, record companies, online platforms), and their work was developed against countermodels, where actors from one field of cultural production endeavored to distinguish themselves from those in other fields (Bourdieu 1980, [1980] 1993). In this constructivist approach, which situates any field of cultural product in its historical context and examines how it emerges in relation to other fields, cultural entrepreneurship is never “purely” symbolic and profit-seeking entrepreneurship is never “purely” economic; both depend on the production of belief (Bourdieu 1980).
CONCLUSIONS
To sum up the main points discussed in this essay, we will begin by arguing that the purpose of any kind of entrepreneurship is the production of belief—generating trust within a market or social group and encouraging people there to adhere to one’s views. Whether one is a profit-seeking entrepreneur who wants to sell a new kind of vacuum cleaner or a moral entrepreneur who wants to ban teenage drug use, one must engage in acts of persuasion (Bourdieu 1980). Therefore, rather than treating profit-seeking economic entrepreneurship and the various forms of symbolic entrepreneurship as distinct categories, we suggest that they be seen as two ends of a continuum. This continuum is involved in all kinds of entrepreneurship, including music, and the position of musicians on that continuum mostly depends on their resources (see figure 1). At one end of the spectrum in music is necessity entrepreneurship, which mostly involves commercial music-making, such as musicians who play for parties and other social functions (see, for example, Umney 2017). At the other end of the spectrum can be found music entrepreneurship that is driven by the wide variety of social dispositions (acquired all along the socialization process), such as the desire for aesthetic innovation or symbolic risk-taking. This often results in what Bourdieu would call the achievement of a “sense of one’s [the artist’s] place” ([1997] 2000, 184) in a cultural-artistic field (i.e., their capacity to spontaneously embrace the most symbolically profitable choices). This process also generally relies on inherited material and symbolic resources, like the cultural, social, and, of course, economic capital of parents and relatives that prevents some young artists from having to engage in necessity and commercial entrepreneurship (M. Scott 2012; Perrenoud and Bataille 2019; Bataille and Perrenoud 2021; Sinigaglia 2021). Beyond class inequalities, contemporary research in sociology shows that gender, race, and all power relations obviously also drastically shape musicians’ careers: their chances to be a necessity entrepreneur, trying to make a living out of musical activities, or an artist entrepreneur, driven by “creativity,” depend widely on the social characteristics (gender, ethnicity, wealth, education) of the musicians.
Figure 1. The continuum of “music entrepreneurship”
One last remark about this continuum: in many publications, Bourdieu (1980, [1980] 1990, [1994] 1998, [1997] 2000) showed that because it is not a commercial economy, the so-called economy of symbolic goods is likely to generate cultural products that are considered to be the purest and the most legitimate works of art. As a result, they end up becoming the most valuable economically (see also, for instance, Nathalie Heinich’s (1996) analysis of the value of Van Gogh’s works). In other words, the spontaneous way of being and working found among disinterested artists is so obviously noncommercial and “pure” that the artworks they produce become highly valuable on the market. This “interest in disinterestedness” (Bourdieu [1994] 1998, 75, 2022) does not only result in the artist’s “sense of placement” in a cultural field (Bourdieu [1979] 1984) but also tends to generate the highest symbolic and economic profits. While this kind of entrepreneurship can be the most profitable, it takes time to turn symbolic value into money. The temporal gap between the initial cost that the musician incurs (i.e., their investment of time and energy in artistic innovation) and the return on their investment in money is the invisible link that connects the two phases of this process (investment and return on investment) and is the central element of Bourdieusian interested disinterestedness (see also Sayer 1999). The philosophical, economic, and anthropological complexities of this topic remain the focus of contemporary scholarship and beyond the scope of this essay.
In conclusion, we would observe that one of the main difficulties faced by the diverse literatures on music entrepreneurship is the lack of a common definition of this term across disciplines. Business and management publications typically see entrepreneurship as something desirable, since, for many musicians, it is the only option they have for economic survival. Here, it is assumed that the idea of entrepreneurship needs to be developed, and researchers need to further examine how to promote it. Critical approaches to entrepreneurship in this field are the exception (Gartner 1988; Mulcahy 2003; Shane 2009). The opposite situation can be found among scholars in the social sciences, notably those who draw on Frankfurt School critical theory. They often condemn entrepreneurship, which they see as the antithesis of pure and autonomous artistic work. These scholars are opposed to commodification and see self-entrepreneurship as self-commodification. Scholars in the sociology of arts have adopted a more constructivist approach, addressing the meaning of music entrepreneurship and the concrete and very negative implications that it can have on the musician’s work. This seems to be the most suitable way to approach a concept like the entrepreneur, which is so heavily politicized and ideologically burdened.
