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Recently, developments in blockchain technology have shaken up the creative industries. Especially in the visual arts, NFT trade gained traction. Yet, musicians have also experimented with implementing blockchain technology. Most notably during the COVID-19 pandemic, the sales of NFTs were thought to compensate for some of the income loss caused by restrictions on live music. This paper explores why musicians engaged with blockchain technology, specifically by selling their music as NFTs, and how they perceive this affected their income, work practices and business models. Building upon 14 interviews with musicians who have sold their songs as NFTs, we highlight two main motivations for selling music NFTs: commercial autonomy from gatekeepers and platforms, and artistic autonomy. Financial gains were less prevalent and often remained obscured in respondents’ discourses. Above all, this research shows that pursuing autonomy and authenticity remains key for musicians, regardless of their appetite for new financial-technological innovations.

From Chicago to Cape Town, post-industrial creative workspaces have become ubiquitous in cities around the world. Although they are often promoted as unique and authentic, many appear to share similar architectural aesthetics including steel beams and monumental chimneys. Existing research shows that creatives are attracted by embedded networks, opportunities for knowledge exchange and the post-industrial aesthetic of these spaces. Yet, we know less about the appeal of industrial heritage and how the ‘thick’ affective atmospheres of these post-industrial workspaces are assembled, experienced and leveraged by workers and managers. This paper draws on a qualitative case study of 8 post-industrial workspaces in the Netherlands, involving 73 interviews with site managers and creative workers, participant observation and an analysis of the websites and Instagram feeds of the workspaces. It explores the interconnected nature of the spaces and stories associated with the sites to identify and better understand the range of material and immaterial elements that combine to produce affective atmospheres. The paper demonstrates how developers fuse industrial aesthetics (layouts) with industrial heritage (historical narratives) to produce unique and attractive workspaces. It then considers how creatives experience and commodify their chosen workspaces. While specific industrial aesthetics are shown to offer a valuable alternative to ‘regular’ office space, connections to the past provide workers with motivation, inspiration and opportunities for identity construction. The paper also highlights how creatives leverage the symbolic value associated with their unique post-industrial workspaces to generate distinction through self and place-branding strategies.

The cultural and creative ecosystem in general, and the popular music sector in particular, has been strongly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, the music ecosystem has engaged in a reorientation and aims to strengthen its resilience to fend off possible future external shocks. The concept of resilience as it pertains to music ecosystems, however, is often merely used as a metaphor and lacks analytical understanding of its constituting principles. In this chapter, we aim to translate existing resilience research on natural ecosystems into a conceptualisation of resilience and ecosystems for the music industry, in order to offer a more systematic lens to examine the popular music ecosystem in terms of its resilience. We focus particularly on the role of diversity in maintaining a resilient ecosystem. As we will show, diversity is a broad concept, ranging from a diversity of business models that foster competitiveness, to inclusion of minoritised groups, languages and genres, increasing access and fairness, and perceive diversity as crucial in fostering resilience, as it provides the basis for innovation, learning, and adaptation. This chapter contributes (1) to the conceptualisation of an existing model of resilience for the music industries and its application to the popular music ecosystem and (2) to understand the crucial role of diversities in building resilience, which may inform music policies.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, social distancing measures were implemented across the globe. These measures demanded replacing taken-for-granted social practices such as shaking hands with new interaction rituals. Based on our personal observations, this collective process of learning new interactions often resulted in feelings of awkwardness. Awkwardness, in this sense, is more than an individual emotion; it is also a cultural marker helping us understand how interactions, interaction rituals and social norms are constituted. Therefore, we aim to obtain a better understanding of both what people perceive as failed interactions during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how they perceive these awkward moments. We do so by looking at how awkwardness is discussed in social and news media during the first wave of the pandemic. Combining a topic modelling of tweets and a thematic text analysis of news articles, we show the main topics representing awkwardness in relation to COVID-19, and how this links to new forms of face-to-face and mediated interactions. Moreover, we demonstrate that experiences of awkwardness often relate to the necessity of bodily and situational co-presence, creating a stronger sense of intimacy, synchronicity and sequency.

Do women and workers with a migration background earn relatively less in the core creative arts or in commercial creative sectors such as advertising? In this paper, we seek to (1) uncover to what extent workers’ socio-demographic characteristics and the sub-sector of the cultural and creative industries (CCIs) in which they are active affect how much they earn, and (2) unravel to what extent the context of sub-sectors affects inequality in earnings between different socio-demographic groups. Using Statistics Netherlands register data on all workers with earnings from the CCIs, we show that earnings are lowest in the sub-sectors in Throsby’s (2008) inner circles of the CCIs. Both having a migration background and being a woman affect earnings in the CCIs. Especially gender inequality in earnings is extensive and omnipresent, being least pronounced in sub-sectors such as literature, music and visual arts, and most severe in e.g. film and photography.

