Curating the music city: The accommodation sector in Glasgow’s music tourism ecology

Since becoming a UNESCO ‘City of Music’ in 2008, Glasgow has sought to develop the tourism potential of its music scene. As potential beneficiaries, accommodation providers have facilitated the development of music tourism initiatives within the city, strategically positioning themselves as ambassadors for the city’s music. This article considers how three Glasgow hotels ‘curate’ the musical life of the city, presenting themselves as facilitators of cultural experiences rather than mere service providers. We draw on interviews alongside an analysis of marketing discourse to show how this approach is reflected in the physical space of hotels, recruitment practices, and the language of promotional materials. Arguing that the packaging of musical experience often implies an instrumentalist understanding of music’s cultural value, we consider what it means for music to be re-imagined as an ‘experience’, and how music’s value as a resource for self-construction is articulated within the discourse of contemporary tourism.


Introduction
Since becoming the UK's first UNESCO 'City of Music' in 2008, Glasgow has begun to develop the potential of its vibrant music scene as a driver of tourism. As key potential beneficiaries of cultural tourism to the city, several accommodation providers have played a role in music tourism initiatives, providing spaces for performance and networking events, acting as occasional promoters and, in their marketing strategies, rhetorically positioning themselves as ambassadors for the city's music. As urban landmarks, symbols of local identity, and markers of a city's global status, hotels are important points of connection between travellers and local music scenes. While this intermediary role has often been seen as incidental, in recent years, increased tourist demand for authentic local knowledge fed by the emergence of online platforms such as Airbnb, has led several hotels to reconsider their position within the cultural life of the destinations they serve.
Where the corporate chains that emerged in the late-20th century were associated with the homogenisation of urban space, a newer generation of hotels has sought to emphasise the uniqueness and cultural value of the hotel space and to 'curate' destinations as sites of cultural experience. These 'budget boutiques' can be viewed as a popularisation of the elite design hotel concept that emerged in the 1980s and as indicative of a move in a certain segment of the industry from a service-based approach towards the 'experience economy' (Pine and Gilmore, 1998). Budget boutiques create value by claiming to offer elite experiences of cultural consumption at a more modest price-point, providing resources for the projection of cultured identities through the selective re-appropriation of local music and heritage. This shift is accompanied by a corporate discourse in which concepts such as 'creativity' and 'exploration' occupy a significant role, and in which non-elite, millennial consumers are encouraged to view themselves as co-creators of unique cultural experiences rather than as consumers of highly standardised accommodation services.
This assumption by a segment of the hospitality industry of a curatorial role within Glasgow's musical ecology, raises the question of music's place within this new landscape. It also, first, merits a brief preliminary consideration of the broader, underpinning relationships at work across, and between, the different elements in this terrain. A musical 'ecology' in this context can be thought of as a system that traverses the infrastructure (venues, for instance) and the social and professional relationships at work, both musical and extra-musical. This is useful since it incorporates the actors who may be constitutive of a 'scene' -and hence the social processes that feed into music making (Behr et al., 2016: 6) -yet also accounts for the materiality of place, beyond symbolic and social conditions (Behr et al., 2016: 7). An ecological approach to (live) music in a given locale acknowledges the extent to which musical practitioners (artists, managers, promoters and, particularly, venue operators) are concerned in their day-to-day operations with their relationships with 'regulations and regulators -in terms of licencing laws, noise, health and safety, and so forth' (Behr et al., 2016: 18-19).
A musical ecology, then, concerns policymakers and local aspects of infrastructuresuch as transport to and from venues -at the same time as it does the purely musical elements. In terms of measuring local music provision this means that, as van der Hoeven et al. (2021: 162) argue a 'holistic and integrated view' is valuable, necessary even, to capture activity at the 'margins' of the ecology. In the current context, that includes the hospitality sector. Furthermore, if one considers the overlap between music industry and hospitality industry in social, economic (they are mutually supportive) and infrastructural (they share spaces, and licencing concerns) dimensions, then a 'music tourism' ecology can be viewed as a key element of both of these constituent elements of urban cultural and economic space and relevant to the broader, interdisciplinary study of urban spaces, particularly given the ways in which both music and tourism are imbricated into urban policymaking and development. As van der Hoeven and Hitters (2020: 157) note '[u]rban regeneration has thus provided an important rationale for investing in a thriving live music ecology, as it supports urban branding, tourism and gentrification'. Hotels, then, are key nodes in this ecology relevant to, and bridging, the music sector and the outward facing urban and tourism strategies.
We seek here to develop an account of these nodes, and their relationship to the more specifically musical ecology and its discourses of value. Drawing on fieldwork interviews and an analysis of hotels' corporate and media discourse, we explore how the cultural-experience-led brand strategies adopted by Glasgow's budget boutiques seek to appropriate the city's music and heritage as a set of symbolic resources which can be used in the performance of cultured, cosmopolitan consumer identities. This is achieved by re-organising the space of the hotel itself, through websites, in-house apps and booking platforms, and through strategic partnerships with other businesses within the music and leisure sectors. We trace the discursive strategies used by hotels to reposition themselves within the space of local musical culture, considering: What kinds of cultural products and activities is music combined with in experience-led marketing discourse? What opportunities does this offer for local music venues, promoters, and musicians? And how does this discourse seek to shape the individual experiences of 'music tourists' and their relationship with the city's music?
While the increased salience of music within these strategies may present opportunities for local musicians, it is necessary to be aware of how the role of hotels in local music scenes is shaped by larger concerns with competitivity, brand identity and the vagaries of the experience economy. Arguing that the re-packaging of local musical experiences often suggests a highly instrumentalised understanding of music's value, we consider the broader implications of experience-led cultural tourism for musicians and their audiences in Glasgow and beyond, asking what it means for music to be re-imagined as an 'experience', and how the value of music is understood and articulated within the discourse of contemporary tourism.

