“There are no days off, just days without shows”: precarious mobilities in the touring music industry

ABSTRACT

The proliferation of online streaming music has led to a loss of income from the sale of recorded music pressuring artists and technicians to find alternate avenues to earn income, particularly through touring. Yet, there is little study on the lives and experiences of workers who tour. I use Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis to analyze how the rhythm of “tour life” exposes workers to vulnerability and risk. Touring requires synchronizing the needs of daily life to an extreme form of employment-related geographical mobility. On tour, artists and workers struggle with basic self-care, eating, and sleeping in the context of constant travel. The rhythm of touring forces workers to be “always on” and always away in architectures that blur living and working space. The tour bus is a liminal space – neither home or worksite – yet features elements of both. Cultural work further produces an arrhythmic arrangement through the absorption of work into leisure time. For the public, travel or attending concerts are a form of leisure, the eurythmic counterpoint to their daily routines. For musicians and crew these are the quotidian elements of work. Working in the live music industry is seasonal, contractual and contingent on numerous cultural and economic forces. While touring music workers are an extreme case of employment related mobility, the rhythms of their working lives offer insight into the risk and vulnerability experienced by an increasingly mobile workforce.

KEYWORDS:

• Music
• touring
• rythmanalysis
• automobility
• cultural labour

1. Introduction

The growth of online music streaming has reconfigured the spatial arrangement of the music industry and the income of composition of musicians and music workers. Today, there is a growing pressure to earn an income from live performance and touring (Hracs 2012; McKinna 2014). Through touring, the working lives of musicians become temporally and geographically fragmented which are embodied through everyday practices and mobilities. Rhythmanalysis is useful for analyzing vulnerability and risk of life on tour as it focuses on the patterns and rhythms of everyday life. This paper applies Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis to interviews with touring workers, showing how the rhythm of “tour life” inscribes repetitive vulnerability and risk as they traverse mobile working and living spaces, at daily, seasonal and career-spanning temporalities. Risk, vulnerability and precarity can be understood in a number of ways. Workers navigate the immediate dangers of road travel alongside challenging self care routines in the context of longer term vulnerabilities such as a lack of standard employment relationships and limited access to benefits. Attention to the rhythms of everyday life on tour ground wider observations about work and labouring, revealing how precariousness is experienced in an individual and embodied way. These observations expand discussions on cultural labour, employment related mobility, automobility, and mobile subject formation (Cresswell, Dorow, and Roseman 2016; Lazzarato 2004).

Scholars of cultural labour describe the emergence of a neoliberal entrepreneurial working subjectivity that purport to empower and liberate a workers individual creativity while in practice subject them to exploitative and precarious working arrangements (Lingo and Tepper 2013; McRobbie 2002; Neff, Wissinger, and Zukin 2005). Turrini and Chicchi (2013) show these subjectivities are “not free of constraint, exploitation and subjection”, but are “largely embedded within a control device that produces and stimulates desires, ambitions, frustrations and new inequalities at the same time” (510). Drawing on Standing (2011), they add this is “sustaining development processes, that at the same time cast the workforce into a general and structural condition of precariousness” (510). The touring worker embodies this subjectivity.

Recent scholarly attention to the music industry focuses on its restructuring as a result of music piracy and the proliferation of streaming services (Eriksson et al. 2019; Prior 2018; Tschmuck 2017). These approaches fall short of explaining impacts on musicians and workers. An interrogation of the lived experience on tour shows how changes in the music industry manifest in the everyday life of musicians and workers. Reid-Musson (2018) argues that “rhythms create quotidian disciplinary conditions upon which exploitative migration and mobilities regimes rest” (882). For live music workers, the rise of streaming affects their income composition. Streaming has reconfigured work and capital in the music industry, pressuring musicians and workers to become more mobile. According to Prior (2018), the entrance of technology companies into music is in the form of rent seeking practices, which exacerbate existing inequalities and limit access to the benefits of streaming to many working class music workers. The use of rhythmanalysis to understand “tour life” reveals how structures of power discipline music workers through, what Lefebrve calls “dressage”. Borrowing the term from equestrian training Lefevbre uses dressage to describe how rhythms can be entrained into the body (Lyon 2018). In the same way that a trainer breaks in a horse, workers’ bodies are entrained to tour. The patterns of touring show how quotidian rhythms of daily life synchronize to longer temporal experiences of burnout and exhaustion. In that way the repetitive daily rhythms of touring over time unsynchronize to a precarious arrhythmia of anxiety, exhaustion and vulnerability.

This paper explores three overlapping rhythmic patterns. First, it considers embodied and bodily rhythms of life on tour. Rhythmanalysis starts with most proximate rhythms in order to appreciate more external or distant ones (Lefebvre 2004). On tour, the natural rhythm of the body is in complex synchronization to the working day. On tour workers struggle with quotidian corporeal aspects of life such as eating, sleeping, using the bathroom and basic self-care. Touring disciplines these bodily functions to its particular timespace through a process of “dressage” (Lefebvre 2004, 39). Dressage entrains workers to the prevailing economic logic of the industry in order to achieve a metastable equilibrium, an isorhythmia (Lefebvre 2004, 20). Independent artists entrain their bodies for touring through lifehacking tactics (Potts 2010). While at higher strata, workers are “broken in” by structured rhythms.