In this context, social science research should continue to explore the ambivalent relationships between economic and symbolic entrepreneurship in the culture industries. Of the many different kinds of music, popular music is probably the best study object for this kind of research, since it is characterized by the most ambivalent logics and narratives about the “arts” and “business.” A first step toward an objective, integrated, and constructivist approach to music entrepreneurship could be taken by problematizing the idea of entrepreneurship itself, in both academic research and political and institutional discourse.
NOTES
1 A wide variety of universities and colleges offer minors, certificates, or other programs in music entrepreneurship. In the US, for example, these schools include Arizona State University (2024), Boise State University (2024), Miami University (2024), North Carolina State University (2024), Northern Colorado University, College of Visual and Performing Arts (2024), Texas Tech University, Department of Interdisciplinary Arts (2024), University of Maryland, Baltimore County (2024), University of Nebraska Omaha (2024), and Western Carolina University (2024). Examples in the UK include the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance (2024), Leeds Beckett University (2024), Liverpool Hope University (2024), London College of Contemporary Music (2024), and University of Derby (2024). Examples in Australia include Box Hill Institute (2024), Flinders University (2024), and Griffith University (2024).
2 According to the footer at the bottom of the pages on its website, Effectuation.org “is a Global Society advancing Effectual Action through research, education and practice.”
3 For example, the website Musician & Co. has developed the notion of the “musicpreneur.” It sells courses on music entrepreneurship, has links to books on the topic at Amazon.com (from which the site may earn a commission), and offers posts like “8 Things to Organize in Your Creative Business” (Danyew 2024a), “On Developing a Daily Ritual: Insights from Mason Currey’s Book” (Danyew 2024b),and “Time-Blocking for Musicians: How to Structure Your Workday” (Danyew 2024c). See also Danyew (2024d) and Musician & Co. (n.d.).
4 An example from my own experience, written in the mode of autoethnography, can help to illustrate this point. On the campus of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, where I teach, I am often thought of as a former “professional musician.” (A long time ago, I made a modest living playing the double bass in France.) Recently, I was approached by colleagues from psychology and management to give a talk on creativity at a conference that brought together master’s students from the prestigious Polytechnic Federal School of Lausanne and from the Business and Management Faculty at the University of Lausanne. Students from the other faculties (e.g., Literature and Humanities, Law and Criminal Sciences, Social and Political Sciences, Geosciences, Medicine) were not invited. During this talk, I made predominantly critical observations on the ambiguous ways that the word “creativity” is used in many social contexts today and stressed that the conference organizers may have misunderstood my work when they invited me to speak. Unsurprisingly, my remarks disappointed most of the audience, who thought that my talk was not very “creative.”
5 Take the example of a pianist who is the son of wage-earning musicians in a famous European orchestra. For a time, he lived in New York, then in Paris, won an international jazz award, and tours the world with his contemporary jazz trio, working with booking agents on three continents. After a few years, this musician came back to his home city (a European capital) and took a position programming music at a local piano festival, which is held annually; he has also been offered a job teaching at a conservatory one day a week in the winter. He also joined the boards of private foundations that support music-making activities in his country. Here, holding multiple jobs is an effective way to secure a long-lasting career with a satisfying level of recognition and income.
6 The term “ordinary musician” refers to “players competent in a variety of styles, ready to do what is likely to come up in most engagements…[and able to handle] whatever the world throws their way” (Faulkner and Becker 2009, 16).
7 It can be surprising to see how few of these concepts are used in business and management research. For example, the eminent Journal of Cultural Economics, which is published by Springer, recently published a paper that considers “the market for meaning” as “a new entrepreneurial approach” (Chang, Potts, and Shih 2021). This piece appeared exactly fifty years after Bourdieu’s (1971) first important article on “the market for symbolic goods” (le marché des biens symboliques).
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