Glasgow as a music tourism destination
The context for this research is the emergence of music as a key strand within Scottish tourism. Research by UK Music (2016: 44) suggests that Scotland has benefitted from a surge in music tourism in recent years: an estimated 928,000 music tourists came to Scotland in 2015, spending a total of £295 million. In 2016, the figure increased by 31%, with 1.2 million visitors spending a total of £334 million (UK Music, 2017: 32). Glasgow, Scotland's largest city, attracted around 449,000 music tourists in 2015 generating £105 million for the local economy (Perman et al., 2018). Hailed as a 'European capital of music' in a 2018 report, Glasgow has a diverse and vibrant grassroots scene, several iconic heritage venues, and one of the world's highest ranked conservatoires (Perman et al., 2018). Music has been recognised as one of the four 'core strands of Glasgow's cultural offer' and Glasgow Life, the organisation tasked with managing the city's cultural 'brand', pledged in 2017 to 'continue to showcase the city on the global stage and create more opportunities for visitors to experience one of the world's top sporting, cultural and music cities' (Glasgow Life, 2017).
Glasgow is a musically diverse city in which several scenes co-exist. In the words of one local tour guide, 'there's a huge kind of band scene the kind of indie, rock band thing, there's a lot of quite Avant Garde stuff going on, and there's a huge amount of techno, pop stuff, there's an awful lot of that and a real kind of momentum behind them' (Jonathan Trew, fieldwork interview, 2018). The city has a distinct musical identity, although it is not associated with a particular genre or musical 'sound': many of the internationally recognised acts associated with Glasgow 'tend to be quite cult bands rather than huge megastars' (Trew, 2018). 'Unlike say Liverpool or Manchester', another tour organiser notes, the city has few individual 'bands that [spring] to mind that [tell] the story, in a coherent way' (Fay Young, fieldwork interview, 2018). Narrating Glasgow as a music city thus requires a unique and carefully developed 'brand story' which reflects the city's musical histories as well as the aspirations of those currently living and making music there.
Since achieving UNESCO status in 2008, however, Glasgow has yet to develop a cohesive music tourism strategy. The UNESCO 'music city' designation, shared in the UK by Liverpool (which was granted the status in 2015), is part of a set of broader initiatives and concerns. Within UNESCO itself, it forms a subset within a broader network of 'Creative Cities', established in 2004, oriented towards promoting intercity co-operation and internal support for creativity (in the arts) as means of urban development (Taylor, 2022: 315). UNESCO's award of 'music city' status rests on criteria including 'music heritage, background in musicmaking, education, community involvement, regular highprofile local music events, and international music events' (Taylor, 2022: 315). Not all of these are amongst the internationally acknowledged 'superstar' (Ballico and Watson, 2020: 2) cities whose reputation as music hubs precedes them. Nevertheless, the emergence and increasing prominence of widely touted urban music centres outside of capital cities (such as Nashville, Austin, Melbourne and Liverpool) fed a concomitant growth in the use of music as a tool to leverage tourism and, associated with this, a perception of music as a driver of economic growth and urban development. This has been accompanied, also, by a rise in both national and international forums, guides and reports (e.g. Shapiro, 2019;Terrill et al., 2015) that seek to support city policymakers in deploying their cultural assets, as both promotional tools and in line with economic development goals.
It is useful, then, to distinguish between a 'music city' as a geographical, as an industrial and as an institutional, policy-oriented formulation. Ballico and Watson (2020: 3) distinguish between music scenes and the 'Music City' while acknowledging that the latter concept is 'useful to understand the structure and functioning of place-specific and, more closely, city-based music scenes'. Glasgow, certainly, has a rich history of prominent musical activity, heritage and community involvement (per the UNESCO criteria). Its celebrated venues (King Tut's Wah Wah Hut, Barrowlands), festivals (e.g. Celtic Connections) and higher-end musical infrastructure in the shape of the Hydro Arena (Behr, 2022: 139) follow a long history of using international cultural initiatives as a launchpad for regenerative efforts -such as the European Capital of Culture in 1990, a strategy echoed by Liverpool's progress from European Capital of Culture in 2008 to UNESCO status.
Glasgow does, then, have a history of capacity and willingness to build and support its musical economy. Its 'scene' is reasonably robust. Aligning that more explicitly with a dedicated tourism strategy that encompasses the margins of the music ecology has been less of a marked strength. The 'music city' designation has, indeed, suffered from notoriously low visibility. Perman et al. (2018) found that it was recognised by only 11% of Glasgow residents surveyed. A failure to exploit the UNESCO brand was also identified by participants from across the music, tourism, and hospitality sectors in a research project at Newcastle University (Ord and Behr, 2019). Perhaps in recognition of these concerns, Glasgow Life launched a new 'Glasgow UNESCO City of Music' digital brand in July 2019. While the relaunch of the UNESCO brand constitutes a step towards higher visibility for music within the city's cultural offer, it remains uncertain whether Glasgow will develop a sustained and coherent 'music city' policy framework like comparable cities such as Adelaide and Berlin. 'Roadmap' documents based on studies of successful initiatives across the globe have emphasised the need for strong leadership, investment in local music ecologies, and cross-sectoral engagement across a range of policy areas from planning to alcohol licencing (e.g. Guerrero Orozco et al., 2018;Music Canada, 2015;Seijas, 2017). While the recent setting up of music advisory boards in the English cities of Brighton, Manchester and Sheffield suggests that these ideas are starting to seep into local cultural policy elsewhere in the UK, Glasgow lags some way behind comparator cities in terms of developing a cohesive strategy and policy framework and achieving a level of co-ordination between the various sectors, including hospitality, that constitute the wider music tourism ecology.
