https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1073-2550
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ABSTRACT
Using data on the emergence of music genres from 1970 to 2015, this paper examines the relative importance of related and unrelated diversification processes for symbolic knowledge creation. Modelling 33 urban music scenes from Northern America and Europe as network-based symbolic knowledge bases allows for the testing of whether new genres are related or unrelated to pre-existing knowledge bases. The results show that new music genres spawn mainly from local knowledge sources in the centre of music scenes. However, symbolic knowledge creation rarely happens without contributions of extra-local knowledge. These unrelated diversification processes are grounded in the anchoring of trends and fashions originating elsewhere.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors thank the editors and anonymous referees whose comments are highly appreciated. They also thank Bjørn Asheim and Ron Boschma for commenting on earlier presentations of the ideas behind this paper and encouraging the authors to pursue them at the International PhD course on Economic Geography (Utrecht 2014). Finally, the authors thank all music fans on last.fm who have contributed tags to the site and made this study possible.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
ORCID
Benjamin Klement http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1073-2550
Notes
1. After a site relaunch in 2015, six tags are displayed. The data acquisition started before the site relaunch.
2. For the cities included in this study, see Table A1 in Appendix A in the supplemental data online, which also shows the number of taggers using city-related tags for each city.
3. As artists sourced by city-related tags filled the database, the database also filled with genre-related tags which were used in this step. The top 100 artists of genre-related tags used for more than 20 artists in the database were included in the database.