Source document: https://docs-lawep.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/1697795180351.pdf (Grenada)
This article was downloaded by: [84.39.117.57] On: 22 August 2015, At: 02:15 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: 5 Howick Place, London, SW1P 1WG Cultural Trends Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccut20 Networks of value in electronic music: SoundCloud, London, and the importance of place Daniel Allingtona, Byron Dueckb & Anna Jordanousc a Department of Arts and Cultural Industries, Faculty of Arts, Creative Industries, and Education, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK b Department of Music, Faculty of Arts, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK c School of Computing, University of Kent, Chatham Maritime, UK Published online: 04 Aug 2015.
Click for updates To cite this article: Daniel Allington, Byron Dueck & Anna Jordanous (2015) Networks of value in electronic music: SoundCloud, London, and the importance of place, Cultural Trends, 24:3, 211-222, DOI: 10.1080/09548963.2015.1066073 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09548963.2015.1066073 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform.
Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content.
Versions of published Taylor & Francis and Routledge Open articles and Taylor & Francis and Routledge Open Select articles posted to institutional or subject repositories or any other third-party website are without warranty from Taylor & Francis of any kind, either expressed or implied, including, but not limited to, warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement.
Any opinions and views expressed in this article are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis.

The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information.
Taylor & Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.
Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms- and-conditions It is essential that you check the license status of any given Open and Open Select article to confirm conditions of access and use.

Downloaded by [84.39.117.57] at 02:15 22 August 2015 Cultural Trends, 2015 Vol.

24, No.
3, 211–222, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09548963.2015.1066073 Networks of value in electronic music: SoundCloud, London, and the importance of place Daniel Allingtona*, Byron Dueckb and Anna Jordanousc aDepartment of Arts and Cultural Industries, Faculty of Arts, Creative Industries, and Education, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK; bDepartment of Music, Faculty of Arts, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK; cSchool of Computing, University of Kent, Chatham Maritime, UK to a lesser extent, hip hop), While recent debate has often focused on a reiﬁed “cultural value” (whether opposed to or aligned with monetary value), this article treats “value” as a verb and investigates the acts of valuing in which people engage.
Through ethnographic research in London’s electronic music scene and social network analysis of the SoundCloud audio sharing website (which is dominated by electronic dance music and, it uncovers substantial patterns of geographical inequality.

London is found at the very centre of a network of valuing relationships, in which New York and Los Angeles occupy the next most privileged locations, followed by Berlin, Paris, and Chicago.
Cities outside Western Europe and the Anglophone world tend to occupy peripheral positions in the network.

This ﬁnding suggests that location plays a major role in the circulation of value, even when we might expect that role to have been curtailed by an ostensibly “placeless” medium for the distribution and valuing of music.
While there are reasons the metropolitan emplacedness of dance music – given the importance of the relationship between production, consumption, and live DJing – the privileging of particular cities also mirrors patterns of inequality in the wider cultural economy.

That London should appear so supremely privileged reﬂects both the exporting strength of British creative industries and the imbalanced nature of the UK’s cultural economy.
for Keywords: cultural value; electronic dance music; ethnography; social network analysis 1.

“Value” as noun and verb In a speech delivered at the British Library in 2013, the UK government minister then responsible for the arts afﬁrmed culture’s “instrumental, as well as intrinsic, value” before asserting the need to demonstrate “the value of culture to our economy” (Miller, 2013, n.p.).
The point made was, as the BBC put it, that “the arts world must make the case for public funding by focusing on its econ- omic, not artistic, value” (2013, n.p.

): an idea that was widely condemned as philistine, as in the complaint that “[i]nvestment … in the arts is not something the value of which can be determined by consulting a spreadsheet” (Massie, 2013, n.p.).
This exchange highlights the extent to which recent public debate on the arts has hinged on the word “value” used as a noun denoting a quan- tity.

The question has been of whether policy should focus on monetary value or on artistic value where cultural goods are concerned.1 By contrast, this article foregrounds the act of valuing, calling for attention to “value” as verb.2 It recognises that this act must take place within a social network, where “social network” is a *Corresponding author.
Email: daniel.allington@uwe.ac.uk © 2015 The Author(s).

Published by Taylor & Francis.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ Licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Downloaded by [84.39.117.57] at 02:15 22 August 2015 212 D. Allington et al.
generic term for various social formations that might otherwise be denoted by words such as “com- munity”, “coterie”, “circle”, “movement”, “scene”, or “milieu”.