Second, this paper explores the spaces that facilitate “dwelling-in-motion” (Sheller and Urry 2006). On tour, vehicles and parking lots support polyrhythmia between different bodies and productive capacities forming a eurythmic whole (Evans and Franklin 2010). Touring requires extreme mobility made possible through architectures of mobile dwelling. People on tour form intimate relations with their vehicles forming a car-driver hybrid assemblage (Urry 2006). This intimate assemblage is the active constituent in the production of touring space (Lefebvre 1992). Cresswell (2006), suggests that “places marked by an abundance of mobility become placeless” (31). Cars, busses, highways, airports, loading docks, parking lots, etc. are typically understood as transitory and generic (Auge 1995). Yet, an examination of touring space suggests otherwise. On tour, an empty Wal-mart parking lot – an archetypal example of a non-place – is a safe, widely available, sanctioned place to park and sleep overnight. As Ramella (2018) shows, the idea of home and away are complicated when on tour. Analysis of touring space broadens discussions on automobility and its convergence with “dwelling-in-motion” (Featherstone 2004; Urry 2006).

Finally, this paper considers how “inscribed rhythms” (Edensor 2010b, 11) reveal the forms of power which regulate the lives of workers. According to Lefevbre “power knows how to utilise and manipulate time, dates, time-tables. It combines … those that it employs (individuals, groups, entire societies), and rhythms them” (Lefebvre 2004, 68 emphasis added). Inscribed rhythms including the organization of the working day to the seasonality of work, effectively rhythms workers, entraining them to a specific form of domination (Potts 2010; Reid-Musson 2018). Workers embody risks of production on a daily basis (driving, eating, exhaustion) while over career spanning temporalities this work arrythmically synchronizes with life changes such as aging or starting a family. The changing music industry and the increased demand for travel and extreme mobility signals a transition from a capital-labour relationship to a capital-life relationship (Lazzarato 2004) where workers and artists increasingly commit and sacrifice themselves for work.

1.1. Methodology and data

This paper is derived from a larger doctoral project, supported by data gathered through 40 semi-structured interviews with people in the music industry. Respondents work in multiple positions at different strata, ranging from musicians, technicians, and truck drivers to music executives and managers. Most participants are based in North America. There is enormous class stratification between the respondents. For example, Milton is a senior vice president at a major record label, others are independent artists who represent themselves in most or all business dealings. Almost half the sample are primarily employed as non-musicians (tour managers, merchandise sales, technicians and engineers). At least two people tour regularly as both artist and technician (Janice and Marvin). Older respondents tend to have diverse resumes that span multiple positions over time (Ronnie, Jim, Andy, Ben, and Frank).

There are a number of people who carry out management tasks with varying degrees of power over the organization of the tour. For example, Tania and Janice work as tour managers are primarily concerned with the daily operation of the show. There are many involved in touring who do not travel yet still exert power over the working and living conditions of the tour, these include band managers, booking agents and promoters. It is not within the scope of this paper to fully articulate the complexity of industry (see: Prior 2018; Tschmuck 2017). It is important to note the sample is nebulous, with respondents holding different, multiple and overlapping jobs at varying scales in the industry over different career lengths.

Throughout the paper I will use various terms to refer to the population. Often, I use the term “workers” in a broad sense lumping together artists, technicians, engineers, crew and managers. While each of these positions differ in their occupational specialty, together they share common experiences. Descriptive writing will be deployed to distinguish between the struggling artists who live in their cars to higher strata workers who tour in comparatively better conditions. Similarly, the term “production” is used with a double meaning referring to the entirety of a touring production and to the capitalist mode of production. All respondents have been assigned pseudonyms.

2. The new geography of work in the music industry

The rise of music streaming and the growth platform economy has reconfigured the music industry (Prior 2018; Tschmuck 2017). The transition from music sold as a physical media to on-demand streaming reduces the incomes of many music workers, pressuring them to perform live (Hracs 2012; McKinna 2014). According to McKinna (2014) “the change in the record industry in the last ten years, largely due to digitization and the internet, has led to the increased importance of touring as a way for musicians to earn money” (McKinna 2014, 69). The increased reliance on live performance and touring changes the nature of work leading to an increase in precarity. Touring geographically and temporally fractures the lives of musicians through insecurity in the predictability of the time and place of their work, wages for their work, the places they live and stay, and how they care for themselves, their crews, and their families. These forms of insecurity manifest on the body, challenging how they negotiate everyday life and the self on tour. While many of these insecurities map onto existing theories of precariousness, touring adds additional dimensions related to mobility. While work in cultural industries adds intersecting subjective dimensions to theories of precarious labour (Duffy and Wissinger 2017).

The current configuration of the music industry stems from decades of technological disruptions and capital reconfigurations. The so-called “Mp3 crisis” changed the way people buy and listen to music (Sinnreich 2013). With record sales peaking in the late 90s, the music industry entered a seemingly endless downward spiral (Tschmuck 2017). Physical album sales plummeted as music piracy and sharing platforms became ubiquitous. Local record stores closed. First replaced by Wal-Mart and other big-box retail stores that sold physical albums as loss leaders (Fox 2005). The entrance of retail capital had a deleterious effect on independent record stores, which function as intermediaries in local music scenes (Anderson 2009). Record labels pursued a legal response to online file sharing, seeking injunctive relief from file sharing platforms and in some cases even suing the end consumer of pirated music (Prior 2018). This was a costly and ineffective strategy as music piracy continued to expand. The Mp3 crisis was first resolved through the establishment of new online music markets such as the iTunes Store. Today, streaming platforms, such as Spotify, Apple Music, and Google have completed this transformation, which Prior (2018, 33) argues “represents a shift in business models from material ownership to a system built on rent”. Today, the recorded music market is reconstituted as a service where users rent access rather than own music as a discrete material or digital object.

