![]() Future work should explore underlying beliefs and perceptions of career musicians alongside other key factors, such as health behaviors and social support, with the aim of making specific recommendations to the music industries and educators. We conclude that low mental wellbeing in musicians is the result of working as a professional musician, as opposed to being an inherent trait. Status as a solo or lead artist and perceived level of success also significantly predicted higher levels of anxiety and depression, and lower levels of positive wellbeing. We showed that musicians who viewed music as their main career were more likely to have poor mental wellbeing and had significantly higher levels of clinical depression. Across the whole sample, we found that over half had high levels of anxiety, and a third were experiencing depression. In this study, 254 musicians from 13 countries completed measures of anxiety, depression, and wellbeing as well as answering questions about their professional status, level of success, and income. People working in the music industry report significantly higher levels of anxiety and depression than the general population, but to date, studies have not explored the differences between professional musicians and those who perform music primarily for recreation. It concludes with a call for highly bespoke financial and psychological support, as well as a need to rethink what cultural value is for this workforce in the “new normal”, considering changing valuing processes. to the kind of work carried out), with others experiencing major changes (e.g. It presents an inequality of experiences connected to a range of socioeconomic and psychosocial factors, showing how some freelancers experienced small changes (e.g. This study builds on qualitative interviews carried out in July–November 2020 (n = 20) by exploring findings from follow-up interviews conducted in May–July 2021 (n = 16). In particular, there is a lack of research exploring how socioeconomic and psychosocial adversities may have changed or evolved, and how these changes have been perceived and subjectively experienced by freelance cultural workers. There is a dearth of qualitative research exploring how freelancers working in the cultural industries have been affected during COVID-19. The conditions in which freelance cultural workers exist are precarious and typified by inequalities, as has been widely acknowledged within research in the last decade (Brook et al., 2018 Comunian & England, 2020 Morgan & Nelligan, 2017 Scharff, 2017). ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() 1 A freelance career in the cultural sector has long been recognised as a path that may involve substantial financial or psychological risk, including periods of low or unpaid work, with social, cultural, and symbolic capital also important to "making it" (Gerber, 2017 Gross & Musgrave, 2020 Menger, 2001). The impact of these ongoing changes provided many challenges for the sector, including fewer employment opportunities (Office for National Statistics, 2021), but also increased some opportunities in relation to digital production (Radermecker, 2020), and home-based arts engagement (Bu et al., 2021a). These changes fluctuated in line with the easing and tightening of social distancing throughout the pandemic, with many cultural venues oscillating between in-person and digital offerings, alongside hybrid models. For example, Gross and Musgrave (2016) reported via a self-selecting sample of 2211 musicians and music industry workers that 68% had suffered from self-reported depression, and 71% suffered from self-reported anxiety and/or panic attacks, with later work suggesting that the nature of being a musician was, respondents felt, at least partly responsible for these conditions (Gross & Musgrave, 2017). With reference to wellbeing and mental health, in particular, research has suggested that professional music makers suffer from high levels of anxiety, depression and other mental health conditions, and that these conditions might be explained by the nature of musical work itself (Detari et al., 2020 Gross & Musgrave, 2020 Jacukowicz, 2016 Loveday et al., in press Vaag et al., 2016). Alongside the literature outlined above, a growing body of literature adopting a critical perspective towards creative labour points towards musical careers being synonymous with high levels of financial precarity (Morgan & Wood, 2013), inequality of access (Brook et al., 2020) and sexual discrimination (Conor et al., 2015). ![]()
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