Such social formations are funda- mental to cultural history and to cultural production in the contemporary world, and have been extensively theorised in the sociology of culture (c.f.

Becker, 1982; Bennett & Peterson, 2004; Bourdieu, 1996), and researched through a number of means, including formal social network analysis (e.g.
Anheier & Gerhards, 1991; de Nooy, 1999).

Moreover, scenes constituted as locally situated social networks have demonstrably played a key role in the establishment of many genres of popular music (for recent studies, see Crossley, 2008; Lena & Peterson, 2008, pp.

703–704, though the latter do not explicitly invoke social network terminology).
It could not be otherwise: as a recent report on the music industry argues, “talent … cannot exist unless it is recognised by others in a network” (Schifferes, Cunningham, & McAndrew, 2014, p. 15).
In wealthier societies and amongst global elites today, such expressions of recognition or acts of valuing often take place through online interactions, as part of a wider cultural shift that has enabled or (depending upon one’s point of view) obliged creative workers to undertake tasks for which they might previously have relied on other professionals: for example, one report found 64% of pro- fessional musicians in the UK to “us[e] web-based technologies to produce, promote, and distribute their music” (DHA Communications, 2012, p. 11).
However, it remains to be seen whether the trend for digital do-it-yourself has opened up or closed down opportunities.

At the same time as attempt- ing to move conversations away from a reiﬁed and isolable “cultural value” and towards the socially situated acts of cultural valuing whose aggregate effects give rise to that deceptively stable concept (see Allington, 2013), this article also therefore attempts to understand empirically how such acts may be mediated by online and ofﬂine contexts.
In particular, to what extent does geography inﬂu- ence acts of valuing in a location-agnostic online network?

We chose electronic music for our case study because forms of electronic music have been par- ticularly rapid in their embrace of digital media whilst retaining an emphasis on forms of live per- formance.
While we initially intended to study all forms of electronic music, we rapidly became aware that club- or rave-based genres were dominant on the website that we had elected to study, for which reason our study of electronic music came to prioritise study of electronic dance music.

2.

The SoundCloud website Our study of online interactions focused on SoundCloud: a social networking and music-sharing site launched in 2008 by Alexander Ljung and Eric Walhforss (SoundCloud, 2014).
It has become the market leader among audio-only content aggregators, especially for electronic dance music and (to a lesser extent) hip hop.3 As well as allowing users to post audio tracks – original record- ings, remixes, mashups, and so on – and listen to tracks posted by other users, it facilitates engage- ment in various valuing activities: “following” users, reposting tracks posted by other users, “favouriting” tracks, commenting on tracks, and engaging in conversations with other users through such comments.
All the active producers of electronic music among our interviewees used it as a major means by which to publish and publicise their work (one who was no longer an active producer had formerly used MySpace in the same way).

3.

Methods In order to study online valuing as part of a much broader sphere of musical interactions, we carried out interviewing and observational research in the London electronic music scene.

In our interviews, we asked about value-producing activities.
While observing performances in live music venues, we looked for valuing behaviours, noting (for example) the different modes of bodily comportment that indicated positive evaluation of music in different contexts.

Downloaded by [84.39.117.57] at 02:15 22 August 2015 Cultural Trends 213 London was chosen as a site for qualitative research because of its reputation as a centre for electronic music.
Since the early 1990s, many of the most internationally inﬂuential genres of electronic dance music have originated in London, including jungle/drum and bass, UK garage, dubstep, and grime.

Moreover, live music venues in London host many forms of electronic music, including experimental electronic music, live coding, electronica, ambient, etc., so that we could be assured of a wide variety both of interviewees and of sites for observational research.
The choice turned out to be fortuitous, because, as we found, London appears to be a uniquely privileged location for the production of value in electronic music.

3.1.

Identifying “electronic music” We adopted an emic approach to what would count as electronic music.

On SoundCloud, music is less often marked as “electronic” than as belonging to a speciﬁc genre identiﬁable as electronic.

Our research subjects also tended to talk about particular types of electronic music – trance, techno, grime, etc.
– rather than about “electronic music” in the abstract.

The following points are broadly characteristic of the music whose production and consumption we found ourselves to be studying: (1) Absence of or lack of emphasis on lyrics and original vocals.

