Nashville Becomes 'Silicon Valley of Music Business'

Nashville really is Music City, Richard Florida writes in the Atlantic. Charting the demographics of the music industry from 1970 to 2004, Florida found that “Nashville was the only city that registered positive growth. In effect, it sucked up all the growth in the music industry.” It’s not just stars and bars, either: The city is home to a staggering 180 recording studios and 80 record labels, across many genres.

“While conventional wisdom holds that modern technology allows musicians to work from anywhere,” Florida writes, “the reality is music, like many other industries, is actually becoming more concentrated and clustered.” So it’s not surprising that a city that in 1970 was a provincial country music capital is “now the center for multiple musical genres from country and gospel to rock and pop.”