The Champ is (Still) Here

Now that Richard Florida has posted on the rising popularity of Nashville with musicians and Dan has investigated Richard’s claim that Nashville is diversifying beyond country music, it seems like a good time to share a peek at some more of our research in progress.

We’ve built a North American dataset that pulls together the American and Canadian numbers on musicians and the recording industry. Not only does it allow us to make comparisons between countries, but it’s also useful for comparing larger cities. Toronto and Montreal are the only really populous cities in Canada. Now, instead of being limited to comparing them to one another, we can compare them to similar regions across North America.

For now, though, let’s look at Nashville. We compare it with a set of peer regions (populations of 1 to 2 million) using data on recording industry firms. That includes recording studios, record labels and the like. Nashville doesn’t just rank #1 – it dominates the rankings, with over twice the per capita recording industry of second-place Vancouver. And when we look at the concentration of the recording industry using a metric called location quotient (LQ), Nashville becomes an even more dramatic outlier, with a score over six times that of its peer cities:

Nashville maintains its dominance when we expand our view to all metro areas in North America, large and small. Notice how Canadian cities consistently rank better than similarly-sized American ones, with the sole exception of Nashville:

When we shift our gaze to concentration of the recording industry, Nashville once again becomes even more of a stand-out. Canadian cities move closer to their American brethren, although Canadian cities still rank highly. We’ll talk about this systematic difference between countries in a future post:

Why is the music industry so concentrated in Nashville? The Sonic City paper includes a brief history of the music industry in Nashville that sketches out the origins of its dominance. Here’s an excerpt:

The story of Nashville’s rise as a music center illustrates the cumulative, location-specific nature of the process of the evolution of a music scene. Nashville’s evolution, according to various studies, begins with the institutionalization of the Grand Ole Opry, which originally emerged as one of many weekly ‚barn dance‛ music performance radio shows that originated in the 1920s (Lomax 1985; Cusic 1994; Daley 1998; Malone 2002; Connell and Gibson 2003). As the style of music it was known for evolved and became known as ‘country’, the show benefited from its originating station’s powerful ‚clear channel‛ signal which reached across much of North America at night. The Opry brand name grew, outlasting programs from Chicago, Kentucky and elsewhere. While Nashville was not yet a major center for recording studios or record labels, it benefited from its close proximity to the South, Midwest and Texas, and from a welcoming environment that respected the country genre more than other music centers. . .

The MPI has also released a good working paper on how the music industry is shifting geographically over time: Music for the Masses: The Economic Geography of Music in the U.S., 1970-2000.