Haynes and Marshall (2018) argue musicians are pressured to be entrepreneurial actors; they are the “barometer of current trends” in the gig economy (459). The rise of streaming and loss of income from record sales occur alongside the rise of platform capitalism (Arvidsson and Colleoni 2012; Langley and Leyshon 2017; Srnicek 2017). Under platform capitalism, previously remunerated labour is rendered into free labour (Terranova 2000). Observing work on platforms “emphasizes how the contemporary media system relies on the activities of a wide range of diverse external actors (a multitude) that are generally not paid for what they do” (Arvidsson and Colleoni 2012, 137). Platforms are intercepting the value of recorded music, leaving working musicians under-remunerated from the circulation of their music. The largest music companies today are technology companies, such as Google, Apple and Amazon, who own platforms extracting musical surplus labour in rents (Prior 2018) meanwhile musicians are increasingly selling the service of music in the form of live performance (Hracs 2012).

Online streaming is part of a new crisis reconfiguring the labour process of music. The music industry today is more uneven than it ever has been (Tschmuck 2017). While many platforms have low barriers to entry, these platforms have not become significant redistributive systems. According Connor, Gill and Taylor (2015) “creativity and creative labour are often framed as open to all, by dint of their universalism (‘everyone is creative’!) in fact, inequalities are rife in these industries and at times of economic crisis and instability, are worsening” (4). The few cases of artists becoming successful YouTube stars, for example, seem to pale in comparison to the myriad ways that platforms intensify work and create dependency (Cutolo and Kenney 2019). The growing avenues for creative expression on platforms seem to exacerbate existing inequalities, rather than mitigate them (Duffy and Wissinger 2017).

Streaming directs profits to elite artists and tech companies (Eriksson et al. 2019; Marshall 2015) causing an intensification of work for musicians and music workers. Today, few artists rely on income from recording (Marshall 2015). Artists and other workers increasingly find themselves needing to tour to earn a living (Gross and Musgrave 2016). Touring is not new in any sense, musicians have travelled for work as long as music has been a form of work. However, due to the changing income composition of musical workers, survival now requires extreme mobility, which can isolate workers from personal support networks. The change in the lives of music workers is best understood as a transition from a capital-labour to capital-life (Lazzarato 2004), where their relationship to capital seeps into all aspects of life. Touring is an example of work seeping into daily life.

To date, there are few studies of touring, with some notable exceptions. Common amongst existing research is a lack of materialist analysis. Tironi (2012) considers how mobility and fluidity amongst musicians in local music scenes challenges existing cluster theories. They contest the very idea of a local music scene given both the linkages and flows with other scenes. Nóvoa’s (2012) ethnography of a touring band explores what does it mean to “do the road”. Touring and the mobility of touring, they show, reproduces the identity of the musician as a musician. McKinna (2014) explores what authenticity means in the context of repetition of tour. Touring frequently involves performing the same songs, often in the same order, each night. McKinna’s novel exploration of time and rhythm on tour concludes that authenticity is related to the experience of live music in the moment of performance. Ramella (2018, 2019) explores a similar question to this paper, asking how musicians come to think of home and away when they are on tour. The participants in Ramella’s (2018) study describe the road as a home, in spite of its itinerancy. The conclusion is that the binary of home and away become blurry on tour.

Taken as a whole, these articles focus on either the cultural, musicological or personal experiences of touring. Absent are materialist discussions about the political economy of the industry, working conditions, or the wider experience of touring as a form of work. While music work and touring is undoubtedly a source for identity work (DeNora 1999; Leidner 2016; Nóvoa 2012), for the subjects in this research, touring is their livelihood. This is particularly true of non-musician workers, such as technicians, who lack the space for expression that musicians have on tour. For scholars of music work, it is difficult to disentangle the rewards of meaningful work from the livelihood. Unlike the aforementioned papers, this paper begins in framing touring as a form of wage earning work, narrowing the focus to professionals. A focus on the work of touring opens up new avenues to think about mobility, working conditions, and workplace socialization. This materialist perspective enhances existing research on touring. Below, I explore how the rhythms of touring structure working life. Daily rhythms expose workers to precarious working conditions, while longer rhythms expose workers to burn out and exhaustion. Drawing attention to the rhythms of everyday life can reveal numerous power relationships as experienced through its subjects.

