Making Musicians into Productive Laborers

Abstract

This chapter employs Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's work on scalability to examine the music manager, a kind of popular-music analog to the nineteenth-century concert agents discussed in the previous chapter. Today's music managers act as chiefs of staff for musicians, helping them build their team of lawyers, publicists, agents, and more, attempting to make what is nonscalable—a musician (who can only write so many songs, give so many concerts, make so many recordings)—as un-nonscalable as possible. Music managers attempt to transform their clients into productive laborers whose work can be scaled through building and maintaining an audience and loyal fanbase, which must be constantly cultivated, maintained, and augmented through the unceasing labors of musicians on social media.