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This paper analyses the location patterns of audio-visual communication firms, a cultural and creative industry that includes activities related to motion picture, video, and television programme production, post-production and projection activities, as well as sound recording and music publishing activities. Firms in the industry tend to agglomerate in the core of large metropolitan areas to benefit from the economies arising from this clustering. Using Mercantile Register data, our results indicate a strong agglomeration pattern at the core of the Barcelona metropolitan area, as well as close inter-industry linkages with other cultural and creative industries. This location behaviour is explained by path dependence processes rather than as the result of cluster-based policies to encourage the concentration of such firms in some areas of the city. In view of these results, policy measures aiming to foster firms' competitivity should be more selective and target the specific areas preferred by audio-visual communication firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Music printing in the Iberian Peninsula has been little studied and rarely has this specialized aspect of book production been considered in the broader context of more general trends in printing there during the sixteenth century. Music historiography has tended to assume that music printing failed to flourish because of poor local demand. However, more recent evidence, including analysis of book inventories, suggests that there was a thriving market, based on both international and local distribution, but that the printing of music books was affected by many of the factors that beset printing in general, including the expense of importing high quality paper, limited availability of specialized fonts and the socio-economic vicissitudes of individual printers. This essay explores the dynamics of the production of and market for music books through analysis of three major cities – Seville, Barcelona and Madrid – which appeared to offer the right conditions but which ultimately produced only a limited number of editions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]