ABSTRACT
This chapter examines changing employment relations in the recording studio sector, describing how these changes are resulting in a rise in temporary and flexible patterns of freelance-based project work, marked by volatile and insecure employment, low wages and long working hours. It highlights how new employment strategies are balanced unevenly towards recording studios, moving the pressure of obtaining work, and the financial risk of not doing so, away from the studio management and on to producers and engineers. Both for new and experienced producers and engineers, the sector is revealed as an increasingly difficult one in which to find and maintain gainful employment, and for many an increasingly exploitive one.