Despite the lack of an explicit policy framework for developing music tourism in Glasgow, collaborative work between hotels and local music promoters indicates a growing awareness of the potential value of music tourism for the hospitality sector and for the city's economic development. In the absence of public sector leadership, much of the impetus behind the 'music city' discourse has come from the private sector in the form of network-building efforts led by among others, the Scottish Music Industry Association and Music Tourist, in which representatives of the hospitality industry have taken a small but significant role. Local factors are in play here: although around 60% of visitors to Glasgow choose to stay in a hotel, the majority stay for an average of 1-2 nights. Hotels thus have an interest in increasing the number and length of hotel stays, while local music promoters have an interest in converting short-stay business travellers into music tourists. Hotels are also in competition with platforms like Airbnb, which as well as competing on price are perceived as offering a more direct and authentic connection to local culture.
Interest in music on the part of the hospitality industry can also be linked to a strategic shift away from a service-focused emphasis on cheapness and reliability, towards an approach that emphasises the qualitative aspects of the hospitality experience. This emphasis on the experiential quality of the hotel stay is achieved by creating a more engaging interior space, by forging links with external partners in the cultural sector, and by selectively incorporating the city's cultural resources into the hotel's brand identity. This re-appropriation and commercialisation of local culture and knowledge as part of a culture-led branding strategy is what we refer to by the term 'curation'. It is a term used by the hotels themselves as part of a corporate discourse that draws heavily on the vocabulary of art and the creative industries. In the marketing rhetoric of accommodation providers, this 'curatorial' shift is often discursively framed in terms of concepts such as 'citizenship'; hotels present themselves as taking up a 'neighbourly' disposition towards local creative businesses as part of an ethics of sharing, encouraging their guests to see themselves as temporary citizens of the local 'neighbourhood'. It is part of a strategy which seeks to differentiate hotels from their competitors by maximising the quality of guests' experience, through the repackaging of locally available lifestyle and cultural experiences. In exchange for the price of their stay, guests are offered a privileged glimpse of the 'real' life of the city through enhanced access to local knowledge. The guest is constructed as an informed, cosmopolitan traveller, who perceives the city as a site for the accumulation of cultural experiences as a form of cosmopolitan capital.

Defining music tourism: From product to experience
Music tourism is often thought of as a sub-category of cultural tourism. Titan Music Group (2012: n.p.) defines 'music tourists' as 'people who travel -often with their families -to a city beyond their home region for the sole purpose of attending a large music event, often an international music festival'. An early study for UK Music distinguished between overseas and domestic music tourists, but similarly restricted their definition to those whose sole purpose was to attend a large event (Blake, 2012). The prevalence of definitions which hinge on attendance at large-scale music events has meant that studies have tended to focus on the economic impact (e.g. ticket sales, food, drink, and accommodation) of concerts and festivals at the expense of grassroots venues and less tangible, but no less commodifiable musical activities (UK Music, 2017). As Gibson and Connell (2005: 16) argue, however, 'music tourism constitutes a cluster of possible tourists, activities, locations, attractions, workers and events which utilise musical resources for tourist purposes'. Many opportunities for developing the tourism value of music exploit the 'creative' or 'experiential' aspects of local music, for example, taking lessons from local musicians, participating in traditional music sessions, or performing at open mic events.
The pursuit of intimate, place-specific musical experiences reflects the wider trend towards celebrations of localism, creativity, and self-expression within the discourse of contemporary tourism and has been interpreted as a search for more authentic alternatives to the mass-tourist experience. Creative tourism, insofar as it offers 'more flexible and authentic experiences which can be co-created between host and tourist' (Richards, 2011(Richards, : 1225 is constructed as a rejection of mass tourism, with tourists reimagined as potential 'locals'. As tourists seek experiences which connect them to the everyday life of a destination, they shift from a 'predominantly passive gaze to encompass more active forms of involvement [. . .] in the everyday life of destinations' (Richards, 2011(Richards, : 1237. Fundamental to the concept is the pursuit of 'activities and experiences related to selfrealisation and self-expression whereby tourists become co-performers and co-creators as they develop their creative skills' (Richards, 2011(Richards, : 1237. Rather than consuming a different product or service, then, creative tourism implies a shift in perspective and an emphasis on tourism as a practice of self-making. The reorganisation of spaces of tourism to facilitate personally meaningful cultural 'experiences' can be viewed as part of the larger shift towards what Pine and Gilmore (1998: 99) have called the 'experience economy'. The experience economy in leisure and tourism is typified by the development of experiential environments and the repackaging of a range of tourist goods and services in the form of 'experiences' (Richards, 2011(Richards, : 1228. Much destination branding is organised around the idea of experiences, as in response to increased competition, 'places increasingly distinguish themselves through their "consumptional identities" or the reconstruction of places as, centres [sic] of consumption, through the manipulation of culture and creative resources' (Richards, 2011(Richards, : 1230. The cultural and symbolic capital of places becomes a resource for the staging of commodifiable experiences, which brings with it a new measure of competitivity: the 'ability to transform the basic inherited factors into created assets with a higher symbolic or sign value' (Richards, 2011(Richards, : 1230. For Pine and Gilmore, 'experiences' unlike commodities and services, 'are inherently personal, existing only in the mind of an individual who has been engaged on an emotional, physical, intellectual, or even spiritual level' (Pine and Gilmore, 1998: 99).
