Dispassionate labour: Independent musicians and creative autonomy in the age of platformed cultural production

This article introduces the concept of dispassionate labour to theorize the changing function of creative autonomy among independent artists working in the platform economy. Building on interviews with experimental musicians in Portugal, Sweden, and the UK, it traces a disenchantment with the Romantic ideal of creative autonomy and highlights artists’ pragmatic development of new technological and legal literacies that bring them closer to the ‘dirty materiality’ of their work. This allows artists to simultaneously depend on and disengage from platform infrastructures to leverage opportunities amidst new constellations of intermediaries. Ultimately, it is argued that the transparency and professionalization of artistic work in the platform economy make musicians keenly aware of their complicity in the perpetuation of an inequitable system that relies on the incorporation of its outsides, and that this newly dispassionate orientation to cultural production threatens a key tenet of artists’ identities as agents of social reproduction.