(2) Individual tracks primarily identiﬁed with a producer rather than with a singer, rapper/ MC, or band.
(3) Sound is dominated by electronic instruments and digitally generated sounds (especially so-called “software instruments”) and optionally also by digital samples of vocals and/or conventional instruments.

(4) Designed for play as part of a continuous DJ mix, and not just as discrete tracks.

(5) For the most part, suitable for dancing.

3.2.


Qualitative methods We conducted eight one-on-one semi-structured, audio-recorded interviews, involving ﬁve musi- cians who produced original tracks or had done so in recent years (most of whom also worked as DJs), a club DJ and an online DJ who did not produce original tracks, and the artistic director of a live music venue.
We also observed and took notes at three electronic music performances, and interviewed a panel of three musicians in front of an audience at a public event in early June, 2014.

The panellists were Tim Ingham of ambient band Winterlight, Chad McKinney of live coding band Glitch Lich, and the instrumental grime DJ, promoter, and producer Paul Lynch, better known as Slackk; questions were asked by ethnomusicologist Luis-Manuel Garcia, an expert on electronic dance music.

3.3.
3.3.

Quantitative methods For the analysis presented in this article, we downloaded all publicly available data on 150,000 randomly chosen SoundCloud accounts, including comments left on tracks and information on who followed – and who was followed by – whom.
Limitations of the SoundCloud applications programming interface prevented us from being able to track all the users that followed the most popular SoundCloud users in our sample, so quantitative analysis focused on the members of our sample and the users they followed.

Downloaded by [84.39.117.57] at 02:15 22 August 2015 214 D. Allington et al.

Assessment of location relied on information that SoundCloud members provided about themselves, and some data cleaning was necessary.
For example, some users gave neighbour- hoods within cities as their city location (e.g.

“Surry Hills” instead of “Sydney”) while others were divided in their use of English and non-English names for the same city (e.g.

“Al Qahirah” and “Cairo”) or used variant abbreviations for city names (e.g.

“NYC” for “New York”).

Where such discrepancies were observed, the smaller or less frequently used cat- egory was merged into the more frequently used one.

4.

Findings 4.1.
4.

Findings 4.1.

Qualitative ﬁndings Emergent themes in interviews included the importance of scenes as valuing communities, the contrast and possible mismatch between cultural value and monetary value, the value of music-making as an activity in its own right, and an “art for art’s sake” ethos that was espoused by some interviewees and disavowed by others.
However, in this article, we shall focus on the theme that emerged around geographical location, and the association of value with particular locations.

At the live event, the three performers were asked whether physical location was still important, given digital communications media.

All three appeared to suggest both that it was and that it was not: Tim Ingham: I largely exist in a bedroom and that bedroom could be anywhere.
I’m signed to a label from Oakland in California and I’ve probably played more gigs in Italy than I do anywhere else.

Chad McKinney: I live in Brighton and my brother lives in New York City and Cole [Ingraham] lives in Shanghai.

So it matters very little where we are.

… Like, we started in California, in Oakland actually.

Paul Lynch: We run a club night and it’s kind of based around the London grime scene, theoretically.

But … we can be playing people like Rabit, who’s from Houston in Texas.
Or a fellow called Strict Face, who we play a lot of, and he’s from Adelaide in Australia.4 At the same time that these accounts appear to assert that it is not important for the individual music-maker to be in any speciﬁc location, they orient to clearly located centres in the global cul- tural economy: London, New York, and the San Francisco Bay Area.
In other words, digital media make a difference not by eroding the importance of place, but by connecting people to places that they do not physically inhabit.

One does not have to be in London to be part of the “London grime scene”, it seems – but it remains the London grime scene.
Another of our interviewees also seemed to be in two minds about the importance of locality, insisting both on the existence of a sound speciﬁc to London and on the importance of international exchange between London and other localities.

Indeed, London appeared to be regarded as an especially privileged location by most interviewees.
This was surprising, not only given Hesmondhalgh’s (1998) ﬁnding that the production of electronic dance music (or “dance music”, as it was known at the time) was one of the least centralised branches of the British recorded music industry in the 1990s, but also given an expectation that decentrali- sation would have increased now that it is possible to produce electronic music on consumer level computer hardware without even the need for a microphone (let alone a recording studio) and to distribute music of all kinds via free-to-use websites such as SoundCloud (appar- ently bypassing the practical need for a record label).
Nonetheless, several interviewees had moved to London from elsewhere and found their new location to be a great advantage.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, one compared London very favourably to the rural location on the west coast of Ireland from which she came.

