ABSTRACT
While technological changes, marketing strategies and changes in taste and style have been crucial in the geographical distribution of music, other forms of music diffusion are based largely on the movements of people rather than products or capital. Everywhere music is played and consumed it contains multiple networks. Cities are nodes in international mediascapes – centres of production and retailing – and hosts to multicultural communities and their diverse musical texts and spaces. This chapter examines the complex relationship between migration and music, and the manner in which music has been transformed in a variety of destinations. Cities such as Paris maintain connections to such Francophone centres as Montreal, Algiers and Abidjan, while providing the stage for African musical transformations; New York is a central node in Latino traditions (with connections to Miami, Havana and Puerto Rico) and a major part of pan-Caribbean links (with Kingston and London), while Indian diasporic networks link cities as diverse as Mumbai, Birmingham, Chicago and Kuala Lumpur. Cities also host diverse domestic recording industries, while several styles of music (such as hip hop, R&B and techno-pop) have become transnational urban sound-tracks, as likely to be heard in Seoul as Sao Paulo.
