Ted Rall Musicians as workers and the gig economy Martin Cloonan TIAS, University of Turku
Structure Musicians as workers Three case studies Gigs and the gig economy The wider context Conclusions
Part 1: Musicians as workers Players Work Time (2016) some critiques... Musicians as workers contested: Frith: love of music is why people are willing to pay for musical labour in the first place, but it also means, perhaps, that they don t really regard music as work. Its value is precisely as nonwork. Musicians may, then, be workers, but they shouldn t be (2016: 115). London bias: HQ of Musicians Union, major orchestras, record companies, etc. Gender bias: low percentage of women in music profession & music industries pre-1975.
Part 2: Three Case Studies Three careers covering post-war period careers span late mid C.20th to present day, allow for: Examination of working conditions and issues. Comparative study of changes in profession/ industries. Foregrounding of hidden musicians. John Patrick: professional musician from Birmingham, working since 1950 in ballrooms and on television. Anne Collis: percussionist from Preston, working in classical music from 1960s onwards. Michael John McCarthy: freelance musician from Cork, lives in Glasgow, mainly working in theatre.
John Patrick: Big Bands and Television Gigs around Birmingham and goes professional in 1950, aged 19, as I didn t like getting up in the morning (Patrick 2014). 1954: Moves to London and the Basil Kirchin Band residency: a strenuous job. You played seven nights and two afternoons a week and got about 11 a week for it (ibid). On the road: just a job. It was a boring job and you played the same thing every night (ibid). 1956: Back to Birmingham and the Sonny Rose Band
John Patrick: Big Bands and Television Technology career hit by records, but secured by television. Records in the mid 1950s: a guy would put on records and he wasn t very friendly to the band. I mean he wasn t a DJ. He was the caretaker of the ballroom and he would just go into a little room upstairs and put records on (ibid). Television: Independent Television (ITV) launches in 1955 and Patrick gets work at ATV in Birmingham Composes themes for shows and as Musical Director is also an employer of musicians.
Anne Collis: Orchestras & Gender born in Preston (1943), moves to London to study at Royal Academy of Music (RMA) 1962-4, at time when there were no women on any instrument except the harp in any major London orchestra (Collis 2008). 1960s: touring ballet companies, visiting opera companies needing an orchestra, chamber music or stiffening amateur orchestras who were planning to give concerts, but had no-one to play percussion (ibid). kept busy with lots of very satisfying work, the world of the major, established orchestras was firmly closed to us women (ibid).
Anne Collis: Orchestras & Gender 1970s: Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO) - much against the wishes of the board (ibid). Context: 1975: UN International Women s Year and UK Sex Discrimination Act Few women in orchestras 28/400 in London orchestras. Feminist activists working in MU: Liz Hambleton, Terri Quaye, Maggie Nicols and Marian Fudger. Royal Academy of Music has to create new faculty for percussion. 1980s onwards: teaching at RAM (Junior Professor) and director/ composer/ conductor for National Symphony Orchestra, orchestral fixer.
MJ McCarthy: Theatre & Education Born in Cork, 1982 - a musician who, when not composing for theatre, filling out the ranks of various Glasgow indie bands or looking after his baby son, likes to play records (Didcock 2015: 17) Moves to Glasgow in 2004 to study. 2006-2012: member of Zoey Van Goey. 2007-now: Self-employed musician. the very first thing I was paid to do in Glasgow, as a musician, was to compose and perform music for a play (McCarthy 2017). 2017: composer, performer and MD.
MJ McCarthy: Theatre & Education I don t have a sense of how many hours I put in a week. If you were to average my hours over the course of a year...and then break that down in to an hourly rate, it might make for some uncomfortable reading (McCarthy 2017): I m not sure how sustainable it is for me to get paid the same or less. How much I get paid per gig has been pretty much static for the last 3 or 4 years. So, if my income had gone up it is because I m doing more gigs, it s not because I m getting paid more per gig and that seems to be reflected across the board in terms of creatives in theatre. There has been a freeze on, certainly in Scotland, for the last 5 to 10 years really (ibid). Importance of government policy/state funding of arts.
Summary of Case studies Characteristics of these three careers: Nomadic existence: it would be much, much harder for me to make a living in Ireland than it is in Scotland (McCarthy 2017) Flexibilty and insecurity of self-employment: if someone approaches me with a project that I m not interested in, I can sort of turn them down but only indirectly (McCarthy 2017) Personal characteristics: adaptability, personality and reliability. Inequality of opportunity: gender, race, skills, geography, etc. Changes / opportunities: technology, education.
Part 3: Gigs and the gig economy Gig a musical term now taking on wider meaning, but disputed origins. goes back more than a century as musicians slang for a date or engagement (Nunberg 2017). Used in USA in 1920s and 30s, in use in UK by early 1940s. But seasonal working, insecurity and lack of employment rights have much longer pedigree and led to formation of unions for musicians in 1890s and many precursor benevolent societies. a term that has its origins in popular music culture, is now associated with precarious and exploitative employment in the wider economy something that should provide food for thought for musician and fan alike (Cloonan and Williamson 2017: 493)
Part 3: Gigs and the gig economy Gig Economy/ Definitions: there is no agreed definition (Brinkley 2016: 5) a labour market characterised by the prevalence of short term contracts as opposed to permanent jobs (OED 2017). the freelance economy, in which workers support themselves with a variety of part-time jobs that do not provide traditional benefits such as healthcare (Hook 2015). Taylor: relates to new technology and business models which are based around matching sellers and buyers of goods and services (2017: 25) or individuals making money from assets that they own or their ability to do a certain kind of work (ibid).
Part 3: Gigs and the gig economy Brinkley: likely to consist of professional freelancers with additional employment in taxidriving and the provision of concierge services for households (2016: 3). Taylor: 4% of UK working population, but 63% of employees are full time (Taylor 2017: 23). Gig companies us apps and claim workers are not employees Lobel: gig economy can either be seen as an attempt to increase economic efficiency, reduce idleness and encourage entrepreneurial spirit (2017: 2) or be viewed as an uber-capitalist system that commoditises every transaction (ibid: 3).
Part 4: Wider Context Shifts in capitalism from the accumulation of capital to the accumulation of labour (Denning 2010: 80). Beck: move from a uniform system of lifelong full-time work organized in a single industrial location to a risk-fraught system of pluralized, decentralised underemployment (1992: 143). Work on creative industries and whether affective labour can resist, evade or exceed capitalist colonisation (Gill and Pratt 2008: 28). Gill & Pratt praise Hardt and Negri for centering the role of work in capitalism and drawing attention to the processes of precarisation and individualism (ibid: 29). Hofman: only recently has music become the energizing empirical scholarship on affective labour practices as part of the recent turn to labour in cultural studies (2015: 29).
Conclusions Wright: the gig economy: welcome to our world! More and more workers are finding they have to manage a number of activities with corresponding income streams. This has been the case for people in the entertainment industries for some time (Musicians Union delegate at Scottish Trade Union Congress, cited Pohl 2017). Musicians may have invented the term gig, but not the gig economy. For some musicians, freelancing is a preferred way of working. Aspects of music profession prevent it from fully being part of the gig economy limited supply and demand; history; not all musicians are workers. So... musicians may only be part of the gig economy when subsidising their (musical) gigs.