More surprisingly, another compared it favourably Downloaded by [84.39.117.57] at 02:15 22 August 2015 Cultural Trends 215 to New York, having found audiences for experimental electronic music to be vastly larger in London.
As Elafros (2013, p. 474) shows in her study of the Toronto DJ scene, there can be substantial differences between locations within a city with regard to what audiences perceive to be accep- table musical styles.

Our interviewees appeared to see East London as an especially good location for music of the kind they most valued, favouring Shoreditch – an intensively gentriﬁed area strongly associated with the creative industries – in particular.
One interviewee noted that audi- ences in Shoreditch were open to less “commercial” music than those in the West End, where his previous regular DJ job had been.

Two interviewees had moved from a venue south of the river to a gentrifying area bordering Shoreditch: a move that one explained was carried out in order to shorten the journey for the East London-based “hipsters” (i.e.

middle class bohemians) who constituted a major part of their audience.
A third stated that he had been unable to connect with other musicians before moving to London, and identiﬁed a particular venue within Shore- ditch as particularly important in the musical relationships he had formed.

Yet another runs a venue in Shoreditch.

Such factors may be particularly important for electronic dance music.
Because it primarily exists in order to facilitate dancing and related forms of sociality, its consumption is closely tied to particular kinds of venues, especially the club, which typically builds its clientele by playing a speciﬁc genre or sub-genre capable of drawing a crowd in its particular locale.
More- over, while the international stars of electronic dance music genres generate income much like rock stars, that is, by releasing heavily promoted albums, touring, and headlining festivals, and are for that reason geographically footloose, most producers can only monetise their art through regular DJing, with a “residency” at a single club generally being the most efﬁcient way in which to achieve this.
In consequence, electronic dance music genres are characterised by a particularly strong association between producers, consumers, and places (exempliﬁed by the Chicago house scene, which began with Frankie Knuckles’s famous residency at the Ware- house gay club).
The association with place (which has parallels in the history of jazz; see Becker, 2004) means that the potential for the development of such genres is severely restricted without appropriate venues, as evidenced by the difﬁculties several of our interviewees faced before their entrance into the (East) London scene.5 Thus, decentralisation of the production of electronic dance music tracks may have less geographical impact than might be supposed upon the production of their value.
The privileged status of London in the production of value is explored on a quantitative level in the following section, in relation to a single expression of value: “following” on the Sound- Cloud website.
While our interviewees distinguished between valuing behaviours according to the amount of engagement involved, for instance attaching more importance to informed judge- ments than to generic expressions of approval, it was clear that even the most minimal acts of valuing – such as playing a track on SoundCloud without even clicking the “like” button – matter to them as musicians.

Following a SoundCloud user appears to involve relatively little engagement as compared to writing a comment.
However, it makes the follower publicly ident- iﬁable as an admirer of the user being followed, and as such involves an investment in the sym- bolic capital of the followed.

4.2.

Quantitative ﬁndings 4.2.1.

General observations Our quantitative research focused on comments and on follow relationships: cases where one SoundCloud user signed up to receive updates from another, and in doing so became publicly Downloaded by [84.39.117.57] at 02:15 22 August 2015 216 D. Allington et al.
and visibly identiﬁable as a “follower” of the latter.

This article focuses on the follow relation- ships.

Interviews with our informants suggested that following was regarded as a form of valuing.

As on other social media sites such as Twitter and YouTube, a large number of followers or subscribers is generally regarded as an indicator of success.
Only 12 per cent of accounts in the sample had uploaded publicly available tracks, although those accounts tended to have more followers: across the whole sample, accounts had a mean of 19 followers and a median of 1 follower, with a standard deviation of 2071; among accounts with public tracks, the mean number of followers was 127 while the median was 7 and the standard deviation was 6087.6 As the low medians and high standard deviations indicate, mean numbers of followers were skewed upwards by a minority of SoundCloud accounts with very high numbers of followers.
Indeed, nearly 48 per cent of all accounts in our sample had no fol- lowers, and just under 99 per cent had fewer than 100.

