ABSTRACT
Recent studies of cultural, symbolic or entertainment economies in cities (e.g. Zukin 1996, Hannigan 1998, Scott 2000) have paid little attention to the role of club and dance cultures in the night-time entertainment economy. Research on nightclubbing and dance cultures throughout the 1990s mainly focused on the consumption of clubbing until Paul Chatterton and Robert Hollands, in a series of publications and research reports on several UK cities (Bristol, Leeds, Newcastle), began to draw attention to the supply structure of night-life culture. They put forward the argument that the ‘new’ urban entertainment and night-life economy in 1990s Britain was increasingly dominated by large, partly multinational, corporations aided by entrepreneurial city councils in need of local investment. Further, they pointed out that ownership and control tended to become concentrated in publicly quoted companies, for which branding was imperative to increase shareholder value and the trust of potential investors. The rising signifi - cance of branding, standardization of urban centres, and market segmentation would entail a socially segregated night life mainly oriented towards cash-rich consumers, whilst displacing older or alternative modes of nightlife culture and forcing small and local entrepreneurs out of the market (Hollands and Chatterton 2003, Chatterton 2002). Such arguments are reverberated by similar claims about the capitalist incorporation of countercultural forms and social movements through the cultural and entertainment economies capitalizing on the synergies between leisure, retail and night life (Scott 2000: 209-210, Talbot 2007: 7, Hannigan 1998). As far as the production of dance and night-life culture has become a focus of attention, it was strongly seen in the context of gentrifi cation, corporatization and social fragmentation in the wake of the economic restructuring of cities and urban space. Political economy approaches tend to subsume the cultural under the economic, assuming that the profi t and growth motive of (global) corporate investors eradicates (local) cultural styles and creativity. Tied into narratives of loss of a ‘golden age’, such arguments fail to acknowledge that gentrifi cation and regeneration are more contested processes requiring a more nuanced understanding of the social relations, the particular practices, the meanings, identities and local differences through
which such spaces are lived (Jayne et al. 2006). Chatterton and Hollands’ arguments about the dominance of UK night life by (global) corporate power are premised on the brewery industry and the closely connected or annexed pub sector, the branded high-street fast-food, coffee-shop and restaurants chains, the growth of style bars and leisure/retail/night-life complexes in urban centres such as Star City in Birmingham or Heron City in Spain (Chatterton 2002: 38, Hollands and Chatterton 2003). At the turn of the millennium only three brewers dominated the supply of beer in Britain, and nearly 80 per cent of the pub market was owned by pub estate companies (Hollands and Chatterton 2003: 365, 370-372). Yet, if considering the overall ownership structure of pubs and bars, the picture is less clear. Although the number of independent enterprises in the pub/bar sector has been going down in the past few years, and managed and tenanted pubs/ bars taken together exceed the turnover of the independent pub/bar sector, independent pubs and bars still make up more than half (51 per cent) of all enterprises active in the bar, pub and nightclub sector in the UK in 2006 (Source: ONS 2007; see also Graph 3.2). While tendencies of concentration are discernible in some respects, for example, the brewery industry and pub and bar sector, it would be misleading to claim that night-life entertainment in general is dominated by global corporate power. This argument also fails to take into account the nightclub sector, which as a whole is characterized by small and medium-sized independent operators in most European countries, including the UK; although most of the largest companies in this sector are based in the UK. As the demand for nightclubbing and dancing is more exposed to fashion cycles and musical trends and involves a high degree of risk-management in relation to security and legality, corporate investors tend to stay away from this market (Key Note 2005). Similarly, corporate control is much weaker in relation to the production of electronic dance music than in the music industry generally, where major companies are beginning to lose ground due to new production and distribution technologies (Saego 2004: 93-95). Just as cultural industry research tended to focus on larger, more established business segments, much less is known about small and micro-companies, which often escape from view as they do not ‘register on established indicators’ and are therefore more diffi cult to investigate (O’Connor 1999: 76-77).