3. Syncing the rhythm of daily life

Our biological rhythms of sleep, hunger and thirst, excretion and so on are more and more conditioned by the social environment and our working lives. We train ourselves, and are trained, to behave in a number of ways. (Elden 2004, xii)

“Tour life” requires synchronizing the needs of daily life to an extreme form of employment-related mobility. This section considers how the biological rhythms of daily life synchronize or fail to synchronize with the patterns of touring. Touring is not monolithic. Tours range from solo artists driving themselves from show to show sleeping in their car to full production tours with where dozens of workers travel in specially designed busses. Despite this enormous range and the many forms in between, all forms of touring must synchronize basic bodily requirements of the workers to the pace of the tour. This synchronization relies on what Lefevbre terms “dressage”. On tour, workers condition themselves to sleep in a vehicle, eat in motion, work around the clock, in the context of partying and performing. Lefebvre (2004) writes that humans, like animals can be “broken in” to work. Dressage, Lefevbre argues “determines the majority of rhythms” and that these rhythms edify on “physiological basis” which produces either eurythmia or “even arrhythmia if the rhythms (and needs) are broken” (40–41). The body, according to Lefebvre (2004) “consists of a bundle of rhythms, different but in tune” (20). Accordingly, when biological rhythms fail to synchronize on tour, the arrhythmia is borne by worker’s bodies.

Quotidian aspects of daily life are challenging on tour. These include eating, sleeping and using the bathroom, to less frequent activities such as getting haircuts or seeing a doctor. Simple practices of everyday life are patterned around travel times, group behavior, and performance schedules which are inscribed by a complex business calculus structured by an economic logic, particularly the need to earn an income through live performance. Tours are planned around availability, profitability and travel time. Planning a tour requires reconciling a business case to the physical limitations of workers. This reconciliation, I argue, involves dressage to discipline working bodies towards the business case.

Pott’s (2010) uses a rhythmanlytical approach to explore lifehacking, where individual productivity is developed through dressage tactics. Potts (2010) defines a lifehack as “anything that solves an everyday problem in a clever or non-obvious way” (35). While “hacking” in the one sense is about exploiting technological weakness in a computer system, lifehacking, according to Potts (2010) is “less about the actual technologies than the manner or style of using them” (34–5). For independent artists, “tourhacking” is a dressage to help overcome the biophysical challenges of touring. Eating is a recurring challenge. Marvin, a guitar player, spends most of the year touring as a supporting musician or as a front person for his own projects. Marvin plans tours with a disciplined financial asceticism. Marvin relies on camping, billeting with friends, and cooking meals as a band. One “tourhack” reduces food costs by making meals for his four-piece band from shelf stable ingredients:

For about 89 cents per person, I provide one nutritious and filling meal per day … Canned tuna, a can of beans, a can of corn, some Italian seasoning, a little garlic powder, and hot sauce. Add lemon juice to take off the stink of the tuna … Boom, you have wraps with protein! There is a bit of citrus, so you don’t get scurvy. It’s all fiber, doesn’t go bad, incredibly cheap, filling and doesn’t make you feel gross. (Marvin, Guitar Player, Interview)

Many artists have recipes for quick, affordable and nutritious meals. For Paul, a solo artist, meal planning is challenging:

I plan my meals around what venues will feed me. If I’m playing at a bar or restaurant, I’ll have a meal there. I keep non-perishable or not quickly perishable food in my car. Like peanut butter and honey sandwiches. I use honey instead of jelly, because jelly goes bad. I have a lot of peanut butter sandwiches. (Paul, Singer Songwriter, Interview)

Maggie, a solo singer songwriter musician who also plays in indie rock groups, has adjusted her eating schedule to a single meal with lots of snacks:

I tend to eat one real meal a day. I’ll eat dinner or something like that. For breakfast I eat energy bars. I travel with fruit and nuts and eat all day. It’s the rhythm that you get in to. (Maggie, musician, interview)

Marvin, Maggie, and Paul’s eating habits stems from two logics. First, is the economic calculus of the tour. Many venues provide meals, saving the cost of having to buy or make food. As such the “one meal a day” tends to be dinner before the show. The second logic is to ensure flexibility to accommodate driving schedules. Stopping to eat is a luxury. For Marvin, Paul, Maggie and other independent artists, the razor thin margins of touring require tourhacks to make the venture even remotely successful. Figuring out how, when, where and what to eat requires self or group-disciplining of bodies to fit the business case of the tour.

While many artists and technicians have varying degrees of autonomy over how they synchronize their bodies to the pace of the tour, on larger tours, workers eat and sleep following a production schedule. Frank, a lighting designer, tours on large productions. Unlike the artists described above, Frank has very little autonomy in how his day is planned, including meals. Frank Frank sleeps in a tour bus bus and eats catered food provided to the crew. Larger touring productions provide catering as it is considerably more cost effective to bring the food to the workers than bringing workers to food. However, the quality of catering varies greatly between shows. Frank remarks that,

… as the quality of the tour increases, generally, the food quality goes up … I remember in some small town … The promoter had not put up the money for real catering. [The caterers] come with crock pots and a cheese tray from the store. They made this cabbage soup … [The production manager] scooped up a bowl of this stuff took a taste, and in full view of everyone hucks the bowl out the door. (Frank, lighting designer, interview)

This anecdote captures the frustrating experience of having limited control over how basic elements of life are provisioned. For Frank, and his fellow crew, what they ate that day was determined by a local promoter hoping to save on production costs. The problem of bad local catering is so pervasive in the industry, that many productions will hire caterers with mobile kitchens so the crew can have reliable and healthy food.

