Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
U.S.
(Alaska)
ATLANTIC
OCEAN
North
Sea
40
°
AT
LANTIC
O
CEAN
PACIFIC
OC
E
AN
London
180
°
INDIAN
OCEAN
PACIFIC
OCEAN
Johannesburg
DAVE MATTHEWS BAND
CONCERT LOCATIONS
Mediterranean Sea
SOUTHERN OCEAN
50
°
Number of Concerts at Each Location
16-140
CANADA
1
2-4
5-10
11-15
170
°
1991-1993
1994-1995
1996-Present
UNITED STATES
New York City
Charlottesville, VA
Boulder, CO
U.S.
(Hawaiian Is.)
San Francisco, CA
ATLANTIC
60
°
Chapel Hill, NC
Athens, GA
PACIFIC
OCEAN
160
°
OCEAN
Los Angeles, CA
Austin, TX
The Woodlands, TX
BAHAMAS
Longitude West of Greenwich
Gulf of Mexico
150
°
140
°
130
°
120
°
110
°
100
°
90
°
80
°
70
°
Figure 4.17
World Distribution of Dave Matthews Band concerts.
Data from
: http://www.bmbalma-
nac.com, last accessed July 2011. Compiled by Liz Sydnor and Lennea Mueller.
recycling, selling eco-friendly merchandise, and setting
up Reverb Eco-Villages at concert venues to encourage
eco-friendly behaviors among fans.
marketing agencies play in creating popular culture. By
conducting focus groups with teenagers (the main
demographic for innovations in popular culture), by
amassing enormous databases of what teenagers do and
like, by sending “cool hunters” (“cool” kids themselves)
out to talk with other “cool” kids about what is “cool,”
and by rummaging through teenagers' bedrooms (as
Rosati noted MTV does for casting its reality shows),
MTV and marketing companies are creating what is
cool, what is new in popular culture. In the process of
producing
The Merchants of Cool
, producers interviewed
Sharon Lee, one of the founding partners of Look-
Look, a research company specializing in youth culture.
Lee explained how trends in popular culture are spread
from the hearth:
Manufacturing a Hearth
The question of whether a college band “makes it”
depends greatly on the choices and actions of record pro-
ducers and music media corporate giants. Certain corpo-
rations, such as Viacom, the parent company of MTV,
generate and produce popular culture, pushing innova-
tions in popular culture through the communications
infrastructure that links them with the rest of the world.
Geographer Clayton Rosati studied the infrastructure of
MTV and its role in the production of popular culture
and geographies of popular culture. In his study, he
found that MTV produces popular culture by opening
globalized spaces to local culture, thereby globalizing
the local. Rosati explained that “MTV's incorporation
of rap music and Hip Hop expressive forms into its pro-
duction since 1997” helped produce music celebrities
and opened the MTV space to “artists and forms that
were often formerly relegated to street corners, block
parties and mixtapes—broadening the unifi cation of
popular aspirations with the machinery of the industrial
production of culture.”
A 2001 documentary produced by PBS entitled
The Merchants of Cool
looks at the roles corporations and
Actually it's a triangle. At the top of the triangle there's
the innovator, which is like two to three percent of the
population. Underneath them is the trend-setter, which
we would say is about 17 percent. And what they do is
they pick up on ideas that the innovators are doing and
they kind of claim them as their own. Underneath them
is an early adopter, which is questionable exactly what
their percentage is, but they kind of are the layer above
mainstream, which is about 80 percent. And what they
do is they take what the trend-setter is doing and they
make it palatable for mass consumption. They take it,
they tweak it, they make it more acceptable, and that's
