“I Hold On”: How Country Music Songwriters Cope With the Precarity of Craft Work

Abstract

Careers in creative crafts are perceived to be precarious: workers face constant rejection and receive low and erratic pay. Yet, some creative craft workers handle these challenges better than others. Precarity sometimes subsides as careers progress, and the core-periphery structure that typifies creative craft production systems is navigable. This raises the question of how creative craft workers can cope productively with the precarity of craft work. We research a prominent creative craft worker collective: country music songwriters. Our study captures the voices of 90 creative craft workers, drawing on secondary interviews with 66 songwriters working at the core of Nashville’s highly corporatized country music production system, and 24 operating at its social and spatial periphery. We find that the key to coping with precarity lies in achieving supportive patterns of social embeddedness by investing in primary craft skills, advancing higher-order vocational skills, and navigating the core-periphery structure of the creative craft production system. As apprentice songwriters practice their craft and learn how to organize their songwriting routines, they become increasingly vested in the system. Once they become master songwriters, they broaden their networks by liaising more with other industry stakeholders and engage with the system more reflexively to ensure their continued relevance. Peripheral workers engage in allyship and develop ties with workers positioned at the system’s core. We incorporate these social strategies in a grounded theoretical model capturing how songwriters cope with precarity. We conjecture that elements of the model generalize theoretically towards other corporatized creative craft production systems.