The Island Syndrome: A view on the international success of the Icelandic music scene

Abstract

This study investigates the factors facilitating the success of the Icelandic alternative music scene. Its main goal is to gain better insight in the question why some local music production centers are more successful than others. It brings together some main findings of studies on the international success of scenes and yields a set of facilitating factors that can be used to analyze the success of local music scenes. The findings of this study suggest that most factors that have been at work in the success of other scenes, such as networks, leveraging and musicians' professionalism and mentality, also apply to the case of the Icelandic scene. In addition, there are some factors that can be designated as typical for Iceland and a new topic, national characteristics is added to the list of facilitating factors composed in the theoretical framework. The main conclusion of this study is that it is possible to extract a number of factors that have facilitated international success from literature on music scenes and use these factors to explain the success of other scenes.