While the music industries have always sought to commoditise the ephemeral experience of music, whether in the form of concert tickets, recordings or merchandise, the musical experience economy moves this forward a step with music venues, events and scenes becoming 'stages' for experiences whose value is framed in terms of creative selfrealisation. A 'music city' such as Nashville provides tourists with more than a healthy selection of live music events; visitors to 'Music City USA' consume the city itself and, in the process, experience themselves as pilgrims to a site of historic creativity. Within an increasingly experience-focussed economy music, alongside other pre-existing cultural and leisure activities, can become a base service for the staging of commodifiable experiences, furnishing symbolic props within created experiential environments where the emphasis is less on the inherent value of a cultural 'product' than on the value of the experience as a resource for individual self-expression on the part of the consumer. It is as resources for self-construction that aspects of local music culture are appropriated into the promotional discourse of the accommodation providers discussed in this article. This raises inevitable questions about the intrinsic value of music as a cultural form -as local events, heritage, and traditions are treated as inherited assets for the creation of experiences -and about the kinds of opportunities afforded to musicians within this reconfigured cultural economy. Where then does the shift towards an experience economy leave traditional models of creativity and the musical career, and what are the implications for cultural, educational and tourism policy within the destination? Further, how can musicians, businesses, and policymakers realise the potential economic and cultural benefits of the music-experience economy without damage to the existing music ecology?

Constructing tourist subjectivities
Understanding music's place within the experience economy entails understanding the consumer of music experiences, and this is part of the larger question of how individuals derive meaning and value from the experience of music. The concept of value within the experience economy is intimately connected with notions of self-realisation through consumption, and with idealised tourist subjectivities. In what follows, we trace how promotional discourse constructs the experience of music as a source of value for cosmopolitan consumers, valorising certain ways of relating to the city and its culture over others; later, however, we also consider how these ideas of 'curation' and the creative consumer are interpreted by individuals within the accommodation sector, and the ways (albeit often limited) in which they translate into real relationships, networks and opportunities within the local context.
Notions of 'creativity' and 'exploration' are central to the corporate discourse of the hospitality providers considered here, symbolically aligning a privileged mode of consumption with positive political and ethical values embodied in the high-status subjectposition of the cosmopolitan traveller. It is worth noting that in promoting the image of the tourist as an 'explorer' or 'curious traveller', this discourse draws on earlier discourses of ethical tourism which sought to come to terms with the legacies of colonialism. Hanna (2013) explores the construction of alternatives to the 'mass tourist gaze' noting the prominent use of terms such as 'exploration' and 'discovery' in the discourse of sustainable tourism. Here, he argues: the subjectivity of the 'traveller' functions to separate the identity of the potential sustainable tourist from that of the 'bad' tourist [through] the construction of a particular 'subject position' in which the 'traveller' is a person that engages with the practices of 'immersing themselves in new cultures and environments' as opposed to being positioned as the passive 'gazing' tourist. (Hanna, 2013: 6) 'Tourist', Hanna (2013: 7) notes, carries connotations of 'irresponsible', 'passive', and 'naïve' as opposed to the 'educated', 'active' traveller, who, through authentic engagement with a given locale, approaches the subjectivity of 'citizen'. In the 18th century, 'travel was expected to play a key role in the cognitive and perceptual education of the male English upper class' (Urry and Larsen, 2011: 6), and Galani-Moutafi (2000: 204) also points to the higher status of the 'traveller' as a subjectivity associated with 'the economically well off, white, European male who has embarked on voyages motivated by heroic, educational, scientific, and recreational purposes'; travel, he notes, functions as a metaphor for a 'coming to consciousness', a literal voyage of 'self-discovery', as opposed to the collective participation in spectacle associated with the 'tourist gaze'. Bryce (2012: 444) suggests that identification with particular subject-positions can itself add value to tourist experiences, arguing that 'the occupation of a European subject position in relation to the idea of the East is an "attraction" offered to consumers of tourism in Turkey'.
In their promotional literature, the hotels considered here construct alternative tourist subjectivities using terms including 'curious travellers'/'mobile citizens'. It is thus worth briefly considering the use of these and similar terms in related discourses. Mobility is a marker of wealth and status, and 'is increasingly central to the identities of many young people' (Urry and Larsen, 2011: 30). In the language of the European Union, the term 'mobile citizens' denotes the status conferred by freedom of movement, which allows EU citizens to live and work outside their country of origin without accepting the status of an exile, immigrant or 'ex-pat'. In tourism and hospitality discourse, similar formulations include 'mobile cosmopolitan', the implied subjectivity of patrons of exclusive 'design hotels' who are imagined as possessing a high degree of transcultural as well as economic capital. The three hotels considered here can be understood as populist iterations of the 'design hotel' concept. Where Hotel Indigo (part of IHG) and the Radisson RED (part of the Carlson Rezidor Hotels Group) might be regarded as a mainstream response to the design hotel phenomenon, the citizenM chain is presented as an independent disruption of the mainstream market and is to some extent the prototype of the 'luxury on a budget' concept that these hotels all offer. The three hotels, however, all share the strategy of offering identification with a certain 'creative' subjectivity as a generator of value and rhetorically position themselves as curators of the city of Glasgow as a bundle of cultural and creative 'experiences'.

A changing accommodation sector: Creating mobile citizens and curious travellers
CitizenM is a hotel chain based in the Netherlands which offers a populist version of the 'design hotel' concept. The hotel's promotional discourse constructs guests as simultaneously cosmopolitan and 'at home' -or 'at home' because of their possession of the 'cosmopolitan gaze'. Urry and Larsen (2011: 5) argue that 'the gaze is constructed through signs and tourism involves the collection of signs. When tourists see two people kissing in Paris what they capture in the gaze is "timeless romantic Paris" 'the tourist', they suggest, 'is interested in everything as a sign of itself'.' A promotional video on the company's YouTube channel presents a sequence of images of the hotel's international locations, showing guests interacting with the exterior space of the cities and the interior space of the hotel (citizenM, 2017). The sequence begins with images of the City of London and its iconic landmarks. A group of young, fashionably dressed women are shown looking out the window of a London bus and smiling as if reacting to the previous images. Shots of Amsterdam's canals are then succeeded by images of Paris. Here, iconic landmarks including the Arc de Triomphe are intercut with images of an idealised everyday life; the window of a boulangerie with freshly baked bread, an espresso machine. In the next shot, a couple in New York react to the bustle of Times Square. This sequence connects the hotels with a series of instantly recognisable 'world city' locations, while positioning them as conduits into the everyday life of those places, merging the space of tourism with that of local, everyday experience. The images invite us to look at people looking, experiencing various cityscapes, and through this looking, to identify with them.
