This chapter focuses on the music business in order to explore connections between music and the city. More specifically, it examines policy initiatives of the 1980s and 1990s aimed at developing citybased music industries and thereby improving music's contribution to urban economies. Using the English city of Liverpool as a case study, the first part of the chapter describes several such initiatives, while the second part highlights key features of the discourse that they generated and outlines the main occupational groups involved with formulating and implementing them. These groups are shown to have often conflicting interests in, and perspectives on, the music business and its connection with or value for the city and to promote a ‘rhetoric of the local’ that serves to further their own interests. So although Liverpool's music-industry policy initiatives have tended to be strictly concerned with economics and with music's economic impact on the city, they have also been very much about culture and politics, representing a political battlefield in which different groups have struggled to control connections between the music industry and the city, and promoting a contested discourse that connects the music industry with city identity. The chapter ends by considering some of the implications of this for how we think about and value the music business and its connections with the city.

Developing City-based Music Industries

Most major British cities house a variety of music businesses. In Liverpool during the 1980s and 1990s, for example, there were businesses concerned with the staging of live music performance (such as venues, festival organisations, PA and lighting companies); others concerned with music as a recorded medium (examples are recording studios, studio equipment manufacturers and repairers, record retailers and DJs) or with both live and recorded fields of musical activity; one or two associated businesses (such as law firms specialising in the music and entertainment business and companies producing and distributing music-related merchandise); and bodies engaged in both commercial and publicly funded activity (including community music activity and further or higher music education and training). Many of these organisations dealt with a range of music genres, while some were associated with specific genres (local classical, dance, folk and country music ‘scenes’, for example, had their own particular network of businesses that included specialist retailers and live performance venues).