The Where of Pop

While we all inevitably have some degree of awareness about which cities are media centers--New York and Los Angeles being the two principal American ones--the origins of recent Grammy winners may be pointing toward a shift in conventional knowledge, Richard Florida writes.

Nashville emerges as the hands-down winner:

The top ranked city is Nashville, which is literally off the chart.  LA is second, Montreal third, Toronto (where Grammy nominated artists Justin Bieber and Drake hail from) fourth, and Vancouver fifth (home to Michael Buble, winner of the award for traditional pop vocal album), followed by New York in sixth.

Nashville has become a major force in the music business. Miranda Lambert was nominated for three Grammys this year and took one home for best female performance for her record "The House that Built Me."  Alison Krauss, who won the 2009 Grammy for her record "Raising Sand" with Robert Plant, has won 26 Grammys, the third most in history after George Solti and Quincy Jones. Taylor Swift, last year's Grammy Queen, has a home in Nashville.

Over the past several decades, Nashville transformed itself from a rather narrow country music outpost in the 1960s and 1970s into a major center for commercial music. By the mid-2000s, only New York and Los Angeles housed more musicians. Nashville's rise is even more impressive when you look at its ratio of musicians to total population. In 1970, Nashville wasn't even one of the top five regions by this measure. By 2004, it was the national leader, with nearly four times the U.S. average. Today, it  is home to over 180 recording studios, 130 music publishers, 100 live music clubs, and 80 record labels.

 
I'm going to hazard a guess that the preponderance of Canadian cities at the top of the list may be due (a bit) to Canadian content laws encouraging-slash-protecting Canadian cultural production, though that is only a part of the story--the Canadian musical acts that Florida cites are certainly commercial blockbusters regardless. That said, plenty of mid-size cities in the US have budding, and commercially successful, music scenes that point toward a future where the "where" of North American pop culture production is increasingly multi-polar.

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[nandemo]

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