A second sequence takes us inside the hotel itself, with images of guests relaxing, working, and consuming within the hotel's shared spaces or 'living rooms'. These are in fact public areas whose purpose is 'to create a home environment by designing working, dining, and seating areas to create a home away from home for the guests'. The company presents its interior design aesthetic as the expression of a lifestyle ethos in which the boundaries between work and leisure, here and there, public and private, are intentionally blurred (Contemporist, 2013). These are spaces in which guests can be continually 'inspired': large cabinets filled with local art and kitsch artefacts divide the open-plan areas, creating structure while maintaining a certain fluidity between spaces and the activities of working, eating and socialising.
As well as crossing borders easily, the imagined guest is always on the lookout for 'inspiration' from local cultures. In this montage of images, places merge seamlessly and the iconic is juxtaposed with the everyday as people move effortlessly from place to place and between modalities of experience. Work, leisure, and travel blend into a total experience which is at once faintly exotic and reassuringly homely; as cosmopolitan travellers, they would feel at home anywhere.
As noted above, citizenM's 'mobile citizen' concept can be understood as a populist iteration of the transnational, cultured subjectivity associated with elite design hotels. Here, Strannegård andStrannegård (2012: 2010) argue: the dominating master-idea [. . .] in the design hotel genre is that the clientele is aesthetically constructed as mobile cosmopolitans [. . .] Their target group swiftly transgresses geographical boundaries. To the privileged group the hotels construct and target, boundaries of all kinds are erased. Thanks to their access to cosmopolitan codes and languages, members of this group feel at home wherever they go.
CitizenM and its comparators, however, do not assume the same degree of (real or imagined) transcultural fluency for their guests. While ascribing their guests a degree of transnational mobility based on cultural capital, the hotel spells out aspects of its 'philosophy', and expectations of guest behaviour, that in more exclusive design-led hotels would be implied. Although their website describes their target group in terms which suggest a high degree of cultural literacy, there is also a tacit recognition that their customers may lack the cultural and economic capital of the design hotel's key demographic: Modern travellers have more important needs than chocolates on pillows. They love to mix and match their choices, like a Gap shirt with an Armani blazer, or a Zara coat with a Chanel bag. They take the train into town, but order champagne once they get there. We took this type of traveller and called them 'mobile citizens', or citizenM for short. (citizenM, n.d.) This description suggests an active, outward-looking subject-position of sophisticated consumption, in which high street and designer products are combined in the context of individualised practices of self-representation. It invokes a worldview in which identity is defined primarily through consumption, and consumption is driven by the desire to express a unique identity. This identity is expressed not through an identification with individual brands but through the ability to incorporate them into an individual style. Customers are not defined by which mid-price high street brands they consume, but by how they consume (omnivorously, creatively); 'Citizens', it is implied, are not engaged in the consumption of off-the-peg products, but in the pursuit of unique and expressive consumer experiences.

Managing the 'hotelscape'
The physical space of the hotel itself is crucial to the success of contemporary hotels within the experience economy; as Urry and Larsen (2011: 122) argue, 'it is no longer the formal design of a building that determines its quality, but rather its powers of affecting and engaging users, emotionally, bodily and mentally'. The traditional design hotel concept, as discussed by Strannegård and Strannegård (2012) drew on the aesthetic language of conceptual art and creative design to create an environment (or 'hotelscape') in which aspects of design (including 'colour, lighting, furniture, style and layout') add value from 'the perspective of high spending and hedonistic, cosmopolitan consumers' (Alfakhri et al., 2018: 526).
The interiors of citizenM were designed by Kesselskramer, a Dutch communications agency primarily associated with the fine art sector. Despite these high-toned connections, the hotel is designed to offer culture to guests in a form which is both 'inspiring' and 'accessible': Our 'curated chaos' includes exceptional art, books, designer furniture by Vitra, kitschy souvenirs and local artefacts. We use natural materials and add splashes of colour in the form of big cabinets and their styling, adjusting to the seasons, the city, the neighbourhood, or changing fashions, without ever going out of style. (citizenM, n.d.) Elsewhere, public areas are compared to art galleries: Our hotels are designed to make citizens feel comfortable enough to kick off their shoes and take a nap surrounded by accessible, inspiring artworks [. . .] Can you imagine doing that at an art gallery or a museum? Whether it's on our facades, in our living rooms, in the lifts [. . .] we like to mix the recognisable with art that makes you think. (citizenM, n.d.) This 'inspiring' role clearly goes beyond the traditional remit of a mid-priced hotel; the company present themselves as facilitators of cultural experiences. However, they also emphasise accessibility and 'comfort', a blend of inspiration and familiarity that will 'challenge' guests without pushing them outside their comfort zone.
More than making guests feel comfortable, however, the hotel space offers an opportunity to experience themselves in terms of an idealised subjectivity, affording 'an identity building block that individuals can choose to use in their individual identity project' (Strannegård andStrannegård, 2012: 2002). Insofar as they constitute 'the right crowd', guests themselves become part of the unique atmosphere, co-creating the 'experiencescape' (O'Dell and Billing, 2005) of the hotel through their dress and behaviour, and their interactions with the hotel and each other through social media and in-house apps. In return, the hotels become an 'aesthetic asset' -part of a repertoire of self-representational strategies available to guests 'just like references to movies, poetry and art' (Strannegård andStrannegård, 2012: 2009).
