Producing Nightlife in the New Urban Entertainment Economy: Corporatization, Branding and Market Segmentation

The Ministry of Sound, which started life as a London club less than ten years ago, by 2002 had the largest global dance record label and the most popular music website in the world, and published the UK's fastest growing music magazine, Ministry. It now promotes club events around the globe and broadcasts its radio show on 50 stations in 32 countries, thus becoming the world's most famous dance and clubbing lifestyle brand for young people (www.ministryofsound.com). Universal Studios Japan, which opened in Osaka in 1999, combines theme park rides with media studios creating a modern day `symbiotic' media production and consumption entertainment destination (Davis 1999: 439). On 57th Street West Manhattan, NikeTown, Nike Corporation's flagship retail outlet, is described by Klein (2000: 56) as a hallowed shrine to the heroic ideals of athleticism rather than simply a sporting goods shop, with its three-story high screens and famed sports memorabilia. And `Mythos', a theme park based on Greek mythology will open in 2004 to coincide with the Olympic Games in Athens, complete with rides, mythological figures and wandering minstrels (Emmons, 2000). These are just a few examples typifying the worldwide spread of the theming of entertainment and leisure (Sorkin, 1992; Gottdiener, 2001) and the emergence of a new global economy rooted in an infrastructure of entertainment destinations such as themed restaurants and bars, nightclubs, casinos, sport stadia, arenas and concert hall/music venues, multiplex cinemas and various types of virtual arcades, rides and theatres (see Hannigan, 1998: 1±2). While it is clear that popular culture and nightlife have long played an important role in urban life, we would argue that the `new' urban entertainment economy is distinguishable by an emerging mode of production including a concentration of corporate ownership, increased use of branding and theming, and conscious attempts to segment its markets, especially through the gentrification and sanitization of leisure activities. The night time economy, especially the growth of upmarket style and cafe bars and night-clubs, has a key part to play in this new entertainment infrastructure (Chatterton and Hollands, 2002). Rather than dwelling on some of the recent self-congratulatory commentaries on `urban cultural revival' (Comedia and Demos, 1997; Landry, 2000), our approach is otherwise concerned with how corporate control in the urban entertainment and night-life economies is further usurping and commercializing public space, segmenting and gentrifying markets and marginalizing alternative and creative local development (Zukin, 1995). In what follows, we outline the emergence of a dominant mode of urban entertainment and nightlife production and situate it within critical discussions on the shift from Fordist to post-Fordist production and the related shift from mass to more segmented and varied forms of consumption (Amin, 1994; Kumar, 1995), the move from the welfarist to the entrepreneurial state and city (Harvey, 1989b) and the growing globalization and corporatization of economic activity (Held et al., 1999; Klein, 2000; Monbiot, 2000). Beyond the rather seductive arguments of post-Fordist flexibility and Volume 27.2 June 2003 361±85 International Journal of Urban and Regional Research