Richard Florida, creative class guru, recently released a preliminary report on Music Clusters (view Florida’s Report here).
There is a growing, mainly qualitative, literature on music scenes. Historians have noted the tendency of musicans and artists to cluster together Mark (1998). The term “music scene” was orginally used to describe the musical genres associated with mid‐20th century crossroads music locations which brought migrating, largely rural, folk and blues based musical talent to major cities and in contact with larger audiences, radio stations, commerical venues, recording studios, agents, producers, and music entrepreneurs. Examples of this include: the New Orleans and jazz, Nashville country, Memphis in blues and soul, rockabilly, and Detroit in Motown and roots rock.
Interesting to note Florida’s mention on the lack of quantitative information existing about music clusters worldwide – this despite the fact that there are many cities recognized as being musical ‘meccas’. Florida goes on to provide a working definition of music ’scenes’…
Bennett and Peterson (2004) define music scenes as “the context in which clusters of producers, musicians, and fans collectively share their common musical tastes and collectively distinguish themselves from others.” Clark, Rothfield and Silver (2008) add that scenes are “modes of organizing cultural production and consumption” that ”foster certain shared values and tastes, certain ways of relating to one another and legitimating what one is doing or not doing.” While examining music scenes is useful and important (and a key element of our broader project), this research note focuses on the factors associated with observed concentrations of employed muscians. Other, more qualitative research will probe the nature of scenes and the actors and networks that comprise them.
Some would argue that scenes are precursors to ‘clusters’, if we were to apply economic theory to a very unique system, such as music scenes. I would propose that music ’scenes’ are actually the economic equivalent of clusters, in a much more organic and natural sense.
While it will be interesting to see more research on the topic of music ‘clusters’, I do wonder whether an effort to create and maintain a true music ‘cluster’ (in the economic sense of the word) could be the death of the creative music scene as many have come to know.
