Getting the Melody Right for the Creative Economy

We seem unable to shake off one of our most serious examples of civic lethargy:  our tendency to take our most famous international export for granted as we talk about attracting and keeping creative workers – music.

Meanwhile, the rich get richer.

Up I-40, Nashville Mayor Karl Dean continues to drive new thinking about his city’s music industry, even to the point of gutsily suggesting that perhaps the county vibe was turning off creative types that the city needs.   In response, he appointed the Nashville Music Council, a group of 50 high-profile musicians and industry leaders, with the audacious goal of making Nashville “the friendliest, most supportive city in America for creatives.”

One of Mayor Dean’s goals was even more heretical: to expand the annual CMA Music Festival to include genres other than country.  Some of the other recommendations sound eerily like they may have been borrowed from Memphis Music Foundation, but on balance, the show of solidarity and focus on creative workers using music were impressive.  After all, most of the music business centers on creative work such as writing, producing, performing, designing, and marketing, and it breeds the chemistry and connectivity that offers lessons for the creative economy at large.

The Largest 15 Music Cities

Of course, Nashville is the 800-pound gorilla.  It has the highest concentration of the music industry in the U.S. and Canada and it is more than three times bigger than the second place city, Los Angeles.  The 15 cities in U.S. and Canada with the highest music industry location quotients are:

1)      Nashville

2)      Los Angeles

3)      Montreal

4)      Toronto

5)      Vancouver

6)      New York

7)      Oxnard-Thousand Oaks-Ventura, CA

8)      Madison, WI

9)      Atlanta

10)  Quebec City

11)  Winnipeg

12)  Austin

13)  Ottawa-Gatineau

14)  Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk, CT

15)  San Francisco

Creative industries in the U.S. like music tend to be driven by clustering and economies of scale and scope.  One of the most important themes of new thinking about creative cities centers on authenticity, which is elemental to the character of our city but like music gets more lip service than action.

An Edge Strategy

As our colleague Carol Coletta has written, “Creative capital – new ideas and innovations, new designs, new ways of working and playing – is the fuel for the 21^st century economic engine.”  It’s the availability of talented people who are the keys to success in this economy, not raw materials or access to markets.

There are defining characteristics in a cultural scene that can make it attractive to creative workers: boundary crossing, definitions of culture and the promotion of inter-connections.  That’s because there is multi-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary artistic and cultural expression; informal arts activities like public art, street festivals, gallery walks and farmers’ markets; cross-pollination between for-profit and nonprofit with people active on both sides of the street; and routine request for creative workers to be on task forces.

Our city has a way to go with better representation of young professionals and creatives on boards and planning task forces.  There were some promising signs with the large committee considering the future of Beale Street as some folks from “the edge” and people not often seen on these types of public groups were mixed into the usual suspects.

It’s worth remembering the admonition of John Seeley Brown when he spoke to Leadership Memphis several years ago: “Innovation always comes from the edge.  If you want innovation, don’t look to the center.  That’s where you find conventional thinking and people invested in things as they are.”

Place Matters

That’s certainly been the case with the entrepreneurial and musical history of Memphis but somehow over the years, we lost sight of the reality of innovation.  We’ve even rewritten our history to suggest that we embraced our famous music performers and recognized their genius from the beginning.

That’s the thing about creatives.  It’s not just that we need them for our city to thrive economically.  We need them to shake up the status quo, to provide new thinking and to shake off the vestiges of the ways things have always been.

Fundamentally, however, we must build a creative place.  We should promote adaptive reuse of buildings to house creative companies; we should take culture to the streets and turn arts programming inside out; we should develop districts and neighborhoods that are Cultural Empowerment Zones with incentives and sweat equity options; we should develop design and development guidelines to encourage creativity and leverage the distinctiveness of neighborhoods; and more.

We have to push ahead until we find the tipping point, the point at which the rhetoric about young professionals, entrepreneurs and creative workers is transformed into solid, actionable things we can do.  We seem to have become experts at incorporating the vocabulary of new ideas, but without changing our behavior.

Getting the Outsiders In

The damage from this is even greater than it would be in most cities, because in a city that prides itself for its authenticity, it’s the inauthentic behavior of rhetoric over results that discourages the very people we’re trying to enlist and encourage and the creative ecosystem that we are desperate for.

In Cities in Civilization, Peter Hall writes for 1,168 pages about how particular cities suddenly become exceptionally creative and innovative. He said some urban centers flourish, decline and reawaken periodically. He concentrates on about 20 cities from the Golden Age of Greek civilization to London’s glory days of capitalism in the 1980’s.

One of the featured cities is Memphis from 1948 to 1956. Calling our city “the soul of the Delta,” he writes about the collision of musical styles that produced rock and roll and transformed American music forever. He makes the case that Memphis’ burst of creative genius resulted from the combination of advances in technology, the rise of independent record labels and the impact of “outsiders.”

We tend to see all of this creativity as just a chapter in our history and we see it largely through a rearview mirror.  The truth is that it has lessons just as potent for us today, beginning with seeing music as a vehicle to our creative economy.