Just go and do it: a blockchain technology “live project” for nascent music entrepreneurs

Reynolds (2005) states that punk-unlike post-punk-was not particularly radical from a musical perspective. What was undoubtedly radical, as Laing (2015) notes, was punk's insistence on being distributed and marketed as overtly “independent” music. In this chapter, we, the authors, place our own pedagogic practice within Laing’s punk perspective, detailing a “live project” creating music enterprises using blockchain technology. Our starting point is the eschewal of the dominant discourse of entrepreneurship in favour of a discourse relating to creative autonomy. We consider definitions of punk in our opening section, focusing on punk from the UK and USA and giving particular emphasis to control of the means of production rather than punk as musical genre. We then go on to critique the dominant academic and popular discourses of enterprise, examining the development of the academic discipline and the behavioural understanding of entrepreneurship. We make the case that punk practice can be viewed through such a lens. In the second half of the chapter, we consider approaches to enterprise learning and pedagogy, illustrating our own slant on the practice through an entrepreneurial live project, co-created with students at Middlesex University, which makes use of blockchain technology.