Collaborating in a competitive world: musicians’ working lives and understandings of entrepreneurship

Recent interest in ‘creative’ work practices has been brought about by organizational restructuring and the emergence of the creative industries as an economic power. Drawing on research with musicians in the North East of England, this article explores musicians’ understandings of their working lives within the new entrepreneurial agenda. Musicians are shown to be enterprising in pursuing a musical calling in a difficult market and of particular interest is the extent to which they see themselves as entrepreneurs, whether they equate being self-employed with being entrepreneurial, and what relevance contemporary notions of individual enterprise have for those whose working lives are embedded in the essentially co-operative music world. Networking is regarded as an essential entrepreneurial skill and the concept of ‘active networking’ is introduced to help investigate what can be learnt about musicians’ understanding of entrepreneurship through applying this model.