Marvin, Paul and Maggie as independent artists tour in a different economic strata from Frank yet face similar forms of precarity brought on by the challenges of synchronizing basic elements of life to the pace, schedule, and economics of touring. Taking a rhythmananylitical approach reveals the extent of the daily struggle that workers face synchronizing everyday life to the pace of work. In these examples, the rhythms of touring are “folded in and through the permeable body” (Edensor 2010b, 4). Lefebvre’s concept of dressage outlines this process “as a means to train the body to perform and condition it to accede to particular rhythms” (Edensor 2010b, 5). These “rational, numerical, quantitative and qualitative rhythms” of the tour “super-impose themselves on the multiple natural rhythms of the body though not without changing them.” (Lefebvre 2004, 9). The irregularity or costs of meals entrain independent artists to eat at odd schedules, incentivizing binge eating, snacking, or living off shelf stable ingredients. Similarly, the lack of control that higher strata workers experience over their everyday life is part of a productive and extractive system: money saved on food ends up in the pocket of their employer. Dressage occurs as working bodies bear the austere business of touring. These tactics discipline the working subject, entraining them into a productive system of value creation based on their mobility. Jones and Warren (2016) argue that dressage is used as a means to “impose unsustainable (‘arrhythmic’) patterns of working within the creative sector” (286). This dressage is apparent as “when, where and what to eat” – questions most workers have some level of autonomy over – on tour are structured by the economic calculus of the production.

4. The living spaces of touring

The spaces of music production are typically imagined as the studio or stage. However, the reproduction of the artist and crew occur elsewhere. Feminist labour scholars draw connections between spaces of social reproduction to spaces of production, arguing the divisional hierarchy between home and work is used to obscure care work (McDowell 2003). Social reproduction on tour occurs in vehicles. The economy of touring depends on the reproduction of labour power in vehicles. Feldman (1977) highlights how travelling to work has a “contradictory function as commodity, reproducer of labor power, social control mechanism, and structurer of space” (30, quoted in Reid-Musson 2018). Time spent in transit is often theorized against productive time (Cresswell 2006). In the case of touring, time spent travelling is crucial to both the productive capacity of artist and crew, and to their personal and social reproduction. Sheller and Urry (2006, 209) challenge mobility scholars to think about how “automobility” produces mobile subjects and connects them to larger structures of power. Urry (2004, 26) describes the automobile and its variants as the predominant quasi-private space which subordinates other mobilities while reorganizing work, family life and leisure. Touring is an extreme form of automobility. On tour, vehicles produce a touring subject distant and dislocated from home and non-working life (Ramella 2018). Urry (2006) explains the meaning of “auto” in automobility to be two fold, a “double resonance”. First in reference to the vehicle itself, and second to the human occupant (the auto in “autobiographical”). Accordingly, the “car-driver is a ‘hybrid’ assemblage, not simply of autonomous humans but simultaneously of machines, roads, buildings, signs and entire cultures of mobility” (Haraway 1991; Thrift 1996, 282–84 as cited in Urry 2006, 18). The touring vehicle is a liminal space neither a home or worksite, functioning as both an assembly line and a home, reconstituting the interstices between otherwise disparate spaces of life. On tour, vehicles are nodes, legible as meaningful places of life, socialization, survival and work. Touring workers, their vehicles and the rhythm of production push automobility to an extreme.

Touring musicians have intimate relationships with their vehicles (Ramella 2018). Driving is a “profoundly embodied and sensuous experience … in which the identity of person and car kinaesthetically intertwine” (Thrift 2004, 46–47). Workers and their vehicles form a eurythmic whole (Evans and Franklin 2010, 177). Patti’s band tours in a converted bus affectionately named Stella: “she’s a retired 14 passenger airport shuttle bus with 430,000 miles on her” (Patti, musician, interview). Anthropomorphising Stella reveals her importance: the economics of the tour hinge on Stella; she reduces the cost of living and expands the range where the band can travel. For long distance gigs, Stella is driven overnight, with band members alternating between sleeping and driving. When running late, Patti recalls driving “straight from Tucson to Shreveport. We didn’t stop for 23 hours except to go to the bathroom” (Patti, Interview).

Many musicians tour alone, sleeping in their cars. Raoul, a solo artist, is used to sleeping in his car:

I’ve been in a Ford Focus for two years, I get real comfortable with how to sleep in the thing. I get better sleep in the front seat of my car than I do in a bed. I’m so used to it. I can set it up how I like. (Raoul, Interview)

Touring musicians frequently park overnight at Wal-Mart parking lots. According to the Wal-Mart corporate website: “Walmart values RV travellers and considers them among our best customers. Consequently, we do permit RV parking on our store parking lots as we are able.” (“Frequently Asked Questions,” Walmart.com, n.d.). Paul, tours alone in his car describing the nightly challenge of finding places to park, sleep, bathe and eat. Living in a car on tour exposes him to a number of risks. Paul shared stories about police waking him up, telling him to move along, and a time when people tried to break into his car while he was sleeping. Paul keeps a membership to a regional chain of 24-hour gyms so that he can have access to showers as he travels. As he describes:

I don’t really like sleeping at rest stops. That kind of creeps me out. I’ve done it a few times covering my face with a sleeping bag … Some people do the Walmart parking lot … I’ll usually sleep in 24-Hour Fitness parking lots. I’m a member which allows me to have a place to sleep. I shower and work out every day. So that’s been really nice. (Paul, Singer songwriter, interview)

Paul’s situation is not unique. Over the course of the research, a number of respondents describe similar experiences of sleeping in public or semi-public parking lots and using gym memberships for basic hygiene. Edensor (2010b) writes that “patterns of mobile flow thus contribute to the spatio-temporal character of place” (5), suggesting that the presence of touring musicians and productions transform these non-places into meaningful places of habitation (Cresswell 2006, 31; Auge 1995). Edensor (2010b), continues that the “speed, pace and periodicity of a habitual journey produces a stretched out, linear apprehension of place shaped by the form of a railway or road, and the qualities of the vehicle” (6). In this instance, the dwelling-in-motion produces the vehicle and the parking lot as meaningful places (Sheller and Urry 2006).