Just over one in a hundred sampled accounts had between 100 and 999 followers, while roughly one in a thousand had between 1000 and 9999, and a mere eight had ﬁve-ﬁgure followings, supporting the complaint that, com- pared to conventional media, new media are an inefﬁcient means for musicians to reach audiences (see Banks, Ebrey, & Toynbee 2014, p. 29).
There were just three sampled accounts with over 100,000 followers, all of them representing entities with a presence in the conventional media: one belonged to a very popular but long-defunct American rock band, another to a British singer-songwriter who had appeared on BBC radio numerous times, and the third to a popular British magazine.

4.2.2.
4.2.2.

Location on SoundCloud Because the beneﬁts of being based in London were a theme that emerged from qualitative research, they became a focus of quantitative analysis.

As in Watson’s (2012) study of urban locations in the commercial music industry, this was achieved by aggregating individual entities by the city with which they were associated.
In our sample of 150,000 accounts, exactly 200 with public tracks were associated with London: more than any other city, with New York in second place (171 uploaders) and Los Angeles in third (93 uploaders).
Moreover, among those were a disproportionately high number of accounts with very high numbers of followers: two of the sample’s three accounts to have over a hundred thousand followers were identiﬁed with London, and as many as 2 per cent of London-based accounts (or 20 times the norm across the sample as a whole) had a thousand or more followers.

This gave the 200 London-based accounts with public tracks a staggering mean of 4883 followers, as compared to 67 for New York and 181 for Los Angeles.
However, the typical London-based uploader of public tracks did not appear to have an unusually high number of followers.

Indeed, the median number of followers for uploaders claiming an association with London was 13: about the same as the median for uploaders associated with New York and Los Angeles, and little more than half that for those associated with Paris, Melbourne, São Paulo, and Berlin.
Early in the research, we looked at the SoundCloud accounts our interviewees followed and were followed by, which suggested a tendency for users to follow other users based in the same geographical location.

We investigated this by looking at the behaviour of a larger number of users.
Table 1 shows how often accounts associated with particular cities were followed by members of our 150,000-account sample, as well as how many of those follows were from members of our sample with an identiﬁable location, and how many were from sample members located in the same cities.
Only a minority of follows come from sample members with an identiﬁable location, because most sampled accounts provided no location information at all, but in most cases the largest chunk of that minority is accounted for by sample members with the same location as the accounts being followed.

However, accounts identiﬁed with Downloaded by [84.39.117.57] at 02:15 22 August 2015 Cultural Trends 217 Table 1.

Cities by number of follows from sample members.
City 1 2 3 London New York Los Angeles Nashville Berlin Toronto Stockholm Chicago Atlanta Paris Follows from sample 277401 188789 170477 39889 39732 28649 24446 24255 24167 23649 Where follower location is known 13782 6926 6622 833 5601 1652 1568 2101 937 3311 As proportion of follows from sample Where follower location is the same city As proportion of follows with known location some cities – in particular, Berlin, Paris, Chicago, and London – had a higher proportion of fol- lowers both among sample members identiﬁed with a particular location and among those ident- iﬁed with the same location, while accounts identiﬁed with others – in particular, Los Angeles and Nashville – had a much low proportion of followers falling into either category.
This may be genre-related.

Chicago, London, and Berlin are internationally known centres for electronic dance music (see above and Garcia, in press).
Given SoundCloud’s strong association with electronic dance music, fans of electronic dance music genres may be more invested in the site and therefore more inclined to provide detailed user proﬁles for themselves than fans of those genres most strongly associated with Nashville, that is, country music, and Los Angeles, that is, the rest of the mainstream of US recorded music.
Moreover, we have argued above that electronic dance music may be distinguished by a particularly strong orientation around locally situated scenes (see Section 4.1).

If this is the case, enthusiasts of electronic dance music genres may be more likely to be found in the vicinity of the music-makers that they value than enthusiasts of musics with a more global reach, such as those produced in Nashville and Los Angeles.
Such factors could potentially account for the higher proportion of followers with declared location and the higher proportion of followers with the same declared location.

Table 2 shows the most frequent follow relationships between locations, excluding those where the two locations were the same.
At this point, inequalities between cities become apparent: in the top 10 most frequent follow relationships, there are 7 “follower” cities, that is, Paris, New York, London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Los Angeles, and Chicago, but only 4 “followed” cities, that is, London, New York, Los Angeles, and Berlin.

These four were also the four with the highest number of followers overall (see Table 1).

