Profiting from creativity?

Cultural districts and the challenge of authenticity: the case of Piedmont, Italy

“…This has important effects on the attraction capacity of tourists, audiences and, more importantly to us, further creative people, which in turn increases the creative capital already accumulated in those cities (Florida, 2002). In other words, cultural districts often function as 'magnets' (Scott, 2000) or 'artistic gravitation' areas (Menger, 1993), in which creative people (not necessarily engaged in the local district's peculiar specialized field) flow from other parts of the nation and the world (Florida, 2002;Power and Hallencreutz, 2004). This also allows the district to benefit of a frequent 'refresh' of people, ideas and creative styles, introducing innovation and preventing the district from the pathologies typical of an 'overembeddedness' condition (Uzzi, 1996).…”

The Evolution of Taipei’s Music Industry: Cluster and Network Dynamics in the Innovation Practices of the Music Industry

“…Taipei has evolved as a hybrid creative platform of the music industry within the Chinese-speaking region that incorporates both tensions and competence building. Although the existing literature has examined the cluster environment as a prerequisite for the facilitation of music innovation activities in advanced urban regions (Power and Hallencreutz, 2002;Power and Jansson, 2004;Scott, 1999), to an extent, current works downplay the tensions of the music cluster and the project network, which are evident in the innovation practices of music production in an Asian city context. This paper presents two significant contributions to addressing this gap and to the debate on urban cultural economies.…”

“…As Martin and Sunley (2006) indicated, path dependence and place dependence are co-constitutions. Thus, historical events are crucial to the initiation of place-specific conditions for the music industry cluster that encourage socioeconomic interactions among music communities (Maskell and Lorenzen, 2004), specialisation and localised learning (Storper, 1997) and an institutional environment (Power and Hallencreutz, 2002). These forces explicitly self-reinforce the path dependence and local clustering of the music industry.…”

“…In the context of globalising competition, Taipei has emerged as the innovation centre of pop music production because most of Taipei's music enterprises have successfully used the localised advantage of cluster and translocal networks to promote commercial music artists, such as Jay Chou, A-mei and Jolin Tsai, across China, Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia (Chua, 2004;Fung, 2008). Although the international music corporations in the global city-regions constantly extend the translocal production network to contest the regional market, place-specific creative milieus are still flourishing (Power and Hallencreutz, 2002;Scott, 1999Scott, , 2004Watson, 2008). Although the cluster and network dynamics are intertwined with the innovation practices of the music industry, the negotiations of the cluster and network elements of the Taipei music industry are relatively less well known.…”

Regions and place: music, identity and place

“…Cities such as Nashville, having turned away from their musical history and identity, have again sought to brand themselves as 'Music Cities'. The growing interest in music in economic development policies can be traced back to a more general 'turn' to cultural industries as an important element of urban and regional development policies made in the early 1980s (for example, see Hudson, 1995;Leyshon et al, 1998;Brown et al, 2000;Gibson, 2002;Power and Hallencreutz, 2002;Gibson and Connell, 2003). In the remainder of this section, I will mainly focus on these issues in the context of the United Kingdom, with some reference to other European experiences.…”