Abstract

With the progress of new technologies, a democratization of culture has expanded music making. This has led many music artists to work independently, recording, producing, and managing their music from their own homes. In parallel, researchers have recently documented the vulnerability and structural precariousness of the music world: The work of musicians is informal, unregulated, and lacks the basic elements for sustaining a livelihood. Music psychology has not paid attention to these material conditions of production, focusing instead on the study of pleasure and well-being. Furthermore, work and organizational psychology research has devoted little attention to the musical and artistic fields. This article is aimed at theoretically exploring the subjective experience of artistic work, seeking to account for what drives artists to persist in their creative efforts despite the precarity. It is argued that music does not emerge as an individual and rational choice: music as art envelops and traps, keeping those who work on it on the brink of an abyss, without letting them go, because they fulfill a key social function that cannot be wholly incorporated into society's productive structure. Artistic work can be sustained by means of effective social bonds for the production and transformation of life. Bearing all this in mind, this article makes it possible to articulate different research traditions that have so far developed in isolation.