You Can't Always Get What You Want: Gatekeeping and Social Capital in the Live-Music Scenes of Atlanta and Taipei

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Title:	You Can't Always Get What You Want: Gatekeeping and Social Capital in the Live-Music Scenes of Atlanta and Taipei
Authors:	Tai, Yun
Date:	2014
Issue Date:	2020-10-29 12:11:03 (UTC+8)
Abstract:	This dissertation examines live-music markets (or “scenes”) in the following cities:Taipei in Taiwan and Atlanta in the US. This examination is informed by three broad approaches to creative markets in sociology (field theory, the art worlds framework, and the music scenes framework), all of which share an emphasis on“embeddedness.” In particular, I focus on the impact of both gatekeepers and social capital within each of those scenes, and how both play out in two different places with regards to the music featured at a range of venues. I do this by analyzing self-gathered data collected from local newspapers as well as from surveys and interviews with band-bookers that act as gatekeepers. This self-gathered data documented 175 live music venues in Atlanta and 145 venues in Taipei in 2012—with 5,531 performers offering some 11,000 appearances in Atlanta venues, and 2,467 performers offering some 4,700 appearances in Taipei venues. Comparatively speaking, in 2012, Atlanta had a bigger, busier, more affordable but less connected live-music scene, while the live music scene in Taipei was smaller, more expensive, and had less busy days and months but involved a denser network of music venues. Despite the distinct “ecologies” of these two live-music scenes, social capital at the aggregate level operated in a similar manner for both, as live-music venues within several homophilous niches (based on ticket-price and featured genres) converged in terms of band-booking similarity. Not only did the attributes of venues (e.g., pricing, genres) matter for social capital, so too did the manner of their connections—as venues with common “friend(s)” were more likely to be linked in terms of booking the same performers. Furthermore, inequality in live-music scenes also matters, as I find that a status order, with its attendant “competitive jostling” and “emulation,” emerged among venues occupying different positions in the status order. This dissertation thus demonstrates how the market for live music is a domain in which social factors are intertwined with economic elements.
Appears in Collections:	[Graduate Institute & Department of Mass Communication] Monograph

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