The working conditions of self-releasing musicians in Turkey

Date

2023-9

Author

Ceyhan, Taylan Ozan

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

234
views

75
downloads

Cite This

This thesis examines the working conditions of self-releasing musicians from a critical political economic perspective, seeking to provide a comprehensive understanding of how music is produced by self-releasing musicians. As a result of a set of developments in the music industry, it is now possible to produce and release music without any direct affiliation with record companies. It comes to mean that the costs and risks of music production are imposed on the shoulders of musicians. This thesis discusses the relations of production that those musicians are involved in and positions those musicians within the structure of the music industry. Hence, it investigates the current structure of the music industry and the functions of self-releasing musicians for the industry. It argues that the current structure of the music industry is shaped around streaming platforms, especially Spotify, and self-releasing musicians provide increasing labor supply, speeding up the circulation of capital, and eliminating demand uncertainty. Furthermore, this thesis delves into more direct issues on the working conditions of those musicians such as time, costs, income, concerts, social security and unionization. The analysis draws upon a combination of both qualitative and quantitative data, primarily derived from 29 in-depth interviews and statistical sources. This thesis contends that self-releasing musicians are digital workers, they produce surplus-value, and they either provide or enhance some essential properties of the current structure of the music industry; on the other hand, the structure of the industry does not allow an enabling environment for those musicians to produce music as they wish.

Subject Keywords

Self-releasing musicians, Music industry, Digital labor, Digital music, Political economy

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/105326

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis