Can Karl Dean’s industry think tank rebrand Music City?

Nashville Calling
by Adam Gold

Nearly everyone can agree on why Nashville should be considered a world-class city and a music-business player in the same league as New York or L.A.: We're the cradle of country music, the citadel of contemporary Christian. We're home to many of the most skilled session players, songwriters, producers and engineers in the world.

And yet, touring bands make a beeline from Louisville to Atlanta — around us. When it comes to local bands, the national media suffers from some kind of amnesia: By the time the next one hits, they seem startled all over again to learn Nashville breeds something more than country music. It doesn't matter who moves here, or who makes the pop crossover of the decade, or who sells more than 24 million digital tracks while the rest of the industry is throwing up its hands: For anything other than country, the Music City brand stops at the Music City limits.

Everybody knows we belong at the top of the big leagues — everybody in Nashville, anyway. What's harder to pin down is why the rest of the world doesn't seem to agree.

But for the past year, at Mayor Karl Dean's behest, a think-tank of music-industry heavyweights has been asking the question: What will it take to give the Music City brand across-the-board weight? What will make Nashville a destination not just for tourists, but for the creative class that gives cities a cool cachet that translates into increased revenue and real-estate values?

Known as the Nashville Music Council, the mayor's group amounts to a Justice League of music-business honchos, supplemented by up-and-comers from the trenches who make up in enthusiasm and ideas what they lack in connections. They've addressed themselves to a common topic — what'll it take? — and applied it to a variety of fronts: industry development, venues, education, even public transportation.

Now a year into its existence, the council has many in the Nashville music community scratching their heads and wondering exactly who they are and what, if anything, they're accomplishing. As an advisory board to the mayor — like the Health Care Council — they've managed to split into four subcommittees: branding, creative talent, live music and music education. And so far, a cynic might say, that is their greatest accomplishment.

But there are looming developments that may answer the project's critics. The council is still wading through minutiae in an exploratory phase that, while time-consuming, could well be worth the wait. As a whole, it's a big brain, rich with ideas, eager to work, full of power — but rife with question marks. While the council and the mayor are no doubt developing the biggest picture yet of Music City, it's only slowly coming into focus.


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"I think one of the strongest things we have in Nashville is that we are constantly bringing in — as capital — creative people," says Mayor Dean, answering this reporter's first question with a minutes-long outpouring of enthusiasm. "Whether it's songwriters or musicians or performers or technicians, we're bringing in people whose talent is their ability to be creative. They revitalize the city."

Dean wants to continue to court those bright minds to Nashville and see them sow the seeds of cultural, technological and economic development. He wants to capitalize on the Music City brand. Yet while he recognizes that brand as a powerful magnet to entice new businesses, lure tourists and inspire artists and innovators to seek refuge here, it's one that needs a makeover.

Start with the story of Music City — not just the one you read on plaques lining the walls of the Ryman or the Country Music Hall of Fame, but the one that includes Taylor Swift and the Kings of Leon's recent Grammy takeover. The story of prominent artists from Kid Rock to Jack White coming Nashville-way to set up shop. The story that led urban studies theorist Richard Florida to declare Nashville the Silicon Valley of the music industry.

The rebranding effort hinges on Nashville's fight to tell the world we're not just country — only this time around, it's coming from the Metro government. It's official: Not only do the city fathers want to tell this story, citing all the examples that make it self-evident, but they want to write the ending — not by editing Nashville's rich country heritage out of the narrative, but by building on its laurels and ending in triumph, not tragedy.

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