This article utilises primarily archival sources to explore unofficial networks in the Stalinist music world. It analyses the relationship between the patrons, clients and brokers whose personal interactions helped an inefficient and over-burdened music bureaucracy to accomplish its two basic tasks: administering musical production and ensuring the material wellbeing of Soviet composers, musicologists and musicians. Musicians used unofficial networks to resolve professional disputes with bureaucratic institutions and to acquire material support, especially scarce apartments. Because they were used to manipulating bureaucratic procedures, unofficial networks sometimes came under attack. Investigating these ubiquitous informal interactions therefore contributes to our understanding both of the Stalinist music system and the cyclical campaigns to purge the Soviet arts.