Discussions of amateur media need to pay attention to the meaning of work, and the quality of working life. I begin by arguing that celebrations of the creative possibilities of digital media have unwittingly repeated the sidelining of questions of work in studies of cultural production. I then introduce two strands of analysis that have helped to improve this situation by addressing work in digital and cultural industries. The first is particularly germane to discussions of amateur media: critiques of ‘free labour’ (unpaid work) in IT and cultural industries. The second has generally been concerned more with paid work and employment in these industries. It points to the fact that, alongside autonomy and relatively good working conditions, these sectors are often characterised by casualisation, precariousness and overwork. In this second strand can be found a welcome emphasis, missing from the first, on quality of working life in media production. But these studies have paid little sustained attention to other, more rigorous conceptualisations of quality of working life in sociology and philosophy. To correct this, the next section then presents a normative framework for what constitutes ‘good work’ and ‘bad work’ in modern societies. I then draw on this framework to consider the other case studies in this section of the book. These case studies affirm that amateur media can enhance media production and consumption. But they also, in my view, show how tentative and limited such enhancements may be. Maintaining amateur careers alongside professional ones can lead to people making excessive demands on themselves. In commercial systems, amateur work oriented towards high quality can be exploited by the less scrupulous.