The concept of the tourist as 'citizen' connects three related aspects of the hotel's idealised subjectivity: guests are constructed as 'mobile citizens' of the world,' with a refined 'curiosity about many places peoples and cultures', and as temporary citizens of the destination city. Finally, as 'citizens' of the hotel itself, they become subject to an implied code of behaviour. 'The entrance of a hotel', suggests Christersdotter (2005: 102), 'can be compared to a nation's border': A zone where the social category of 'stranger' is created and where identities are assigned and adopted, maintained and rejected. For those with an admission ticket and belonging to the right group, the border crossing is smooth and frictionless, just like a revolving door. But for those who do not fit in, the actual border and the crossing of it are evident: can I come in and do I belong here?
The 'citizen' conceit also allows economic considerations, such as the uniformity of the rooms, the lack of 'service' staff and the 'grazing' format of food provision, to be framed as ethical considerations formulated as part of a 'democratic' ethos, implying a 'social contract' between hotel and guests. As one journalist noted: if you want to fill up [. . .] then leave without paying -well, frankly, you can. But [CEO Rattan Chadha] thinks people won't. And [. . .] there's doubtless a cold cost-benefit analysis that says money saved on staff more than covers the occasional dine-and-dash guest. (Jones, 2012) It also raises the question of who belongs in the space. As this writer goes on to suggest, the behavioural disposition that the hotel space encodes can clash with local subjectivities: tabloid reports following the opening of the Glasgow branch in 2010 claimed that the irrepressible desire of English and Scottish 'citizens' to 'party' at the hotel had prompted the CEO to voice concerns that the hotel 'wasn't attracting the kind of highend traveller he was aiming for' (Anon, 2014). Clearly, 'resistant' readings of the 'experience-scape' are possible, in this case coming from the less or differently mobile 'citizens'. Calhoun (2008) notes that cosmopolitan discourses often seek to transmute the operation of emplaced and classed subjectivities into questions of moral choice, which enact a basic distinction between good, global citizens and stubbornly resistant locals. In this case, the framing of decisions about whether to appear drunk in the hotel's public areas or to exploit an unattended buffet as a question of free, moral choice, provides a banal illustration of the tendency of the cosmopolitan disposition to underplay its acquired nature through a morally-inflected discourse of free will. Skeggs (2015) has shown how this type of moralising discourse can be critiqued by applying Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and cultural capital to questions of cultural consumption; if a 'citizen' has not acquired the requisite habitus, the tacit rules of behaviour will not be second nature. The apparent failure to appreciate the risk inherent in attempting to 'democratise' what has hitherto been a characteristically elite disposition, suggests that the hotel's management themselves take as 'natural' a disposition which rests on sedimented social experience and acquired cultural capital.

Music in the hotelscape
Given the importance of managing the hotel as an 'experience-scape', bringing the city's music into the 'hotelscape' in a physical rather than a merely symbolic sense, is not a straightforward matter, and there are potential risks in drawing the 'wrong crowd'. CitizenM has been comparatively active in this regard, establishing links with local music promoters, serving as a venue for industry conferences and as an informal headquarters for the Scottish Music Industry Association. The hotel also opens its various multi-use spaces for performances by local musicians: We've [. . .] got something called Best Before Bed which is free for guests at the hotel and £5 for members of the public and we try and get local musicians to play down in our club room. We have this space downstairs as well [. . .] and we try and use local musicians who play maybe once a month and the public as well and try and get some exposure off the back of our brand. (Derek Macmillan, fieldwork interview, 2018) The general manager of Hotel Indigo, however, spoke of the difficulties of hosting musical performances within his hotel: . . .we've tried to promote some live music in here [. . .] things like open mic nights which didn't really work. The problem is it's quite an open space here, people that were dining in the restaurant were complaining about the singers [. . .] I also had a DJ playing here every Friday night for about two years but I stopped that about 6 months ago because it actually wasn't bringing anyone -it wasn't bringing me any money [. . .] the difficulty I found was that this is a very different environment [. . .] most of them are in a lot of them are fairly grotty pubs and things and it wasn't attracting the right crowd or the crowd that went to them weren't keen on coming here because there's a perception of overpriced drinks -a hotel cocktail bar rather than a sort of student hangout -so that's been quite difficult. (Duncan Johnston, fieldwork interview, 2018) Despite attempts to bring music into the hotelscape, most of the musical experiences promoted by the three hotels considered here take place outside the physical space of the hotel itself. In the next section, we consider the ways that hotels construct Glasgow as a site of cultural experience and position themselves as facilitating access to it.

Constructing Glasgow
Despite the emphasis on 'exploration' and 'discovery' in the discourse of contemporary hospitality, places are never simply 'there' awaiting discovery. 'Tourist places', Urry and Larsen (2011: 193) insist, 'are continually reproduced and contested through being used and performed', emerging as distinct sites of tourist experience insofar as they are 'inscribed in circles of anticipation, performance and remembrance' (Urry and Larsen, 2011: 119). The corporate discourse of Glasgow's hotels deploys several strategies to create anticipation, performing and remembering the city into existence. An earlier version of the company's website featured interactive city guides, allowing users to toggle between 'citizen types' ('business', 'cultural', 'fashion', and 'party') each one generating a re-shuffled list of recommendations accompanied by short reviews. This has since been replaced by a mobile app, with a reduced list of featured venues. In both the original city guides and the app, music is offered as part of a total lifestyle package which includes art, fashion, food and drink, culture, and heritage elements.
