Allan Watson

A central concern of media scholars has been the discursive and economic power of a small number of transnational media corporations (TNMCs). In this paper, we advance research on TNMC power through a novel empirical analysis of their global-spatial organization, reflected in their corporate global office networks. Our findings reveal both global and regional corporate strategies and, further, demonstrate how US new media firms are expanding into Chinese global media cities to penetrate this emerging media market. Our analyses provide a crucial macro-level overview of the structural power of TNMCs to consolidate control over the global network of media.

Recent commentaries on the music industry have emphasised the importance of social media in creating a monetisable fan base. However, no quantitative evidence yet exists regarding the correlation between social media follower numbers and artist income. Using a unique dataset of 255 artists signed to a large UK-based independent music publisher, we undertake growth curve modelling to provide a novel quantitative analysis of the correlation between following across major social media and streaming platforms and royalty income from music rights. Findings from our modelling suggest that while there is no correlation between numbers of followers on major social media platforms and an artist’s total royalty earnings, there is a strong correlation between numbers of followers and royalties from music streaming specifically. Set in the context of the high level of income precarity being experienced amongst independent artists, this finding suggests that a positive co-evolution is occurring between social media platforms and music streaming with potentially significant increases in artist royalty incomes resulting from increases in followers. Similarly, our modelling identifies a strong correlation between an artist’s following on streaming platforms and total live music royalties, supporting the notion of a positive co-evolution between streaming and live music incomes.

The music industry is a frontier sector of platformisation. Having undergone two previous waves of platform reintermediation in the form of peer-to-peer networks and streaming platforms, a third wave of platform reintermediation is now underway, as a constellation of MusicTech start-ups, fuelled by angel investors and venture capitalists, experiment with digital technologies allowing users to consume or create music in novel ways. Drawing on interviews with key actors in London and Stockholm, we reveal that an accommodation between tech disruptors and industry incumbents was achieved during the second wave of platform intermediation. However, emerging links between incumbents and MusicTech start-ups in the third wave are overshadowed by a chronic tension that is constituent of intellectual property capitalism and amplified by the legacy effects of preceding waves of platform reintermediation. The ownership of intellectual property confers significant advantages to incumbents when challenged by platform incursion, with copyright assets robustly asserted through publishing rights and defended in law. Set in this context, our examination of the music industry as a pioneer platform industry entering a new wave of platform reintermediation reveals key challenges for both incumbents and start-ups in other sectors of the economy as they too enter broader processes of platformisation.

The notion of ‘regional’ economic growth through the creative industries is rendered problematic by the socio-geographical complexities that characterize them. Addressing an important conceptual and empirical deficit in our understanding of the creative industries at and beyond the regional level, this paper develops a novel and detailed examination of the music economy in North West England. Uncovering a significant disconnection with the mainstream industry in London – an obligatory point of symbolic validation and passage to wider markets – it is argued that policy is required to support professionals in developing socio-spatial networking strategies to cope with their disconnected status.

Despite a significant multidisciplinary body of work on emotional labour, its application to geographical debates regarding space remains thin, and the role of emotional labour in the interrelations that produce space is poorly understood. In contrast, a substantial literature has developed in social and cultural geography concerned with ‘affective atmospheres’, understood as the relational and collective nature of affects. Within this literature, consideration has been given to the ways in which atmospheres might be staged to affect people’s moods for a variety of artistic and commercial reasons. Placing the concepts of emotional labour and atmosphere into dialogue, this paper offers a relational account of the film set as a space in which directors, cast and crew engage in performances of individual and collective emotional labour in order to stage particular atmospheres. Drawing on primary qualitative data, we present the on-set work of film directors as attending to three relational projects: comportment, corpsing and conflict. In so doing, this paper offers a new understanding of the staging of atmosphere through performances of collective emotional labour. Such a perspective goes beyond the material to consider the emotional qualities of space and brings agency and intentionally to the fore in accounts of atmosphere.

This article advances research on external urban relations by drawing attention to the role of temporary project-based economic organisation in the formation of inter-firm links between cities. Through a novel empirical examination of (trans)national co-production in the motion picture industry, we reveal how such projects transcend the boundaries of individual production clusters and link urban centres within specific network configurations. Stripping away the ‘top layer’ of Hollywood’s commercially successful feature films, we undertake a social network analysis of film productions in four markets across three continents – China, Germany, France and Brazil – to provide a unique comparative analysis of networked urban geographies. Our findings show that film production networks are grounded in existing structural relations between cities. The spatial forms of these networks range from monocentric in the case of the French film market, to dyadic in the case of China and Brazil, to polycentric in the case of the German film market. Conceptually, we argue that adopting an inter-firm project-based approach can account for the ways in which complex patterns of inter-firm production relations accumulate to form (trans)national city networks. Viewing city networks in this way provides an important alternative perspective to dominant conceptualisations of global urban networks as formed through corporate intra-firm relations.