Drawing from debates in economic geography on relational and organisational proximity as a substitute for geographical proximity, the paper explores characteristics of knowledge transfer in London's recorded music industry through an examination of organisational connections on local and global scales. The paper demonstrates that knowledge transfer within the industry occurs simultaneously across multiple geographical scales, with certain organisational connections facilitating the transfer of tacit knowledge across organisational boundaries. However, the paper argues that these connections do not offer the same scope for trust as is afforded by frequent face‐to‐face contact and therefore offer only a partial substitute for geographical proximity.

This paper considers an alternative dimension of world city network formation, driven by transnational media corporations rather than advanced producer services. Through an empirical analysis of the office networks of leading media corporations, the paper measures the integration of global media cities into the world city network in 2011. An interlocking network model is employed to determine the connectedness of cities within media networks, and a principal components analysis used to identify six media fields that represent the locational strategies of transnational media corporations. The results highlight the regionality of global corporate media strategies, which are firmly anchored in the major home markets of North America, Europe and Japan but reach out to other world regions through strategically positioned media cities.

Urban geography, both material and imagined, is a crucial mediating factor in the production and consumption of music. The city provides the concrete places which offer spaces for musical creativity. While certain spaces such as recording studios are specifically organised for this purpose, music is produced in many spaces, from the bedroom, garage or home studio, to community and youth centres, to street corners and clubs. Cities also sustain networks that foster and support musical creativity. These networks come together in locales of creativity and production to find fixity in the concrete spaces of the city. At the same time the networks are fluid, with musical knowledge moving within and between cities through the mobility of skilled creatives and new technologies. A growing body of geographical literature is attempting to foreground the spatial in music studies by focusing on local scenes, musical production, and the particularity of certain places. This article aims to provide an overview of current geographical research and debates on music, with an explicit focus on the role of urban space in musical creativity, and on the musically creative networks at work within and between cities. We argue that there is a need to situate creativity more squarely in its material and embodied contexts of production and to consider the ways in which creative individuals interact in complex ways with urban physical form, technology, and other actors in networks of creativity and production.

From the late 1990s, the establishment of a new relational 'turn' in the study of world city connectedness in globalisation has run parallel to the wider relational turn occurring in economic geography. Early work, built firmly upon a qualitative approach to the collection and analyses of new intercity datasets, considered cities as being constituted by their relations with other cities. Subsequent research, however, would take a strong quantitative turn, best demonstrated through the articulation of the inter-locking world city network (ILWCN) 'model' for measuring relations between cities. In this paper, we develop a critique of research based around the ILWCN model, arguing that this 'top down' quantitative approach has now reached a theoretical impasse. To address this impasse, we argue for a move away from structural approaches in which the firm is the main unit of analysis, towards qualitative approaches in which individual agency and practice are afforded greater importance.

Recording studios are distinctive spaces in which artists are encouraged to expose their emotional selves in intimate moments of musical creativity and performance. In this paper, we focus on how music producers and recording engineers perform emotional labour as part of the "performative engineering" of this musical creativity and performance. Through emotional labour performances, producers and engineers create recording studios as emotional spaces, characterised by trust and tolerance. This is often referred to, by recording studio staff and musicians, as creating the right "vibe". We highlight two forms of emotional labour as particularly pertinent to "creating the right vibe": emotional neutrality and empathetic emotional labour. Emotional labour performances help to re-construct the recording studio as a space free of the social and feeling rules that otherwise shape our emotional landscape, and allow musicians to produce their desired musical performance.