While many bands travel in recreational vehicles (RV) there are specially designed tour busses, sometimes called a sleeper coach or entertainer coach. RV’s are generally smaller, slower, and do not require a special licensing to operate. Tour busses are a commercial vehicle purpose built for touring. A tour bus generally has 12 bunks, multiple social spaces, bathroom and kitchenette. The architecture of the tour bus contains the minimum amount of infrastructure required to support a group of 12 (or more) for touring. Many respondents describe the bus as a “submarine”. Greg recalls a long drive in a tour bus “as some kind of god awful, 20-hour submarine ride across the country.” (Greg, sound technician, interview). While that length of drive would be unusual, for many touring workers a large portion of their non-working hours are spent in a bus.

A tour bus has three sections. The front of the bus is the social space, with couches on either side, and a television. The kitchenette has a microwave, fridge, sink and cupboards. There is a small dinner table with bench seating. The sleeping area consists of twelve bunks, arranged on each wall in two columns of three rows of single beds. Each bunk has air conditioning, plug, light and curtain. The curtain across the bunk is the only form of privacy. This thin piece of cloth “closes the coffin”, as Janice describes “the only time you’re alone is when you pull the curtain across your coffin” (Sound Technician, Interview). Most luggage is stored underneath the bus. Smaller carry-on luggage can be kept at your feet in the bunk. An empty bunk is called a “junk bunk” used to store personal belongings. Given the thin profit margins on tour, it is a luxury to have a junk bunk.

There is a social hierarchy for who gets which bunk. The middle bunks are considered the most desirable. Eddie, a younger sound technician prefers the bottom bunk, as he’s “never in a spot where I can get the middle bunk. I choose bottom, I don’t like climbing over people” (Sound technician, interview). The back of the bus is a lounge room with a door and soft seating which converts to a queen size bed. This room is sometimes called the “star cabin” as often it will be used by the star of the show. More often this lounge serves as a second social space, often reserved as a quiet space.

The bathroom on the bus is similar to that on an airplane, with one exception: “don’t shit on the bus.” When asked about what sort of rules there are on the tour bus, “don’t shit” was first on everyone’s list. Frank put it most politely “you don’t, you do not defecate in the bus bathroom because it cannot handle that form of human waste.” (Frank, lighting designer, interview). While perhaps over dramatic, Milton concisely explains the rules of the tour bus:

Sleep with your feet facing forward. Don’t lose your bus key. If you [leave the bus] in the middle of night throw your pillow in the driver’s seat so they know you’re gone. Always keep one hand free so you can unlock the bus. And never shit on the bus. Never on the bus. That’s a crime punishable by death. Never on the bus. (Milton, record executive, interview)

The rhythm of tour can only be reconciled through a car-driver or rather bus-crew-parking-lot assemblage (Urry 2006, 18). This hybrid assemblage is a simulation of a home. It contains all the basic components one would find in a home: sleeping areas, social space, kitchen, storage and a bathroom. However, none of these fulfill their function as would at home. In becoming mobile each component gains limitations. Urry (2006, 27) argues that the car has become a “home-from-home”, while here the touring vehicle is a “workhome-for-work”. The design of the tour bus is not to be home, but rather becomes an architecture that helps absorb home into work. It is an interstitial space not quite home, not quite work, and blurry such that home nor work are fully legible. While Urry (2006) argues that “automobility divides workplaces from homes” (19) here is it obvious that touring vehicles connect and even absorb these two sites. Ramella (2018), makes a similar argument that on tour “binary differentiations of ‘home’ and ‘away’ cannot be maintained” (323). Here, I add a structural dimension of how the production of space on tour renders illegible the differentiation between the binary of home and work producing a non-binary hybrid assemblage. The recurring patterns life are spatialized through the worker-vehicle hybrid producing what Brighenti and Kärrholm (2018) term a territorial intensity, or the “nexus between rhythm and territory” (2). The touring vehicle as a sociotechnical system synchronizes basic human needs, such as sleeping and using the bathroom, to the demands of touring. As it reproduces labour power, it further facilitates the dressage of workers to this system of production.

5. The timespace of touring

[you live] in a bubble, you are removed from real life. It’s like Groundhog Day. The same day, over and over. Especially on an extended tour, [of] 3 or 4 months. The venues begin to look the same. Hotels look the same. Days off are the same … (Rob, sound engineer, interview).

