Unveiling Inequality: The Hidden Dynamics of Music Festival Internships
Are music festival internships welcome to everyone?
Music festivals are often seen as collective spaces that are ‘welcoming to everyone’.
In the pursuit of diversity and inclusion, the spotlight has predominantly focused on diversifying festival audiences. Still, music festival organisers tend to be male, white and from privileged backgrounds.
A crucial yet overlooked aspect thus lies in reshaping the staff composition of music festivals themselves.
In a new paper, Britt Swartjes and Pauwke Berkers highlight this oversight, emphasizing the need to scrutinize backstage dynamics at music festivals.
They do so by looking at the role of internships.
While internships are often framed as pivotal gateways into the music festival sector, offering important avenues for experiential learning, internships may inadvertently reinforce existing exclusions.
“To get into the music festival sector it helps to be highly educated, from a middle-class background, and to have the ‘right’ social network (or the ability to create it) and to wear the ‘right’ clothes and like the ‘right’ music.”
Through qualitative interviews with both interns who became music festival organisers and those who exited the sector after their internship, their research unravels the nuanced fabric of inclusion and exclusion within music festival internships.
Their findings reveal a complex interplay of factors shaping individuals' trajectories, including economic, social, and cultural capital.
Or in other words: to get into the music festival sector it helps to be highly educated, from a middle-class background, and to have the ‘right’ social network (or the ability to create it) and to wear the ‘right’ clothes and like the ‘right’ music.
Gender dynamics in particular emerged as a salient determinant: while men often tried to move into the music festival sector or at least seemed interested in doing so, only women gravitated towards rejection of a career in the music festival industry.
This is mainly due to masculine organisational cultures that reinforce the notion of a music festival organiser as a competitive, chatty and risk-taking man.
Despite deviations from this norm when looking at positions ‘lower’ in the hierarchy, the top positions are usually occupied by people who fulfil this norm. E
fforts to foster diversity and inclusion therefore necessitate a fundamental restructuring of the prevailing cultural-normative framework.
“Merely increasing access to internships for marginalized groups fails to address the underlying dynamics of inclusion and exclusion.”
Reimagining the role of internships becomes imperative in this endeavor.
Rather than viewing internships as panaceas for inequality, Britt and Pauwke argue that people must critically examine their role within existing power structures especially by looking at what the internship experience actually looks like.
Merely increasing access to internships for marginalized groups fails to address the underlying dynamics of inclusion and exclusion.
Collective action emerges as a potent strategy in reshaping the landscape of music festivals. Initiatives like Keychange offer promising avenues for challenging entrenched inequalities within the industry.
In conclusion, by amplifying the voices of those who exit the sector, we can gain invaluable insights into the systemic barriers that hinder more diverse workforces in the music festival sector.
Moving forward, Britt and Pauwke argue that it is imperative to dismantle existing power structures and cultivate an environment that embraces diversity in all its facets.
Only then can music festivals truly resonate as inclusive spaces, and may become spaces for anyone.