ILPC 2027

This paper looks at ‘function’ music in London; i.e. where bands and artists are hired to perform at private parties, weddings, corporate events, and the like. It examines the networks through which this kind of work is accessed, and the material conditions musicians can expect to get by doing them. The work is highly transient and informal: musicians encounter a wide range of diverse, often one-off, buyers, and arrangements are generally highly informal. For instance while a bandleader may have a written contract with the buyer, once money is paid its division between bandmembers is determined on a casual basis, influenced by widespread normative expectations. The paper shows that, like many cultural workers (Banks, 2006), musicians have a strong ‘moral economy’. They value close, trust-based ties and an egalitarian payment system, and they may enforce perceived violations of this moral economy (for instance, when peers undercut widely-recognised going rates) through methods such as social media boycotts and blacklists. However, the paper also identifies important changes in the functions labour market, particularly regarding the emergence of new intermediaries, and the way these make use of the internet. The internet has enabled new forms of ‘booking agency’ to emerge. While traditional agents typically used specialist expertise and networks to proactively seek out work for their clients, we can now observe a proliferation of online ‘agencies’ which operate very differently. They act essentially as online comparison sites which present buyers with hundreds of artists to choose from, forcing musicians into intense price competition. In doing so, they radically shift the balance of marketplace power away from musicians and towards buyers, leading to abuses including the extraction of vast and non-transparent commissions, and severely delayed payments bordering on wage theft. The empirical contribution of the paper is thus to highlight the growth of new kinds of intermediaries in the ‘creative industries’ who have the capacity to subject workers to greatly intensified market competition. These kinds of agency are barely talked about in academic or practitioner literature to date, but play a critical role in function work. The theoretical contribution is to critique arguments about the ‘moral economy’ of artistic workers, which have been a recurrent feature of the literature. While such a moral economy does exist, its terms are continually threatened by the marketising capacities of profit-extracting intermediaries, whose actions cause social solidarities to fray, and embedded norms to be undermined.