In the latest addition to the ‘Live Music 101’ series of theory-based posts, Emma Webster and Adam Behr seek to offer some answers to the question of what makes for a good city for music and set out various formulations as to what makes for a ‘healthy’ live music ecology, an examination of the interplay between national and local policy and the musical city, followed by a case study of Glasgow as an archetypal ‘healthy’ musical city.