Taking care of business: The routines and rationales of early-career musicians in the Dutch and British music industries

This article explores a small sample of musicians in two European musical contexts – the Netherlands and the UK. It examines the relationship between the conditions of national music industries and the strategies used to negotiate a career in music and the extent to which musicians frame their careers as entrepreneurs. Interview data from two projects with early-career musicians form the basis of our secondary comparative analysis. We argue that their strategizing can be framed as a set of responses to their local structural conditions. However, neither set of responses produces market advantage. Instead, traditional power and economic relations that reinforce the logic of the hegemonic mainstream industry tend to prevail, whereby only a very small fraction of the aspiring musicians can sustain themselves financially in music.

Fannish boy: Examining blues fandom through British music periodicals

Before online forums and social media groups allowed spaces for blues fans to share their love of the music, newsletters and periodicals created by blues societies and fans provided outlets for blues aficionados to connect with other fans, discographers, musicians and scholars through performance and album reviews, pilgrimage storytelling, descriptions of recent discoveries of rare sound recordings and much more. The University of Mississippi Blues Archive holds a large collection of blues periodicals, covering over 1000 unique titles, from over 25 countries, with a bulk date of 1963 to the present. Historically of interest to researchers of blues performance history, the collection also contains a wealth of insight to blues fandom and communities of music appreciation worldwide. This article explores pathways for examining blues fandom studies through the newsletter collection and highlights unique issues and perspectives found in the collection.

Following Hadrian

Carole Raddato was born in France in 1976, and now lives in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, where she freelances as a music charts analyst for the British music industry. She runs the history photo-blog, Following Hadrian (https://followinghadrian.com), which documents her travels in the emperor’s footsteps, and she regularly contributes to the online World History Encyclopedia and Ancient History Magazine.