New Jersey Symphony Orchestra sells its collection of renowned Golden Age Collection of string instruments due to its financial deficit.

Is culture losing its political clout in France? That may seem a bit of a stretch, since the government still pours 2.9 billion into the arts every year or 30 times the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States.

In Canada there is no official equivalent to The National Standards for Music Education. However, The Canadian Band Association has recently developed a similar document entitled National Voluntary Curriculum and Standards for Instrumental Music (Band).

Many authors argue that digital technologies, and particularly the World Wide Web, have great potential to serve the challenges faced by museums in relation to access and audience development, which involves reaching and nurturing both existing and new audiences. But what initiatives are there, and how effective are they? What strategies and actions are museums undertaking to take advantage of this potential? What is it being done to establish closer ties with core audiences or to attract new audiences? And what is the audience response to the museums efforts? The British experience in this field is of particular interest because it shows a political context favourable to the development of this emerging area of museum work, and it provides some remarkable and exemplary cases from which to learn good practices.

Ticketing arts organisations internationally are moving away from third party ticketing agencies and more towards in-house box office systems which allow them to build more meangingful customer relationships.

The special interest relationships characterized by the influence on cultural policy of music service networks are the focus of our analysis, as evidenced not only in the United States, but also in contemporary Japan. This paper will describe the activities of significant music networks in Japan and the United States and demonstrate that todays music-related service networks in Japan and the United States appear to have learned the lessons of the 1980s and 1990s challenges to arts and cultural policy.

This paper will try to show how the development of a vibrant and active music industry in Cape Verde can provide this country with a medium for long term economic growth and development. It uses a few case studies to illustrate this point: Senegal, Austin, and Jamaica. Finally, it provides a way forward for what should be the key elements of a strategy that Cape Verdeans should develop to brand and build a globally competitive Cape Verdean Music industry.

The aim was, at an explorative level, to produce knowledge about and understanding of the buying behaviour of theatre distribution agents. A case study consisting of six cases was conducted. The data collection was based mainly on interviews. Findings indicated the need for an extra function in the buying centre: a confirmer. The buying process seemed more informal than the theory indicates. The programme decision did not concern a provider of a product; it was more a choice between different plays. The provider was more to be regarded as a selection criterion. There was a sort of calculation whereby the expected loss was related to the value of the performance.

Theatre Management: Producing and Managing the Performing Arts by David M. Conte and Stephen Langley, has just been released. The new book is written from the point of view that all of the performing arts share the same core issues and that skills learned in o­ne performing art are both applicable and easily transferable to another...

This article analyses and contextualises a variety of relationships between the cultural industries and cultural policy. A principal aim is to examine policies explicitly formulated as cultural (or creative)industries policies. It seeks to address questions such as: What lies behind such policies? How do they relate to other kinds of cultural policy, including those more oriented towards media, communications, arts and heritage? The first section asks how the cultural industries became such an important idea in cultural policy, when those industries had been largely invisible in traditional (arts- and heritage-based) policy for many decades. What changed and what drove the major changes?

This study is based on previous research on Quality, Satisfaction, Willingness-to-Pay and Spending behaviour, in tourism and particularly in the area of festival management. A web and telephone survey on 326 festival visitors was conducted at Storsjöyran Music Festival 2005 in Östersund, Sweden to give the base for new findings concerning visitors perception of their festival experience including their spending behaviour.

This paper deals with Born Globals (BG), i.e. companies which internationalise at an early stage and view the whole world as their activity field. The internationalisation concerns both the inward such as procurement as well as the outward (such as sales) in microbusinesses from two experience based, or so called creative, industries, Swedish Music and Fashion, seldom subject to internationalisation studies. The project investigates in which countries/markets these firms have international activities, why these countries/markets were selected and identifies direct or indirect connections between the inward and outward activities. The research provides a better understanding of the driving forces in internationalization at the micro-level, and gives help for the formulation of new EU export promoting policies.

The impact of technologies facilitating digital distribution of music on the recorded music industry has in the last few years received much attention in the popular press, and to some extent in the scholarly literature. However, there have been few attempts to explore the underlying factors explaining differences in innovative capabilities among record companies.

This thesis proposes that social networks and specific knowledge areas are important factors that can explain these differences among Norwegian record companies. The study therefore investigates the role of social networks and knowledge and their systemic properties related to innovation within digital distribution in the Norwegian recorded music industry.

Worldwide governments and regional authorities have begun to take seriously the idea that cultural and creative activities are crucial areas of economic activity. Industries such as music, film, media, advertising, gaming and design are seen to be increasingly worthy of not just cultural policy but also industrial policy support.

The paper describes the economic impact of music in Iceland and gives and account of the structure of the music industry and its management. Music is of significant importance for the Icelandic community. The discussion touches on the creative industries and accounts for the special position of music, as well as the strategic planning and social organisation that characterise the sector. The theoretical foundation is based on the methods of cultural economics and the methodology of the creative industries. The contribution of culture as a whole to the Icelandic GDP amounts to approximately 4%, and of this music accounts for approximately a quarter. Music fits very well in with the ideology of the creative industries. Porters five forces model is employed to describe the competitive position of enterprises in the musical industry in Iceland. The competitive position of Iceland in the music sector is analysed by the use of Porters Diamond.

Conference of the ESA Research Network for the Sociology of the Arts
Lueneburg and Hamburg (Germany), March 28-April 1, 2007

The ESA Research Network Sociology for the Arts is organizing its 8th meeting at the end of March 2007 in Lueneburg (Germany), with additional events in near-by Hamburg. The main conference venue will be at the University of Lueneburg, close to the medieval old town. The conference will feature keynote lectures, plenary discussions, paper sessions, workshops, and round tables.

The House of World Cultures realizes together with its partners Baltic Sea Cultural Centre (Poland), Danish Center for Culture and Development (Denmark), Intercult (Sweden) and Visiting Arts (Great Britain) the project Europe Now | Europe Next, a series of on-line and real-life Encounters accompanying the EU enlargement.