CAMRI | New Book: Can Music Make You Sick?

New Book: Can Music Make You Sick?

A Book by Sally-Anne Gross and George Musgrave, published by University of Westminster Press

“Musicians often pay a high price for sharing their art with us. Underneath the glow of success can often lie loneliness and exhaustion, not to mention the basic struggles of paying the rent or buying food. Sally Anne Gross and George Musgrave raise important questions – and we need to listen to what the musicians have to tell us about their working conditions and their mental health.” Emma Warren (Music Journalist and Author).

“Singing is crying for grown-ups. To create great songs or play them with meaning music’s creators reach far into emotion and fragility seeking the communion we demand of it. However, music’s toll on musicians can leave deep scars. In this important book, Sally Anne Gross and George Musgrave investigate the relationship between the wellbeing music brings to society and the wellbeing of those who create. It’s a much needed reality check, deglamorising the romantic image of the tortured artist.” Crispin Hunt (Multi-Platinum Songwriter/Record Producer, Chair of the Ivors Academy).

It is often assumed that creative people are prone to psychological instability, and that this explains apparent associations between cultural production and mental health problems. In their detailed study of recording and performing artists in the British music industry, Sally Anne Gross and George Musgrave turn this view on its head.

By listening to how musicians understand and experience their working lives, this book proposes that whilst making music is therapeutic, making a career from music can be traumatic. The authors show how careers based on an all-consuming passion have become more insecure and devalued. Artistic merit and intimate, often painful, self-disclosures are the subject of unremitting scrutiny and data metrics. Personal relationships and social support networks are increasingly bound up with calculative transactions.

Drawing on original empirical research and a wide-ranging survey of scholarship from across the social sciences, their findings will be provocative for future research on mental health, wellbeing and working conditions in the music industries and across the creative economy. Going beyond self-help strategies, they challenge the industry to make transformative structural change. Until then, the book provides an invaluable guide for anyone currently making their career in music, as well as those tasked with training and educating the next generation.

Buy or download

This book is really ambitious, in the best way. It wants to communicate what being a musician *feels like*, it wants to make you think about the music industry in new ways AND it wants to propose some positive practical steps forward. It completely succeeds in all these respects. https://t.co/aXw3QYWOlY

— Toby Bennett (@tgpb85) September 30, 2020

Honestly, I recommend this book to anyone and everyone. Just as an honest portrait of what it is to be a musician in the 21st century, and a framing of the questions we need to ask about music’s value and how to maintain our cultures, it’s unparalleled. And FREE to download! https://t.co/F9YEhZnrFw

— BASS, MIDS, TOPS OUT NOW (@joemuggs) September 29, 2020

Image: University of Westminster Press

About Sally-Anne Gross

Sally-Anne Gross is both a music industry practitioner and an academic. In 1993 she was the first women to work as a director of Artist & Repertoire at Mercury Records UK, and she chaired the first ever panel on gender in the music industries at ‘In The City’ music conference in Manchester. Sally-Anne has been working in the music industry for nearly three decades, as an artist manager, record label director and international business affairs consultant. In her current role at the University of Westminster, she is the program director of the MA Music Business Management where she teaches Intellectual Property and Copyright Management, Artist & Repertoire and Music Development. In 2016 she founded ‘Let’s Change the Record’ a project that focuses on bridging the gender divide in music production by running inclusive audio engineering and song-writing workshops for people identifying as women or non-binary. Sally-Anne is the co-author of ‘Can Music Make You Sick’ the largest ever study into mental health in the music industry that was funded by the charity Help Musicians UK and published in November 2017. She is interested in working practices in the music industries and the conditions of digital labour and specifically how they impact on questions of diversity and equality. Sally-Anne has four grown up children all of whom work one way or another with music, and although she always identifies as a ‘native’ Londoner, she actually lives in North Hertfordshire.