North from here: the collaboration networks of Finnish metal music genre superstars

ABSTRACT This paper explores the collaboration networks of Finnish metal music genre superstars, the evolution of these networks through time and the importance of geographical scale in their evolution. The article, therefore, aims to shed light upon how successful creative teams network: locally (local buzz) and/or globally (global pipelines). The contemporary literature on economic geography underlines the importance of the local scene and of geographical proximity for the creative industries, such as the music industry. The illustrative cases presented here – considered to be superstars in terms of their record sales – provide evidence that if local networks and buzz are present in the home localities of the bands, as is common in urban environments, they take advantage of these collaboration possibilities. However, bands located in smaller more peripheral localities can substitute for the lack of local buzz with global pipelines. Consequently, the results suggest that, for successful bands, the importance of local buzz is not as marked as would be expected based on the earlier literature. Therefore, the findings challenge, at least to a certain degree, the views of the heightened importance of geographical proximity for the creative music industry: instead, superstars collaborate to a large extent through global pipelines.

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