Live Music Ecologies – Charting the Presence of Live Music in Urban Economics

The opening contribution discusses the contextual and theoretical aspects of researching live music in urban spaces, in particular the conceptual and practical relationships in play around ‘live music ecologies’ (Behr et al. 2016), including the interplay between venues of different types and size, alongside the key role in such ecologies of non-musical agents and factors (e.g. transport links, planning and licensing policies, local authority personnel), as well as, explaining why music mapping is needed. It provides the back-ground to, and an overview of, research and knowledge exchange in this area – includ-ing the UK Live Music Census (Webster et al.), Birmingham Live Music Project (Rozbicka et al.), Live Music Mapping Project – and considers the challenges and potential in de-veloping such work using past and present data, alongside its policy uses and implica-tions (van der Hoeven et al. 2021).