Doing what you’ve got to do: the role of working conditions on musicians’ work behaviors

Abstract

While music has long been studied sociologically, musicians themselves have tended to avoid scrutiny. Those sociologists who have studied musicians have tended to focus on their embodiment of genre ideals, or their work ideologies without examining their actual working behaviors. This paper uses ethnographic data collected on the 2006 and 2007 Vans Warped Tours in order to examine musicians as workers laboring within specific contexts that shape and influence their behavior. While previous research has suggested that the work behaviors of musicians are guided by their ideologies about work, in this paper I propose that under certain circumstances the working conditions musicians are operating under create circumstances in which the enactment of their work ideologies becomes difficult to achieve. In these situations musicians may adapt their working behaviors in ways that do not align with, and may directly contradict, their ideological stance on musical work.