Cultural entrepreneurs, cultural entrepreneurship: Music producers mobilising and converting Bourdieu's alternative capitals

This article analyses how DIY (‘Do It Yourself’) music producers act in entrepreneurial ways to generate ‘buzz’ from an economically constrained position. Through semi-structured interviews with music producers in New Zealand, it is suggested a process of capital mobilisation and conversion takes place, where Bourdieu's alternative forms of capital offer a use- and exchange-value in creating new cultural goods that meet identity desires and generate cultural intermediary interest. This adds a new aspect to the sociology of work in the cultural industries by exploring cultural entreprenuers’ practices as a generalised economy of exchange. Although only an indicative sensitising framework, capital mobilisation and conversion may be useful for investigating the practices of cultural entrepreneurs in other sectors of the new cultural economy.

► Cultural entrepreneurs are engaged in self directed artistic production while reproducing labour power in flexible labour markets. ► Highlights how Bourdieu's alternative capitals are the primary resource for cultural entrepreneurs short on economic capital. ► How the field of music production requires that cultural entrepreneurs self-generate ‘buzz’. ► How Bourdieu's alternative capitals are mobilised to build ‘buzz’. ► How co-production by cultural entrepreneurs leads to obligations to use relations and products to build careers.