“One for the money”? The impact of the “disk crisis” on “ordinary musicians” income: The case of French speaking Switzerland

Abstract

The so called “disk-crisis” and the rise of music digitization and/or music piracy regularly make the headlines of general and specialized newspapers. The impacts of these metamorphoses on the more visible actors of the national musical industries are relatively well documented. Nevertheless, little is known about the impact of these changes on the musicians’ incomes – especially the “ordinary” ones, who are located at the intermediary and the bottom stages of the professional hierarchy. This paper aims to contribute to better understanding the extent to which digitization reshaped the ways these little-known musicians make a living from music. To do so, we use longitudinal data collected from a sample of musicians active in the French-speaking part of Switzerland in the early 2010s. These data mainly consist of life calendar-data, with retrospective information on income sources for every year of the career – from the first gig played in public to 2013. Crossing sequence analysis and geometrical data analysis tools, we analyze whether or not digitization spurred a career reorientation to one of two major “poles” structuring the “ordinary musicians” professional space (the “artist” pole or the “craftsman” one). We show that changes are few. Nevertheless, we point out how social origin and gender impact these potential career reorientations. More broadly, our paper points to the need to analyze the social conditions of appropriability of technological innovations - especially when it comes to symbolic goods.