Despite its ubiquity in arts and culture, crowdfunding has limitedly been instrumentalized in policy settings. Yet, with joint contributions by friends, fans, governments, and quasi-public institutions, match-funding of arts and culture through crowdfunding platforms may have benefits: increased revenues for makers and cultural fields, transparency in funding allocation, and stronger community engagement. Drawing upon interviews with regional and local match-funding entities in the Netherlands, we explain how and why they engage in match-funding and what is needed for the collaborative funding mechanism to thrive. Funders are attracted by match-funding’s potential to support relatively large numbers of hitherto underserved makers with relatively small amounts of money, complementary to other funding instruments. Aspects largely overlooked are match-funding’s capacity to leverage resources and install co-decisive processes of public funding allocation. Situated at the juncture of funding, policy, and technology, match-funding requires learning and experimentation with other than reward-based formats to unleash its democratizing potential.

Self-organisation and co-location share a long history in the creative industries. In many of these industries, workers seek to work together and alongside each other in shared workspaces of various kinds. Yet, in the music industries, this practice is less established. This chapter discusses two (partly) self-organised initiatives of musicians in the Netherlands, examining the promises and challenges before, during, and potentially after the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings indicate that despite the potential for knowledge exchange and mutual support, most musicians valued their workspace mainly because it offered facilities (space and time to practise and perform). This was especially important during the pandemic, as it provided a daily goal and structure. As an organisational form in a post-pandemic world, this model could serve as a means to foster resilience especially for early career musicians, providing low-threshold access to essential resources (social, spatial, and symbolic), even during periods of drought.

Measures to curb the COVID-19 pandemic forced many young professionals to work from (often small and sometimes shared) homes. On the basis of in-depth interviews in the Netherlands, this chapter aims to unpack how working from home in times of COVID-19 affects the whole personhood of young knowledge workers. Three important insights are provided. First, when it comes to around boundary sculpting practices, many respondents’ boundary negotiations between personal and professional spheres entail personal, collective, temporal, and spatial borders. Second, interpersonal connections prove to be of vital importance because a lack of face-to-face interactions not only causes a lack of interpersonal contact and emotional connection to colleagues, but also a lack of tacit knowledge. Third, additional spheres like the public sphere are crucial for providing motivation and inspiration. This research shows that working from home can be detrimental to the whole personhood of young professionals.

Collective workplaces – such as coworking spaces, open workplan offices, maker spaces, or fab labs – are founded on one central premise: working alongside others leads to interactions, collaborations and access to ‘buzzing’ knowledge. Yet, at the same time, users of these places go there to do their (often freelance) work, requiring a productive, and therefore usually quiet, work environment. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in the Netherlands, this research explores how users of collective workplaces navigate the coworking paradox: the need for quiet workplaces and the desire for social interaction. It shows how interactions emerge through rituals and especially routines, and describes the spatio-temporal conditions under which these interactions may lead to successful forms of social exchange and community formation.

The creative industries are often considered an important engine of innovation; in the creative sectors, but more importantly, also in the general economy. Yet, contrary to most of the knowledge industries, the creative industries are not thought to pursue innovation as a purposeful effort. This raises the question, that if innovation tends to happen unintentionally, which factors contribute to its nascence? Building upon a qualitative analysis of 43 interviews with entrepreneurs in the creative industries, this paper aims to obtain a better understanding of such creative industries innovation by studying how these entrepreneurs become (in their own perception) more innovative. Our findings show that entrepreneurs in the creative industries perceive their innovativeness to be caused by: (1) their own innovative traits and creativity, (2) external spatial, social, knowledge and work contexts stimulating an innovative state of mind, and (3) by means of serendipity, experimentation and inspiration found in creative practices.

The context of co-located creative entrepreneurs offers resources, in particular identity motives and important residents, that can be used in entrepreneurial identity work. Survey data were collected from entrepreneurs in 10 creative business centres. The results show that the professional identity of creative entrepreneurs has three components: organizational, innovative and artistic. These components follow different formational processes. Positive influences were found between the importance that one places on having others at the location who have shown themselves to be successful and the belonging, personal efficacy, and self-esteem that come from being part of the co-location. In addition, in general those entrepreneurs who have joined the creative business centre more recently experience a stronger change in identity. The findings provide insights into the way in which creative entrepreneurs use their context to manage their identity.

This study focused on the context in which entrepreneurship in the cultural and creative industries (CCI) takes place. We investigated entrepreneurs’ inspiration, which refers to a specific type of motivation that allows the transformation of creative ideas into creative products. To explain this, we operationalised ‘passion for work’, which measures how passionately engaged entrepreneurs are with their work, as well as ‘localised passion’, which measures the passion others in one’s proximity have for their work. Ten locations throughout the Netherlands composed of creative entrepreneurs made up the setting of this study. Our results show that localised passion has two components (passion atmosphere and passion in others), which have a positive effect on inspiration. Moreover, there is a mediating role of passion for work in this relationship.