#WeAreViable, aren’t we? Music careers, state support, and the political feasibility of a Basic Income for the Arts

Tools

Musgrave, George. 2025. #WeAreViable, aren’t we? Music careers, state support, and the political feasibility of a Basic Income for the Arts. Cultural Trends, ISSN 0954-8963 [Article] (In Press)

No full text available

Text
Musgrave (2025) Are We Viable AAM.pdf - Accepted Version
Permissions: Administrator Access Only until 11 January 2027.
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial.
Download (327kB)

Official URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/ccut20

Abstract or Description

During Covid-19 in the United Kingdom, many musicians failed to qualify for income support, leading the Government to announce it would only “support viable jobs”. This implication that creative work was not viable angered many, leading to the hashtag #WeAreViable on X (formerly Twitter) to defend the musical economy. However, given evidence concerning musicians’ incomes, are musical careers, in fact, viable? Have they ever been? This paper critically interrogates notions of artistic career sustainability by adopting a historical case-study approach to explore how being a musician in the UK has always required forms of subsidy given unpredictable and poor financial returns. Following the systematic destruction of many of these systems of support, this paper then asks whether or not the Basic Income for the Arts represents a suitable mechanism to fill this gap, systematically evaluating the concept through the typology of ‘political feasibility’, ultimately suggesting that it is not.

Item Type:

Article

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.1080/09548963.2025.2534379