Agency on the Streets and Beyond: ft. Young Music Buskers in Singapore

Abstract

In recent years, music busking has gained traction in Singapore, as evident from the influx of young music buskers. Yet, there has bee n a noticeable dearth of literature on music busking in Singapore. While research about the arts in Singapore typically attribute developments in the arts to policy changes, this paper locates the transformation of the busking scene in the agency of young music buskers. Drawn from semi structured interviews with 24 young music buskers and framed with Bourdieu’s theory of practice, this paper aims to explicate how these buskers exercise their agency in the busking scene. First, they exercise agency in transforming common perceptions of buskers from “beggars” to performers through the accumulation of performance capital, a scene specific form of embodied cultural capital . Second, amateur musicians in the busking scene exercise agency in using busking as a means to become professional musicians in the music industry. This paper finds that although buskers can exercise a considerable amount of agency in accumulating economic, social and cultural capital in the busking scene, they face significant difficulties in exchanging these forms of capital for commercial and artistic success in the music industry