While we are dealing only with a minority of the follow relationships detected in the sample (i.e.
those where both follower and followed had a declared city location), this ﬁnding appears to suggest that SoundCloud users in some cities may beneﬁt not only from a sizeable local audience but from an audience in other cities as well.

These relationships are visualised in Figure 1, which includes all cities that were associated with at least 20 sampled accounts each of which followed at least one account with a known location.
Cities are represented by nodes whose size is proportional to the total number of times that accounts associated with them were followed by accounts in the sample (see Table 1), whose lightness is proportional to their centrality to the graph, and whose position rela- tive to one another depends on how strongly they are connected.7 Following relationships between these nodes are represented by arcs (arrows) whose head sizes are proportional to the Downloaded by [84.39.117.57] at 02:15 22 August 2015 218 D. Allington et al.
Table 2.

Follow relationships, classiﬁed by location of follower and followed, by frequency (excluding cases where the locations are the same).
Location of follower Location of followed Frequency Paris New York London London Amsterdam Berlin London Paris Los Angeles Chicago London London New York Los Angeles London London Berlin Berlin London London 790 623 615 579 575 499 496 486 451 445 number of times that sampled accounts associated with the source of the arc followed accounts associated with its target.

At the centre of the graph, we ﬁnd London, New York, and Los Angeles, with strong two-way links between all of them.
This is the same trio that Watson Figure 1.

Follow relationships between cities, with the ten most popular cities labelled (see Table 1).

NY: New York, LA: Los Angeles, N: Nashville, B: Berlin, T: Toronto, S: Stockholm, C: Chicago, A: Atlanta, P: Paris.
Downloaded by [84.39.117.57] at 02:15 22 August 2015 Cultural Trends 219 ﬁnds to occupy the core of the networks of studios responsible for the recording of sales-success- ful albums in the American, British, and Australian download markets (2012, Table 7).

New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago form another triangle in this graph, as do London, Berlin, and Paris.
Across the graph, cities appear to be grouped together according to geographical and linguistic relationships, with clusters of North American, British, Australian, and continental European cities prominently appearing in the graph’s semiperiphery and with clusters elsewhere (e.g.

Indo- nesia and the Philippines; India and the Gulf) being still more peripheral.
In addition to any advantages that may accrue from proximity to vast conventional media industries, London-based SoundCloud users might be argued to beneﬁt from both geographical and linguistic factors, sharing a language with New York and Los Angeles and a continent with Paris and Berlin, as well as having a very large home audience and a continuing association with genres of electronic dance music that have become known internationally (see Section 3).
By contrast, African, Asian, and Latin American cities are either absent or represented by small nodes in peripheral positions.

This remains true for Tokyo, Mumbai, Cairo, Mexico City, Lagos, and Seoul: all highly successful exporters of musical genres largely ignored by the European and Anglophone mass media.

5.
5.

Conclusions and the need for further work By focusing on the act of valuing, this article does more than question, with Crossick and Kas- zyńska, “the assumption that measurement on one variable (or a small number of them) will ident- ify [the] value [of culture and the arts]” (2014, p. 128).

It highlights the fact that “the value of culture and the arts” is in itself a reiﬁcation.

These things do not have a value.

Rather, they are valued by speciﬁc people, and in speciﬁc ways.
And such valuing is characterised by exclusions and inequalities of a very familiar sort, even when it is carried out through “new” media.

Qualitative and quantitative analysis indicate that place continues to play an important role in the valuing of electronic music.

Interviews with musicians showed the valuing of such music to be closely associated with particular ofﬂine venues and certain trendy, gentrifying parts of London.
Statistical analysis of information scraped from user proﬁles on the SoundCloud website, mean- while, showed a number of privileged cities to beneﬁt from the public valuing activity of users in other cities.
We found that, despite the apparent “placelessness” of the internet, expressions of esteem on SoundCloud appear to circulate primarily (a) within cities, (b) between cities located within the same region, and (c) towards a particular set of cities with large cultural econ- omies and a strong association with electronic dance music.8 This may be in part because of a special association between electronic dance music and the often highly localised scenes within and by reference to which it is produced and valued.
The ﬁnding that acts of valuing on SoundCloud appear disproportionately directed towards users of that website based in London could be taken as an indication of the UK’s success as a cultural exporter, of a tendency of apparently decentralised “new” media to replicate the inequal- ities of centralised conventional media, and/or of an urgent need to challenge Britain’s imbalanced cultural economy by developing musical scenes outside the national capital (as in the USA, where New York and Los Angeles are more or less equally central to our graph and where other cities, such as Chicago and Nashville, continue to act as centres for other genres, some of them poorly represented in our data).
It recalls a general tendency to dismiss particular forms of music when made outside the walls of certain consecrating cities (McGee, 2011), and mirrors the distribution of arts funding within the UK, despite SoundCloud’s domination by musical genres virtually unsupported by such funding (see Stark, Gordon, & Powell, 2013 on the imbalance of funding both towards London and towards elite artforms).
However, it may also have speciﬁc conse- quences for the forms of music focused on here, due to a strong localism arguably resulting Downloaded by [84.39.117.57] at 02:15 22 August 2015 220 D. Allington et al.

