In one study, seven independent musicians with links to incubators were interviewed in order to investigate the importance of their networks and how co-opetition affects musicians' business models.
By interviewing seven independent musicians, all of whom have had links to incubators, economics students Linnea and Marcus have found that clusters exist within the music industry and that musicians are happy to share knowledge, experience and resources within the cluster. However, sharing between clusters is not as common and musicians rather express that there is competition between clusters.
Linnea Junkka, one of the authors of the study, has extensive experience in music and has studied music in schools, secondary schools and folk high schools. She herself plays classical trumpet and bass, but for a number of years has chosen a different career path, which led her to attend Umeå Business School.
The study found that there were two driving forces among the interviewed musicians that the study chose to categorize as passion-driven and ambitious. The aim of the passionate musicians was to be able to live from the music and not have to have an extra job, unlike the ambitious ones who want something more from their music making. The categories correlated with the musicians' strategies around networking where the ambition-driven musicians had an explicit strategy on how they network and plan to make a living from music - how the network would add value.
I think all independent musicians would benefit from thinking more strategically and understanding that it is possible to think about networking as a musician. It's not wrong to think strategically about your networking even if your music making is entirely out of passion. A first step is to map out your network and competences and then look for which and what needs to be added to it, says Linnea. I think that creators in other fields would also benefit a lot from collaborating more, you don't have to do and know everything yourself.
You can read the full study here: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-172692