Adorno (2001, 187) writes that “free time is shackled to its opposite”. For the public, travel and attending concerts are forms of leisure, the eurythmic counterpoint to their daily grind. For musicians and crew, these are quotidian elements of work and everyday life. Liu (2004) describes how “work as cool” produces an intraculture where work loses its “recreational outside” (77). In the case of touring this “work as cool” intraculture occurs through the rhythming of workers. As the title of this paper suggests, the working day on tour is pervasive. Work on tour is subsuming. It lacks a constituent outside. Time off on tour is still time living with co-workers, away from family and friends. Time off is still life in a suitcase. The rhythm of touring forces musicians to be “always on” (Gregg 2011) and “always away” in architectures that blur living and working space. As Tania, suggests “there are no days off, just days without shows”. Lazzarato (2004) argues that we are transitioning from a capital-labour relationship to a capital life relationship where the production of lifestyle and culture (“the production of worlds”) is entangled in the production of capital and systems of exchange, totalizing aspects of work and life in contemporary capitalism. “Tour life” captures this totality. Rhythmanalysis, according to Edensor (2010b) “is particularly useful in investigating the patterning of a range of multiscalar temporalities – calendrical, diurnal and lunar, lifecycle, somatic and mechanical – whose rhythms provide an important constituent of the experience and organisation of social time” (1). This section proposes the patterning of the working day is totalizing through repetition over multi-scalar temporalities. The tour as totality is established through at least three ways. The lack of control of the working day and working hours, the blurred temporal and spatial boundaries between work and non-work and by the seasonality and irregularity of work.

Large scale concert production is Taylorised. Each aspect of the working day is orchestrated following a technical division of labour. Sound, lighting, staging, and other production are carried out in silos. In some instances, crews will be given colour coded shirts to identify who is working on lighting or sound (Zendel 2014). The specific sequence of events is optimized to reduce local labour costs not to reduce the length of the working day of the touring crew. Touring labour is contracted to finish the show. Wages on tour are negotiated weekly or monthly, but not hourly. There is no incentive for a tour manager to reduce the working day of the touring crew. There are points in the day when workers wait for other crews to finish their work. The sound crew is often first to finish. However, it is not safe to test the sound system while other crews work. Similarly, testing the lighting system requires darkness. Backline and staging cannot setup until the site is clear from sound and lighting. The organization of the working day leaves little control to the workers. As such, it is common for a touring worker to be at the venue working or waiting to work from early in the morning to well after the show. A common adage in the industry is to “hurry up and wait”. This rhythm leaves little time for workers to be away from the production:

Even if I’m not necessarily working every minute of the day, I have to be available and, in the office, or on my radio. It’s hard to step away and get a little bit of a mental break. (Tania, tour manager, interview)

The tour is totalized through the blurred temporal and spatial boundaries between work and non-work. The pace of the tour rhythms workers for longer intervals of work. In an extreme case, Eddie a sound technician describes a high pace tour where “we did 11 shows in 12 days. We did five, with one day off, and then six in a row. That was hardcore.” (Eddie, sound technician, interview). The pace of the tour will include days off, not out of concern for the workers, but rather because of scheduling. Here, Lefebvre’s (2004) notion that leisure and free time “are produced (and productive)” becomes apparent (32). For crew, days off are times to relax and recuperate and see local attractions, providing the tour bus is parked or hotels are booked in an interesting part of town. However, booking agents often plan days off in places where accommodation is less expensive or free. Similarly, independent artists might plan days off where they can camp or billet with friends and family. It is not uncommon for a tour bus to park at a Wal-Mart for a day off, leaving the crew stranded from any sort of amenity. Janice recalls a day off when her tour bus parked a great distance from the venue, leaving the crew stranded:

I’m standing there on the side of the road with my suitcase in my pajamas. Normal people are going by on their way to work looking at me. I feel horrible. I’m waiting for my cab to take me to where I can shower. It’s crazy. It’s not a normal life (Janice, sound technician, interview)

For others, there are no days off. As an assistant tour manager, Tania is regularly expected to advance shows on her days off. She is not allowed to be disconnected. If the tour manager, artist or band management needs work done, she is expected to do that work, regardless of whether there is a show that day. Her work is not scheduled. Tania puts it simply:

I always say there are no days off. There are just days without shows. You’re often working on your days off … There’s a lot of work outside of the show days which can be exhausting. (Tania, tour manager, interview)

Touring enables the employer to have total and extended control of the worker, not just for the working day, but for weeks, months, and longer. The totalizing timespace disciplines workers through dressage into a working subjectivity with no constitutive other. Workers can resist this subjectivity, but through the encapsulation from automobility, and the dislocation from travel, workers succumb to what Janice calls “tour brain”:

[tour brain] is when you start to forget that your home life exists. [home] is no longer an important or necessary part of your day on a conscious level. After 10 days you just put one foot in front of the other. You get tunnel vision, where your home life doesn’t seem necessary. It doesn’t impact your daily routine. You don’t talk to your wife back home, or your boyfriend. That influence from the outside seems to have less and less of an impact on you. By day 15 you nestle into this “the tour is the only thing that matters, and this insular group of people that I’m with are the only people that matter”. You let go of things back home. (Janice, sound technician, interview, emphasis added)

From a rhythmanalytical perspective, tour brain shows the repetitive experience of “dislocation, displacement, disjuncture, and dialogism” (Sheller and Urry 2006, 211), producing a totalized working subjectivity able to shield itself from any constitutive other. On tour, home life disappears from routine and daily life. The rhythming of work through the pace of the tour and the architecture of the tour bus removes not only a “recreational outside” (Liu 2004), but any constituent outside.

