Live Music in the Tourist Industry : A Comparative Study Between the Finnish Hotel Cruise Lines and Sharm EL Sheikh's Resorts Entertainment

Abstract

The primary aim of this study is to focus on the tourists, singer-musicians' and hotel managers' experiences with live music in Finnish hotel cruise lines and Sharm EL Sheikh's seaside resorts. The tourist, singer-musician and hotel manager relations - although an integral part of the tourist experience - have received little attention in past tourism and music studies. Thus, the purpose of this research will be to show that by observing these different informants performance rituals, interactions, and attitudes towards local entertainment in the tourist industry, we could offer insightful guidelines to better understand the cultural significance of live music in the tourist experience, often produced by a complex nexus of socio-political factors. The research will furthermore, try to encompass new grounds by focusing on the sociocultural and aesthetic meanings of live (popular, folk and world) music performances, from a tourist rather than popular music perspective. Themes, such as liminality, the flow, and imagined communities will thus be crucial in assessing the socio-culturally different or similar performer-audience meanings and experiences with live music in the two "worlds apart" en-tertainment settings. The multi-sited ethnographic framework in this research, will compare the host-guest experiences for the two world apart sites, and study the future impacts of world systems on changes in local music production and on attitudes towards live music performances. While Cohen (2002) asks, what can popular music tell us about cities the purpose of this paper is to ask what does the hotel industry tell us about popular music