from producers’ and consumers’ need for venues associated with speciﬁc electronic dance music genres.
While venues for the most commercial forms of electronic music are widespread in the UK, our qualitative research suggests that opportunities to perform non-mainstream genres are concentrated in a small part of the capital, which may limit the possibility for the emergence of new scenes.

In this, some forms of electronic music could be argued to ﬁnd themselves in a similar position to jazz, whose reach beyond London has been found to be restricted by lack of venue support (Banks et al., 2014, p. 49).
Moreover, difﬁculty with venues may have an additional ethnic dimension, given what has been argued to be an unusually high level of police hostility towards electronic music genres associated with the black community (Hancox, 2009; Noisey, 2014).9 While this article has provided clear evidence of geographical inequalities in electronic music, exclusions based on ethnicity or gender would be difﬁcult to study via the quantitative methods used here, because the SoundCloud user proﬁle contains no information from which such demographic features can reliably be deduced.
Further research would also be necessary in order to better under- stand the relationships between UK cities.

While London appeared to eclipse all other UK locations (including the Celtic capitals), it should not be assumed that all British cities besides London were equally disadvantaged in comparison with one another.
There were clear hints both in our qualitat- ive and in our quantitative data that some “provincial” locations were more fortunate than others with regard to the circulation of value in electronic music.

However, exploration of why certain non-metropolitan locations are more favoured than others would be beyond the scope of this article and data-set.
Lastly, the relationship between electronic dance music and electronic music more generally requires further investigation: while these might be assumed to be quite different forms of music, some of our interviewees crossed over between the two, and one discussed incor- porating what he called “headphones music” into dance-oriented DJ sets.

Disclosure statement No potential conﬂict of interest was reported by the authors.
Funding This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/ L014602/1].

Notes 1.

Emphasis on the word “value” was added to all quotations in this paragraph.

2.

With thanks to Kate Oakley for pointing out that our theoretical starting point could be summarised with the slogan “value as verb”.

3.

The prevalence of these genres on SoundCloud is conﬁrmed both anecdotally and through quantitative analysis of how SoundCloud users classify the tracks that they upload.
This analysis will be presented in a separate article.

4.

While the majority of our interviewees expressed no desire to be anonymised, the Creative Commons licence under which RCUK policy requires this article to be published leaves its authors with no ability to protect their informants from misrepresentation, and so we have elected not only to keep their iden- tities secret, but also to avoid quoting their words directly.
We have, however, quoted from statements made by identiﬁed participants in the panel that we organised, because its permanent record is publicly available with rights reserved.

Information collected from the SoundCloud website was already in the public domain.

Downloaded by [84.39.117.57] at 02:15 22 August 2015 Cultural Trends 221 5.
Compare the account by Elafros (2013, p. 474) of a black DJ who had to abandon the style for which he was known, with its overt connection to the history of black popular music, when playing to audiences in more commercial clubs.

6.

All ﬁgures in this article are rounded to the nearest integer value.

7.

Eigenvector centrality was calculated using NetworkX, with account taken of arc weights.

The graph was visualised using Gephi, and laid out with its Force Atlas algorithm.

8.
8.

The placelessness of the internet is especially evident in the case of SoundCloud, which does not, for example, currently enable the user to browse music originating in particular locations.

9.

This was alluded to as a problem by a black DJ and producer whom we interviewed, although he did not consider it to have had a negative impact on him as an individual.

References Allington, D. (2013).

