ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates Manchester's open mic scene, a popular location for amateur music performance yet a scene that startlingly overlooked in social science research. It provides a uniquely inclusionary space where participants are presented with a safe yet effective environment within which they may accrue social capital. It identifies the key motivations and opportunities for those who enter the open mic network to seek musical outcomes, revealing how the scene enables a medley of possibilities through its supportive, non-judgemental, non-hierarchical and loose organisation and the sustenance of distinct ethics and conventions. Social network theory and analysis are able to render visible and understandable otherwise invisible network effects illuminating 'structural relations usually opaque to lay actors, through delineating the ties between parts of social bodies'. However, it extends beyond any identifiable geographical or cultural boundaries; indeed it is international in scale but also composed out of local constellations that become dense in particular urban settings such as Manchester.
