Artist’s autonomy opportunities into the redesigned music production chain at the digital age: What articulation to make a living from music?
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- Abstract
- This paper aims at outlining a macro picture of artist’s autonomy opportunities at the digital age in the music industry. The main goal is to understand how today’s autonomy is achieved so that an artist can decently make a living from music. To conduct the research, music industry development and upheavals are introduced in the first part and are followed by the presentation of the redesigned music production chain at the digital age. Then, a glossary of five natures of autonomy is defined. This study focuses on financial, managerial, spatial, distributional and promotional artist’s autonomy opportunities. These opportunities and the relative intuitions on their articulation at the digital age are explored on the basis of qualitative interviews. The present work focuses on the popular music market in France and in the French-speaking part of Belgium. On this premise, several key actors all along the predefined music production chain are interviewed. It appears that digitalization offers artists some increased autonomy opportunities, thanks to a decrease in generation costs, knowledge access increase, online and disintermediated means, among others. However, obstacles like know-hows, financial resources and bargaining power are still restricting artists’ autonomy. Moreover, current increased contenders’ crowd, streaming platforms’ remuneration system and market power slow down artists in their quest for autonomy. Finally, current artist’s autonomy articulation appears like the creation of an entrepreneurial structure – artist-patron model – instead of the removal of key experienced partners like the manager, publisher, booker, press officer and even record labels. Additionally, today’s stakeholders are no longer regarded according to what they are taking from the artists but about what they are giving to them.