Intrinsically cultural value: A sociological perspective.
Retrieved from #culturalvalue Initiative website: http://culturalvalueinitiative.org/2013/12/05/intrinsically-cultural-value-sociological- perspective-daniel-allington/ Anheier, H. K., & Gerhards, J.

(1991).

Literary myths and social structure.

Social Forces, 69, 811–830.

Banks, M., Ebrey, J., & Toynbee, J.

(2014).

Working lives in black British jazz.

Retrieved from Jazz Services website: http://www.jazzservices.org.uk/index.php/jazzedblog/item/934-working-lives-in-black-british-jazz BBC.
(2013, April 24).

Maria Miller: Arts must make economic case.

Retrieved from BBC website: http:// www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-22267625 Becker, H. S. (1982).

Art worlds.

Berkeley: University of California Press.

Becker, H. S. (2004).

Jazz places.

In A. Bennett & R. Peterson (Eds.

), Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual (pp.

17–30).

Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.

Bennett, A., & Peterson, R. (2004).

Introducing music scenes.

In Andy Bennett & Richard Peterson (Eds.


), Music scenes: Local, translocal, and virtual (pp.

1–15).

Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1996).

The rules of art: Genesis and structure of the literary ﬁeld.

(Susan Emanuel, Trans.).

Cambridge: Polity Press.

Crossick, G., & Kaszynska, P. (2014).

Under construction: Towards a framework for cultural value.

Cultural Trends, 23, 120–131.

Crossley, N. (2008).

Pretty connected: The social network of the early UK punk movement.
Theory, Culture, and Society, 25, 89–116.

DHA Communications.

(2012).

The Working Musician.

Retrieved from Musicians’ Union website: http:// www.musiciansunion.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/The-Working-Musician-report.pdf Elafros, A.

(2013).

Locating the DJ: Black popular music, location, and ﬁelds of cultural production.

Cultural Sociology, 7, 463–478.

Garcia, L.-M. (in press).

Techno-tourism and postindustrial neo-romanticism in Berlin’s electronic dance music scenes.

Tourist Studies, 16.


Hancox, D. (2009, January 21).

Public enemy no.

696.

Retrieved from Guardian website: http://www.

theguardian.com/culture/2009/jan/21/police-form-696-garage-music Hesmondhalgh, D. (1998).

The British dance music industry: A case study of independent cultural pro- duction.

British Journal of Sociology, 49, 234–251.

Lena, J. C., & Peterson, R. A.

(2008).

Classiﬁcation as culture: Types and trajectories of music genres.

American Sociological Review, 73, 697–718.

Massie, A.
Massie, A.

(2013,April 30).

This Britain: Maria Miller confuses economics with pleasure and beauty.

Retrieved from Spectator website: http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/alex-massie/2013/04/this-britain-maria- miller-confuses-economics-with-pleasure-and-beauty/ McGee, K. (2011).

“New York comes to Groningen”: Jazz star circuits in the Netherlands.

In Jason Toynbee & Byron Dueck (Eds.

), Migrating Music (pp.

202–217).

Abingdon: Routledge.

Miller, M. (2013, April 24).


Testing times: ﬁghting culture’s corner in an age of austerity.

Speech delivered on 24 April.

Retrieved from UK Government website: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/ testing-times-ﬁghting-cultures-corner-in-an-age-of-austerity Noisey.

(2014).

The police vs grime music: A Noisey ﬁlm.

Retrieved from YouTube: https://www.youtube.

com/watch?v=eW_iujPQpys de Nooy, W. (1999).

A literary playground: Literary criticism and balance theory.
Poetics, 26, 385–404.

Schifferes, J., Cunningham, J., & McAndrew, S. (2014).

Channelling talent: The role of social networks in recognising and rewarding talent in the music industry.

Retrieved from RSA Action and Research Centre website: https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/reports/channelling-talent/ Downloaded by [84.39.117.57] at 02:15 22 August 2015 222 D. Allington et al.

SoundCloud.

(2014).

Press.


Retrieved January 13, 2015, from https://soundcloud.com/press Stark, P., Gordon, C., & Powell, D. (2013).

Rebalancing our cultural capital: A contribution to the debate on national policy for the arts and culture in England.

Retrieved from GPS Culture website: http://www.

gpsculture.co.uk/rocc.php Watson, A.

(2012).

The world according to iTunes: Mapping urban networks of music production.

Global Networks, 12, 446–466.

Downloaded by [84.39.117.57] at 02:15 22 August 2015