The ambivalence of becoming a small business: Learning processes within an aspiring rock band

Abstract

The process of becoming a rock musician strongly relates to the organisational form of the band (Bennett 1980; Green 2002; Behr 2010). At all levels of ambition and success, membership of a band provides the musician with a natural entry point for performing to an audience and forging a potential career (Smith 2013a). The ‘micro-organisational’ (Bennett 2001) development of a band, therefore, is an important career prerequisite for rock musicians (Behr 2015). However, the social and practical challenges of musicianship seem to be continuously underemphasised within the field of popular music studies (Cohen 1993; Kirschner 1998; Lashua 2017; Weston 2017; Kielich 2018). Therefore, in this article I will focus on an aspiring rock band's informal learning processes in becoming a small business together. The study provides insights into the educational and organisational aspects of band practices and contributes to the fields of popular music, education and organisation studies – fields that are converging in the emerging interdisciplinary research area of ‘organising music-making’ (Beech and Gilmore 2015).