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The ambivalence of becoming a small business: Learning processes within an aspiring rock band

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 March 2021

Tobias Malm Open the ORCID record for Tobias Malm [Opens in a new window]
Tobias Malm*
Affiliation:
University College of Music Education, and Royal College of Music, Stockholm, Sweden
*
E-mail: tobias.malm@smi.se
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Extract

The process of becoming a rock musician strongly relates to the organisational form of the band (Bennett 1980; Green 2002; Behr 2010). At all levels of ambition and success, membership of a band provides the musician with a natural entry point for performing to an audience and forging a potential career (Smith 2013a). The ‘micro-organisational’ (Bennett 2001) development of a band, therefore, is an important career prerequisite for rock musicians (Behr 2015). However, the social and practical challenges of musicianship seem to be continuously underemphasised within the field of popular music studies (Cohen 1993; Kirschner 1998; Lashua 2017; Weston 2017; Kielich 2018). Therefore, in this article I will focus on an aspiring rock band's informal learning processes in becoming a small business together. The study provides insights into the educational and organisational aspects of band practices and contributes to the fields of popular music, education and organisation studies – fields that are converging in the emerging interdisciplinary research area of ‘organising music-making’ (Beech and Gilmore 2015).

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Article
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Popular Music , Volume 39 , Issue 3-4 , December 2020 , pp. 585 - 599
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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