Urban music ecosystem – elusive definition of live music venue and cross-city comparison

Music ecosystem draws attention to the physical and infrastructural context of cultural space. Beyond the agents, musical and non-musical stakeholders, venue owners, managers, promoters, musicians, and audiences, local and national policymakers (Behr et al 2016), its core are music venues. But, how do we define a ‘venue’? When something is and is not a venue? While there is an overarching drive to map cities’ music infrastructure that could inform music policies, there is a plethora of definitions present in research and various datasets. In this contribution, we discuss various definitions of music venues. We follow with a cross-cities comparison of physical music infrastructures, highlighting unique examples of non-traditional music venues, and geospatial comparison. It focuses not only on venue categorisation and quantity, but also geolocation.