Feeding on these trends is the now multitrillion-dollar wellness industry, which has seen exponential growth in recent decades. At its core is the commodification of self-care, where health services and products are packaged, marketed, and sold as consumer goods. Booming amongst corporate HR, it encompasses everything related to self-actualised health, ranging from training methods and pop performance psychology to appropriated consumer versions of spirituality and mindfulness (aptly termed McMindfulness by Purser, 2019). For many music colleges too, these are the closest-at-hand service providers for limiting students’ health issues. As a result, colleges sometimes accidentally promote the included lifestyle branding and the encouragement to invest in flashy solutions that promise to enhance health and performance. This self-improvement pressure is particularly potent for musicians who already subscribe to an intense and competitive practice culture. The danger is that it promotes a wellness consumption spiral, as any number of individual problems can be uncovered through enough of the self-exploration that the industry promotes, only to continuously sell you the guides to rebuild. A similar approach exists in instrumental teaching, as teachers sometimes pick apart a student to properly reconstruct them from the ground up. If this fails, the student can simply be deemed not to have done it right or not to have stuck with it long enough. Wellness programmes often employ the same circular reasoning.

Wellness is, after all, now a moral lifestyle. When institutions in good faith promote the healthy musician, they inadvertently often promote the wellness industry version of this lifestyle, along with all its unrealistic promises of easily commercialised solutions.