To Örebro University

This paper will investigate the work-life balance of self-employed musicians. Although there are many salaried jobs in different sectors of the music industry, self-employment is a typical form of work in all the fields of art and culture. In 2022, almost one-third of cultural workers across the EU were working as freelancers or entrepreneurs (Eurostat 2024). Despite the fact that many freelancers consider their work as fulfilling, the instability and uncertainty of work and income can cause a lot of stress that these professionals need to cope with, which puts them in a psychologically more vulnerable position compared to employed professionals. In addition, the music industry is permeated by gender inequalities, potentially affecting specifically women and non-binary freelancers’ work-life balance. 

Challenges caused by self-employment can affect musicians’ willingness or possibilities to have families, since dimensions of family life can create challenges for the wellbeing of parents regardless of their employment status. Having children brings along tensions for time use, family economy, and psychosocial resilience (Fawcett 1988; Nelson et al 2013; Collins & Glass 2018), which can further contribute to work-family conflicts. Furthermore, the music industry still seems to have a glass ceiling when it comes to gender and paid jobs, since in many countries, most professionals earning their living as musicians are men. It is likely that musicians struggle with more gendered difficulties and inequalities in work-family reconciliation compared to professionals in other fields. In this scoping review and paper, we will investigate the previous findings of how self-employed professionals of the music sector have balanced their work and family lives, and what kinds of challenges fre

Music spaces, from conservatories to recording studios, have proven themselves unequal and exclusionary. To investigate how power relations condition present-day musical life, the research environment in musicology at Örebro university has been awarded funding for the three-year research program Music, Power, and Inequity (MPI).

The aim of this paper is two-fold. To contextualize our studies, we will initially give a brief presentation of the research program MPI. With the specific aim of discussing power relations in music society, we will secondly introduce two studies in their initial phase. Both studies investigate inequalities and hierarchies affecting the underprivileged in musical life, focusing on issues with regards to the music elite and freelance musicians' working lives.

The studies' methodologies build on a mixed-method approach. They map socio-economic characteristics of (i) freelance musicians, and (ii) people in power within central music organizations, conduct interviews focusing on musicians' life stories from a feminist intersectional perspective, and perform critical discourse analysis and multimodal analyses of home pages and official social media accounts.

Together, the projects contribute a crucial critical analysis of the constitution of the elite in musical life, clarifying the consequences of social distinctions as well as discussing what is required in terms of risk, support, and various forms of social, cultural, and economic background to lead a sustainable working life in music.

Music spaces, from conservatories to recording studios, have proven themselves unequal and exclusionary. To investigate how power relations condition present-day musical life, the research environment in musicology at Örebro university has been awarded funding for the three-year research program Music, Power, and Inequity (MPI).

The aim of this paper is two-fold. To contextualize our studies, we will initially give a brief presentation of the research program MPI. With the specific aim of discussing power relations in music society, we will secondly introduce two studies in their initial phase. Both studies investigate inequalities and hierarchies affecting the underprivileged in musical life, focusing on issues with regards to the music elite and freelance musicians' working lives.

The studies' methodologies build on a mixed-method approach. They map socio-economic characteristics of (i) freelance musicians, and (ii) people in power within central music organizations, conduct interviews focusing on musicians' life stories from a feminist intersectional perspective, and perform critical discourse analysis and multimodal analyses of home pages and official social media accounts.

Together, the projects contribute a crucial critical analysis of the constitution of the elite in musical life, clarifying the consequences of social distinctions as well as discussing what is required in terms of risk, support, and various forms of social, cultural, and economic background to lead a sustainable working life in music.

The debate around gender equality and feminist concerns in relation to musical life are increasingly part of Swedish public discourse. Attention directed to structural gender inequalities in various music scenes by feminist associations, governmental intervention in these issues, and the recent #metoo-protests against sexual harassment and violence in the music industries, are all part of this. Based on interviews with musicians engaging in affecting change, who start out from a gendered perspective, this thesis explores the feminist political potential of both music-making and organisational work to combat inequalities in relation to music, and focuses on several features of such an engagement: the negotiating character of relating to gendering categories as part of feminist attempts to transform music; the relation between power structures and musical performance by discussing embodied practices and musical material concerned with feminist social commentary and what these do politically; and feminist approaches to practice beyond notions of gender equality as representation. The theoretical concept of affective dissonance is used to shed light on musicians’ self-reflective negotiations with social power structures and how these negotiations produce a specific potential for collective feminist action and solidarity within and across music environments. The musicians interviewed are active in various music scenes, from opera, jazz and blues, visa, new music composition and sound art to dansband, rap and folk music and they all engage in different ways with both notions and practices of gender-related and feminist transformation in music-making. This thesis examines the interrelated aspects of such an engagement, of individual experiences of sexism, gender power dynamics and social-professional relationships, musical performance and material, and collective feminist ambitions and capacity in music practice.