Building Ontario's music economies

This report argues that changes to the music industry, in the wake of new digital technologies, and a declining market for recorded music is leveling the playing field for cities and allowing new locations to compete with the established centers of music production. [...] The prime justification for the use of qualitative interviews comes from the exploratory nature of the research and specific calls from the relevant literature, including the work of Markusen and King (2003) who advocate qualitative research to uncover the micro-geographies of artists and the finding of Wolfe and Gertler (2004) that the dynamics of industrial clusters can only be properly captured [...] Music and musicians are also catalysts of technological innovation as well with notable examples including the iPod and iPhone and a host of breakthroughs in e- commerce and the growing online marketplace, which stem from the recording industry developing the infrastructure to sell music online. [...] In the last ten years the structural and geographic landscape of the global recorded music industry has been radically altered by the introduction of digital music files or ‘MP3s’ and the practice of ‘sharing’ copyrighted music over the Internet with programs such as Napster. [...] Although several aspects of the so called ‘MP3 crisis’, including the rise of ‘gift economies’ and the post-MP3 restructuring of the North American recorded music industry have been addressed by scholars1, the rise of independent music production and the spatial ‘remixing’ of the music industry, have yet to be addressed.