Promoted music attractions on the earlier guide included the café/record shop Mono, described as a 'hub for young creatives' and a 'place to discover undiscovered music'. Music venues listed include those with 'heritage' status (e.g. King Tut's Wah Hut, the site of career-defining early gigs by acts such as Oasis) or others which allow visitors to combine music with other lifestyle interests such as food, drink, and architecture. Stereo, for example, is a café and live-music venue situated within a Rennie Mackintoshdesigned building. Blackfriars, described as 'best for live music', is also home to 'Scottish-international fusion' cuisine and 'a wide selection of craft beer', while the Butterfly and Pig is primarily a restaurant but hosts free live music on a regular basis. Restaurants, bars, and cafés predominate, and although the city's concert hall is listed, the promoted music venues are in most cases small, multi-purpose spaces which allow guests to combine musical experiences with lifestyle interests such as artisan coffee, vegan food, art, and architecture.
On Hotel Indigo's website, the city beyond the hotel is constructed as domain of creative discovery comprised of discrete 'neighbourhoods' -'uncharted places' -which are curated by the hotel in order for 'you' in turn to be 'inspired' (Hotel Indigo, 2018). Referring to Glasgow city centre as an 'uncharted place' is clearly something of a stretch. Nevertheless, guests are invited to imagine the city as a blank canvas, to be overwritten with personally meaningful experiences.
Hotels construct local places through the creation of place narratives. Hotel Indigo rebrands its post-industrial location just outside Glasgow's city centre as 'the dynamo district', mobilising historical and contemporary discourses to present the area as a hub of creativity and entrepreneurship: A beacon of restless innovation, central Glasgow's vitality springs from its industrial roots. The revolutionary 19th-century power station that first lit up the area is now reborn as Hotel Indigo® Glasgow -vibrant and full of warmth, just like the locals. On the doorstep, grand Victorian buildings bear witness to past prosperity, while in the here and now, the air is charged with creative energy and entrepreneurial drive. Walk our pulsating neighbourhood to discover what's new, cherish what's old and glimpse what's still to come as you revel in contemporary art galleries, underground clubs and packed, trendy eateries. You too will feel the sparks that ignite this city as you rub shoulders with high-flying financiers and creative stars in the making (Hotel Indigo, 2021).
Like so much of the public-facing discourse discussed here, this passage constructs the tourist as a discoverer. Traversing the city's 'neighbourhoods' on foot, the guest is positioned as an explorer willing to expend physical and intellectual effort in the quest to 'feel the sparks' of the city's creative culture. The narrative also suggests continuity with the city's older industrial identity, glossing over any sense of rupture by emphasising parallels between the innovative spirit of the industrial past and the entrepreneurial present, and legitimising the hotel's place within the city's story, a continuous history of inspired innovation.
The notion of presiding over a 'neighbourhood' allows the hotel to appropriate local music assets as a source of experiential value. The website devotes substantial space to constructing an appealing culture-oriented narrative around the hotel's awkward location on the fringes of the city centre, flanked by the offices of credit services and insurance brokers. Reborn as the 'Dynamo District', the 'neighbourhood' is presented as a source of 'inspiration' for those willing to expend physical and intellectual effort to 'feel the sparks' of 'restless innovation'. It includes venues like King Tut's Wah Wah Hut, presented as a place of potential discovery where 'lucky punters' can catch 'the next big thing'. The cultural life of the city is couched in terms of valuable individual experiences: at the Barrowlands, a ballroom turned rock venue, guests are offered the opportunity to 'dance alongside 2000 other fans on the sprung floor while revelling in the venue's excellent acoustics and aura of rock 'n' roll nostalgia' (Hotel Indigo, 2021). Through the 'neighbourhood' conceit, these potentially transformative experiences are drawn into the promise of the hotel itself.
General Manager Duncan Johnston describes the hotel's target customer ('what they call the "curious traveller"') in more prosaic terms than those used by the company website as 'probably people 20s, 30s and 40s, that just want to get a bit of culture I suppose and see different cities and not stay in a really cookie-cutter style hotel' (Duncan Johnston, fieldwork interview, 2018). The company's slogan ('Discover Unique Together') combines this 'explorer' subject-position with notions of specificity and the co-creation of travel experiences. The company blog invites guests to engage in creative activity during their stay with one vlog post instructing viewers 'How to snap photos like a social influencer' 1 Music features prominently in the hotel's promotional materials, and each of the group's hotels has its own Spotify playlist. The Glasgow playlist celebrates the city's vibrant musical past and present and positions the hotel in a curatorial role, offering its guests access to 'true musical history'. The 14-track selection is eclectic (even, the presence of David Bowie excepted, a little obscure). It is also cosmopolitan and contemporary. Alongside African, Dutch, and American artists, four Scottish acts evoke both the city's indie music heritage (Orange Juice) and its contemporary scene (Naum Gabo, ultra-contemporary local EDM). By inviting potential guests to 'tune in' to the sounds of the city during the booking process, music is used to construct Glasgow as a hip, contemporary, global music destination, and to forge an imaginative connection with the destination in advance of their visit.

'Personalities wanted': Recruiting creative individuals
The widespread borrowing of the language of 'creativity' by the accommodation sector extends beyond the public-facing material into recruitment and organisation policies which emphasise the notion of creativity and individuality. The Radisson RED, for example, recently advertised for a 'curator' instead of a General Manager, and jobs which elsewhere in the sector would come under the category of 'service' (such as bar staff) have been listed as 'creative' posts. At citizenM the hiring process is constructed as a kind of audition: We hire our ambassadors purely based on their personalities. Instead of a traditional interview, we hold a fun casting day. The result: amazing teams in every hotel. Curious, well-travelled and open-minded, they embody the typical mobile citizen. They are also completely multifunctional: they'll help you check in and also shake up the perfect cocktail. We don't believe in segmenting people into concierge, receptionist, or bar staff. We want our ambassadors to be completely free to do what's best for each guest. (citizenM, n.d.) Management highlighted the need for staff to be able to provide customers with personal recommendations from their own experience. Additional staff training involves sampling local music experiences: . . .this Friday I'm taking our ambassador team to the piping centre which is a venue near us that does Scottish traditional music [. . .] they're going to take us round to meet the piper, get a bagpiping lesson and go on a tour and learn about the history of the tour and then afterwards we're going to another venue for some drinks, just so the guys know more venues in Glasgow. (Derek Macmillan, fieldwork interview, 2018).
