An expanding social science literature examines how digital platforms are changing capitalist exchange and production, disrupting industries, occupations and employment relationships. By quickly matching buyers and sellers, digital market intermediaries expand the ‘gig economy’ by encouraging outsourcing (Aloisi, 2018), liberalising employment relations (Forde et al., 2017), contributing to the re-commodification of labour and imposing more intense competition on workers (Wood et al., 2019). While theorists of the sharing economy emphasise the egalitarian ethos of some platforms (Schor et al., 2016), theorists of platform capitalism predict the spread of ‘winner takes all’ markets dominated by large players (Moazed & Johnson, 2016; Srnicek, 2017). Literature shows that the prevalence of labour-based platforms remains limited. Huws et al. (2016) find few European workers have pursued platform work full-time. Katz and Krueger (2016) find only 0.5% of American workers identify customers through an online intermediary. Wallerstein et al. (2019) find that between 1% and 4% of workers in the US, Japan and Europe see platform-based gig work as their primary source of income.
Surprisingly little is known about the limits of the platform economy. Here, we examine freelance live music, because it prima facie appears ripe for ‘platformisation’, as PwC (2015) characterises arts and entertainment generally. Live music has long been a ‘gig’ economy, organised as disparate one-off engagements with infrequent direct employment. Other aspects of the music industry (namely recorded music) incubated early platform pioneers like MySpace. Informal networks are important in live music, and there is an ample supply of under-employed musicians trying to overcome barriers to market entry, creating an incentive for platforms to open-up the
field. Moreover, we uncover attempts to bring platform functionality to live music, and identify new actors describing themselves as ‘platforms’. Yet, we find that intermediaries have only partly digitalised and those that most resemble labour-based online platforms occupy small and low-value segments of the market.
With some exceptions, there has been little theoretical discussion on the limits to platformisation. We propose that the structural features of markets may create external barriers to the growth of labour-based online platforms. To evidence this, we present a dataset including interviews and a systematic review of 168 intermediary websites in Germany and the UK. We demonstrate the relatively weak presence of platform functionality in these markets, despite efforts to further platformisation. We explore the qualitative aspects of work in these markets that frustrate platformisation: the task, its valuation and the organisational field. Our main contribution is to show how the limits to platformisation do not only reflect resistance by workers or inadaptability by entrepreneurs, but also historical and organisational characteristics that render certain industries resistant to the platform model.
