In 2025, I organised two workshops with grassroots music collectives in the UK, each of them shaped by different local contexts, political commitments and experiences in the music industry, but both concerned with a similar set of questions: how do people build spaces for music-making under unequal conditions? What kinds of care, knowledge, labour and practices of refusal are needed to sustain such spaces? And what can we learn from collectives that do not simply respond to exclusions in the cultural sector, but actively imagine other ways of working and creating together?

These workshops formed part of my Early Career Fellowship with the Independent Social Research Foundation, which has supported my research on music collectives and their relationship to the city and issues of inequality in the music industry. My project looked at how collectives emerge in response to barriers around gender, race, class, space and precariousness – all dynamics that shape the nature of creative work – but also at how they do more than merely ‘fill gaps’ left by existing institutions in the field. I find that grassroots collectives create infrastructures of their own: they redistribute opportunities, knowledge and resources, they form new connections and relationships with other like-minded cultural actors, and they often rehearse more caring and collaborative ways of working together. In these ways, they make visible the kinds of labour that are frequently hidden or undervalued, both in and beyond the cultural industries. And they ask, sometimes implicitly and sometimes very directly, what a more just (musical) life may look like.

Experimenting with sound

The first workshop took place in London and brought together two feminist music collectives. The event combined a practical synthesiser workshop for women and gender non-conforming artists in music with a group discussion about professional opportunities, inequalities and the wider conditions and experiences of working in the field. This combination of hands-on experimentation and collective reflection felt important. It meant that the workshop was not only about talking about exclusion, although that conversation was necessary and insightful, but also about creating a space in which participants could touch equipment, ask questions, make and experiment with sounds and learn about music and technology without the pressure of already having to know.

In music technology spaces, the assumption of prior knowledge often becomes a gatekeeping mechanism—and one that is heavily gendered at that. The studio, the synthesiser, the software interface, the technical vocabulary: these all can all become ways of sorting people into those who ‘belong’ and those who are made to feel like outsiders. The workshop tried to interrupt that dynamic, if only temporarily, by making experimentation and learning the starting point. Guided by different music artists, participants were encouraged to approach sound without needing to perform expertise and to follow their curiosity rather than hide uncertainty. In that sense, the synth workshop was not separate from the conversation about inequalities but formed itself a part of that conversation as well as a way to think beyond standardised working practices in the music industry.

The group discussion that followed opened up questions about access to professional networks, the uneven distribution of labour and career-making opportunities and indeed about the gendered assumptions that shape debates around musical talent and excellence as well as the difficulty of sustaining artistic work within precarious economic conditions. There was a strong sense that opportunities in music are never simply about talent or ambition but that they are shaped by who gets invited into rooms in the first place, who has time to take unpaid or underpaid work and who is encouraged to experiment and allowed to fail, while others have to repeatedly prove that they deserve to be there.

At the same time, the discussion did not reduce participants to experiences of exclusion. There was also humour, generosity, practical advice and a sense of shared strategy. The collectives involved had already built spaces where people could learn from one another and where professional development did not have to be separated from mutual aid or shared political commitments to gender equality and social justice more broadly. This is one of the things that interests me the most about grassroots music collectives: they often work with very limited resources, but they generate forms of social and creative abundance that are difficult to measure through conventional ideas of ‘impact’.

Music, community and place

The second workshop took place in Edinburgh with a grassroots music collective working to build a sustainable local music scene while especially engaging with disenfranchised young people. Here, the conversation took a different yet very much related shape. Rather than focusing primarily on gender and access to music spaces, we spoke about the precariousness and the joys of grassroots community arts work—from the emotional investment, the funding pressures, the exhaustion, the need for trust. Yet it was also about the many moments of connection that make the work feel necessary and rewarding despite its difficulties.

This workshop foregrounded the relationship between music, place and community. Building a sustainable music scene is not only about programming events or supporting artists, although those things matter deeply, of course. It is also about creating conditions in which people who might otherwise be excluded from cultural participation can see music as something available to them. Importantly, this includes young people who have been pushed to the margins by education systems, economic inequality, urban regeneration pressures or simply by the lack of access to safe creative spaces. The collective’s work showed how music can become a way of building these relationships in a caring and sustainable manner without romanticising the very real, structural challenges involved.

Much of our discussion centred on the tension between care and sustainability. Grassroots work is often driven by people who give far more than they are paid for, and sometimes far more than they can afford to give. A commonly shared language of passion can obscure this kind of labour. Here, participants spoke evocatively about the difficulty of maintaining boundaries between their different work and personal commitments, the pressure of short-term funding cycles that can severely constrain grassroots possibilities and the need to support not only the communities being served, but also the organisers and facilitators, artists and volunteers who make the work possible.

And yet, joy was again central to this conversation. There was joy in seeing young people find their voice, in watching a local scene become more connected and in making something happen despite limited resources. This joy should not be mistaken for a simple solution to structural constraints – which often is cloaked in accommodating discourses of resilience to precariousness – but it should not be overlooked either. It is part of what sustains grassroots cultural work and what makes it politically significant, too. Joy, in this context, is not an escape from structural inequality but a way people survive it, challenge it and indeed build otherwise.

The significance of collaborative research

Both workshops were outcomes of my research collaboration with the respective grassroots collectives, but they were also data points within it. In this sense, they were not simply events organised after the ‘real’ part of the research had been finalised; that is, merely as a form of dissemination. Rather, they were part of the research process itself: spaces that brought together differently positioned artists, creative producers and local organisers; spaces where knowledge was produced collaboratively through conversation, practice, creative experimentation and shared reflection. They allowed me to think with and alongside the collectives rather than only about them.

This kind of immersed, collaborative research requires attention to relationships. It also requires a willingness to sit with and work across difference as our experiences and relationships to the music industry have certainly differed while also sharing deeply held beliefs about a more open and just creative sector. For me, these workshops affirmed that music collectives are not only responses to crisis or institutional exclusions but also sites where new possibilities and alternative futures can be crafted.

They ask what skills can be shared, which forms of professionalism might be reimagined and what kinds of creative, organisational and care work are needed to build more inclusive and sustainable ways of making music. What struck me across these two workshops was how both collectives engage with inequalities in the music industry: sometimes by opening doors into existing structures, and sometimes by asking whether those structures should remain as they are.

The workshops highlighted here thus offer a glimpse into how these questions are negotiated in practice. Through the sounds made and stories shared, the issues debated and those left unresolved, they showed how questions of inequality and care become part of the everyday work of making music together. They also illustrate what can emerge when research aims to create space for exchange between analysis and practice and for different forms of knowledge and experience to be brought into conversation.