Balancing Acts: Composite Careers in Nashville's Music and Service Industries

Many artists facing unpredictable employment seek other kinds of jobs beyond their respective industry to make ends meet. Yet, aside from noting the precariousness of work in the arts, existing scholarship says little about how these workers manage their employment beyond creative work and across multiple industries, leading to an incomplete portrait of artistic working lives. Based on a two-year qualitative study of the Nashville's downtown music scene, we show how musicians assemble composite careers –complementary employment across two or more industries. We found that artists integrated creative and frontline service work in ways that were strategically useful along three lines (structural, symbolic, and social), which were directly shaped by urban resources, narratives, and networks. We show how artists assemble composite careers by drawing on geographically proximate but categorically distinct industries. While the concentration of artists working in multiple capacities may sustain and reproduce the local cultural scene, we highlight the strain they face in maintaining composite careers over time and suggest that the process of assembling this employment may exacerbate individuals’ inability to secure stable employment and livable wages. We discuss the implications of composite careers for artistic careers, precarious service work, and urban sociology.