Touring is further totalized through the seasonality of the work. Touring professionals experience insecurity on a seasonal basis. Neis et al. (2018) describe the “fragile synchronicities” that mobile workers face, arguing the need to expand theories of employment mobility to better understand the many forms of seasonal or long-distance travels to work. Touring work fits this call. The lives of touring workers are structured by irregular work schedules, seasonality, and a lack of fixed work sites. In the following example, Tania describes how she lost a regular high paying gig because the artist was booked as an opening act rather than a headliner. Tania’s job was cut as the crew was downsized to fit the new production size. At the time she was recovering from an experience of burn-out. Losing this contract made her reconsider working in the industry.

[The band I’ve worked the past three summers for] are opening all summer for [a major act]. [Management] are trying to cut three crew buses to one. So my boss says, “if we take you we need another bus and I don’t think we can afford it.” I do this every summer, that was my one gig I could count on … (Tania, tour manager, interview)

Here, Tania’s high paid and long running summer contract was no longer available. This change was a lucid moment revealing her own precarity. Discussing this precarity Tania framed it simply “you don’t want to have to need a contract. You want to be able to choose.” Tania’s experience shows insecurity occurs on a calendrical timescale from the contract and contingent nature of work in the industry. Respondents described similar situations where they lost work because artists’ popularity declined or decided not to tour, or for a host of contingent factors. Accordingly, workers are victims of these “fragile synchronicities” (Neis et al. 2018) through the seasonality of work, lack of choice in work, the insecurity and limited tenure of contracts and the changing tastes of consumers.

One particular fragile synchronicity is being revealed as the music industry copes with the COVID-19 global pandemic. While the research for this paper was carried out in the years prior the pandemic, follow up interviews with subjects make Tania’s experience seem nearly universal. COVID-19 has brought the touring industry to a halt. Every actor in the live music industry is affected, from musicians and technicians to venue owners and booking agents. The generally eurythmic cycle of summer tours with high paying music festivals has stopped. The industry has fell into a state of arrhythmia. While it is not within the scope of this paper to fully assess the impact, scholars could use the rhythmanalytical method to better understand and theorize how the music industry copes with emergency and risk.

6. Conclusion

This rhythmanalytical study of touring situates the experience of touring workers in the discussion of broader changes in the music industry. The music industry has undergone profound changes in the new millennium. This transformation pressures workers to tour more often and for longer. Yet there is little scholarly data about life on tour, the spaces of touring and longer-term experiences of workers (cf. Gross and Musgrave 2016, McKinna 2014; Nóvoa 2012; Ramella 2018). This paper seeks to fill this gap by exploring the lived experience of workers on tour and their experience of time and space at work. This paper contributes to the study of cultural labour by centering the everyday experiences of touring workers. A rhythmanalytical approach centers the quotidian aspects of life offering a grounded lens into life on tour. Reid-Musson (2018) suggests that rhythmanalysis captures the “inalienable, lived, and interstitial aspects of social space and time which systems-level analyses of mobility may neglect or overlook” (883). As such, rhythmanalysis serves as an ideal analytical tool to explore how the patterns of daily life to reveal the complex systems of power acting on the body (Lefebvre 2004, 20).

Tour life is patterned in a number of rhythms. First, touring requires the daily synchronization of basic needs such as eating and sleeping to the pace of touring. Workers undergo a process of dressage, entraining to mobile living conditions. Dressage here means adjusting what and when they eat and where they sleep to fit a business case. Touring spaces dressage workers to fit within the “capital life” of touring (Lazzarato 2004). People form deep bonds with the vehicles they tour in, and “kinaesthetically intertwine” (Thrift 2004, 47; Ramella 2018). These vehicles, however, are not designed to be home, but rather to reproduce something like a work-home assemblage mobilized to increase productivity. These are liminal spaces, not quite home and not quite work (Ramella 2018), that reproduce mobile labour for work. This presents an important link between automobility and mobile labour. Foregrounding the vehicle as a site of habitation, work, and social reproduction connects mobilities literature to labour studies in a novel way challenging the conception of vehicles as interstitial between sites of production and reproduction.

Finally, the patterning of the working day synchronizes to longer rhythms on annual and career length temporalities, through insecurity and burnout. Workers have little time off from the tour. Their time off is constrained by the demands of production. Indeed, following Lefebvre (2004, 32) and Adorno (2001) their free time is both produced and productive. Annually, workers face the possibility that they might not be able to find work. The contingent nature makes it challenging to plan over a year. These forms of precarity accumulate over a career, structuring longer life decisions. The implications of this risk are acutely revealed through the COVID-19 pandemic, which effectively shuttered the live music industry on a global scale for a yet to be known period of time. Attention to rhythms show how touring synchronizes biophysical and embodied processes to an extractive capital system. While the mobility of workers, show how the architecture of touring, and mobile-dwelling produce a mobile subject to fit within this system of production. The pace of touring and the lack of constituent outside synchronized to longer temporalities is arrhythmic to the lifelong needs of workers. Using rhythmanalysis, this paper shows how touring is precarious on multiple overlapping time periods and as workers traverse mobile living spaces in the context of constant travel. Working in music is fun, rewarding, and an important and meaningful source of identity for these workers. However, workers across the economy are becoming more mobile, as such there is a pressing need to understand how mobility structures risk, and produces new subjectivities (Cresswell, Dorow, and Roseman 2016).