To deliver on the promise of the company brand, staff need to accrue and share cultural experiences themselves, and possess the ability to create compelling narratives about the city's culture. Word of mouth recommendations built on the individual experiences of locals and the avoidance of paid advertising promotes a sense of discovery and authenticity, supported by the cultural capital of the brands and their youthful staff. But staff also rely on a steady flow of information from venues and promoters to make up-to-date recommendations, which one interviewee suggested was not always easily accomplished: . . .the best way for people to talk about concerts and stuff is to physically come in and say to our ambassadors and the guys are open to it, say if someone had a list of gigs coming in in the next two weeks, and they came in at three o'clock. See the core shift pattern is between 7 and 3 and 3 and 11? If someone came in at this handover point and told the gigs for the next two weeks, I could guarantee that the ambassadors would be raving about it. (Derek Macmillan, fieldwork interview, 2018) While constructing a fantasy of cultured, cosmopolitan consumers with privileged access to the best of the 'local culture' is easily accomplished online, then, connecting guests with real musical experiences once they arrive is not necessarily an easy task, requiring an entrepreneurial approach, and the continual nurturing of cultural and social capital by management and staff.

Conclusion
In this article we have considered how three of Glasgow's city centre hotels incorporate local music into their brand narrative, promising to unlock the cultural opportunities Glasgow offers for their customers. We have also pointed to some of the ways in which these branding strategies have been translated into action on the part of hotel management and staff, that while determined by brand strategies that are independent of specific local contexts, has the potential to bring visitors to the city into closer contact with its music. So, what are the implications for Glasgow as a 'music city' and as a place in which music happens?
In his work on traditional music in the west of Ireland, Kaul (2007) distinguishes between forms of commercialisation which allow local musicians to retain control over the production of 'cultural artefacts' (which thus retain their 'functional value' for the producer) and those in which musical activities are primarily aimed at a commercial tourist audience and shorn of their original functional meaning, with a resulting loss of control and authenticity. Kaul makes this distinction in order to emphasise that the commercialisation of local musical practices through strategic partnerships between music and other sectors (such as hospitality) are not necessarily purely inauthentic and exploitative. The appropriation of Glasgow's music and its reputation as a music city by hotels as part of their marketing discourse is a form of commercialisation over which currently local musicians appear to have little control. As Kaul (2007: 716) argues, however, 'commercialisation can co-exist (if not always comfortably) with an artist's control over the production of their art form', and gives the example of pub 'trad music' sessions as successful commercial partnerships between musicians and publicans, which satisfy tourists while allowing local musician to retain control over their practice and a sense of its authentic functional significance. His work suggests, in fact, that for many tourists, a sense that the sessions might be at least close to 'the real thing' may be a source of added value.
The hotels discussed here are also concerned to convey at least a credible sense of authenticity in their recommendations to customers, and the sense of having 'discovered' an authentic Glasgow that transcends the mass tourist experience, seems to be a key component of the value of the local music scene for accommodation providers and their customers. Rather than constructing musical experiences for a tourist audience, providers want their customers to feel that they are receiving a privileged glimpse into a local scene in which musicians are simply doing what they do.
The question is then, is there potential for developing mutually beneficial relationships between the sectors that go beyond the highly selective appropriation of local musical culture as part of corporate branding strategies? The acknowledgement of Glasgow's music within these branding strategies is ostensibly a positive step and suggests opportunities for developing music tourism (and music more generally) in the city. These opportunities, however, are embedded within the overarching logic of the experience economy, and the cosmopolitan-consumer identities it promotes. Hotels' participation in the musical life of the city is fully entwined with their brand identities and transnational corporate strategies, however effectively these may be clothed in discourses of sharing, inspiration, and creative transcendence. As a result, the narratives they produce around the city's music are inevitably reductive. Our research, however, indicated a genuine appreciation of the city's musical culture amongst accommodation staff and a willingness to promote it. There is also evidence of providers working successfully with promoters to host and promote events hinting at the potential of a more joined-up approach of the kind advocated by proponents of music city initiatives. Successfully integrating the accommodation sector with the city's music scene to the benefit of both, however, would seem to be dependent on significant interpretive work and leadership on the part of driven and well-connected individuals able to translate centralised brand narratives into real experiences on the ground.
The relationship of international chains with local music scenes is determined by global marketing strategies and the consumer identities they promote. Within these discourses, music functions primarily as a symbolic resource; what is being sold is the experience of experiencing music as part of an aspirational lifestyle identity. This has implications for Glasgow's musical identity, as the city's musical past and present is filtered through narratives in which customers and guests are 'inspired' by a local culture which they co-create in the process of 'discovery'. The translation of this into a positive impact on the city's music scenes depends on the interpretive work of individuals on the ground, and the extent to which bland corporate narratives can be translated into sustained relationships between individuals across the city's music, tourism, and hospitality sectors and thus into real opportunities for local musicians to connect with the city's growing stream of music tourists. If they are to benefit, local musicians may need to work through the implications of this experience-led consumer culture and grasp the affordances of their music in terms of the lifestyle-driven consumer subjectivities that the experience economy seeks to develop and profit from. From a research point of view, further investigation of how the design and discourse strategies of hotels shape tourist perceptions of the city as a space of cultural experience, may allow for a fuller understanding of the role of hospitality in cultural tourism initiatives, and the benefits of cultural city initiatives for local music ecologies more broadly.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/ or publication of this article: This research was supported by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Creative Economy Engagement Fellowship