Silicon Valley for music. Even today, this phrase smells of paradoxy. After all, so much of the music industry’s recent history has been carved out by an ideological and geographical separation from tech entrepreneurism—the likes of Napster in Boston, BitTorrent in San Francisco and Spotify in Sweden disrupting the incumbents in New York and Los Angeles, forcing record labels, publishers and their artists to catch up to the consumer-facing allure and logistical B2B mess of file-sharing and streaming.
Yet, the “radical” concept of a music startup haven may slowly be crystallizing into a reality, as tech talent flocks to historic music cities at unprecedented rates. Austin, TX, a vibrant live-music town home to festivals like SXSW and Austin City Limits, topped FORBES’ latest list of U.S. cities creating the most tech jobs, boasting a 73.9% growth in tech sector employment from 2004 to 2014. Nashville and Memphis also made the list, at No. 8 with 68.6% growth and No. 10 with 35.3% growth over the same time period, respectively. Several specialized music accelerators such as Zoo Labs and Project Music have sprouted up across the country, in an attempt to bridge these burgeoning tech and creative communities.
In addition, investment in music is rising on the policy level, as governments recognize the art form’s potential to drive both economic growth and civic engagement. The Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade recently injected $200,000 into a statewide music-industry research and revitalization project known as the Colorado Music Strategy (COMS). The City of San Antonio, TX recently gave $25,000 to nonprofit San Antonio Sound Garden to collect data on how musicians make and distribute their work. Conferences and networks such as the Music Cities Convention and the United Nations’ Creative Cities Network are further driving this agenda to cultivate robust creative communities.
Of course, sealing the gap between local music and tech will be much easier said than done. To what extent are musicians and tech experts actually motivated, or financially able, to collaborate with each other? What deeper socioeconomic issues could present obstacles to growth? Success in bridging these communities will involve carefully evaluating a city’s unique economic and cultural positioning in the national and global music landscapes, as well as learning key lessons from other entrepreneurial industries.
What does a Music Cluster look like?
Only over the past few decades have organizations begun formalizing the interplay among economic expansion, community development and the arts. In the 1990s, Harvard Business School Professor Michael Porter popularized the concept of “clusters,” or geographic concentrations of related companies and institutions in a particular field, heavily influenced by local assets and designed to make regional communities nationally and internationally competitive. Expanding on this idea, the National Endowment for the Arts coined the term “creative placemaking” in 2010, recognizing that arts-driven collaborations among public, private and nonprofit sectors could spur job creation and revitalize infrastructure.
As with any other industry, central to establishing a “music cluster” is the recognition of a unique, sustainable competitive advantage. One of the best lessons in this vein comes from Y Combinator Co-Founder Paul Graham, who admitted that he was unconvinced about startups’ potential in Pittsburgh, PA until learning about the city’s “youth-driven food boom.”
This trend seemed to fit the template for startup success like a glove: cuisine is a key facet of a city’s identity and personality, while most startup employees fall within the 25- to 29-year-old age bracket. Hence, Graham saw an exciting opportunity for Pittsburgh entrepreneurs to capitalize on the city’s culinary scene, “treat[ing] the people starting these little restaurants and cafes as [their] users.” Such a ploy is not merely about exploiting cultural capital for financial gain; it’s about giving this capital a visible footprint on the world map.
What the music-tech industry could learn from Graham is that globalization doesn’t necessarily make knowledge more important than space. Whether your music startup is a “good idea” will depend a lot on your immediate context. For instance, Memphis has a reputation not only as the nation’s “logistics center,” but also as a recording town, with strong studio brands like Sun Studio (B.B. King, Elvis Presley), Stax Records (Otis Redding, Rufus Thomas) and Royal Studios (Bruno Mars, De La Soul). Hence, its most successful music-tech products center around plugins for digital audio workstations, metadata improvements and other B2B solutions, rather than B2C ones. In contrast, Austin’s status as a live-music town leads many of its music startups to target event producers, talent buyers, live performers and concertgoers as their key clients.
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Cherie Hu, Contributor | “I focus on the crossroads of technology and the music business.”
https://www.getrevue.co/profile/cheriehu42