ABSTRACT
iscourses of creative autonomy have been central to thinking about how D artists and various other cultural workers navigate the social, economic, and political environment of their work. This chapter explores how creative autonomy has been understood and problematized among creative workers in general, as well as musicians and music industry workers in particular. 1 The context in which dimensions of autonomy—artistic, professional, existential—are experienced and articulated is an economy that is highly complex in terms of incorporating informal practices; independent and even subcultural (Hodkinson 2002, 109–29) production; as well as corporate, profit-driven commercial production—in other words, it is a mixed economy (McRobbie 1998). I begin with an overview of some of the dominant theoretical approaches to autonomy that have been used to describe the particularities of creative or cultural labor in the capitalist system and, in some cases, to problematize the industrialization of cultural production.
