Nashville is the Place to Be
Time to load up and move out (for those of us that don't already live there): Nashville is a city packed with music jobs that pay top dollar. Better than New York, in fact.
The news came via an EMSI report cited in Billboard this month showing that the Capital of Country leads the pack (per capita) for where to find the most folks making a living in the music industry.
Major cities Los Angeles and New York are still at the top of the heap for shear number of music jobs available. But for musicians that have a choice on where to call home, they tend to concentrate in music-friendly cities like Austin, Charlotte, Seattle, and New Orleans. And Nashville, where the cost of living allows their funds to go farther than in LA and NY.
"From 1970 to 2006, Nashville was the only city in the country with positive growth in music industry jobs using a location quotient, a measure of a particular industry's share of the total employment in a given location." -Billboard
Nashville also hangs with the big kids for top paying towns, when compared with the national average income of working musicians: Los Angeles (175%), Nashville (156%) and New York (147%). Other music-friendly US cities glitter a bit less in the light of that same national average: Charlotte (99%), Austin (94%), Atlanta (85%), Memphis (79%) and New Orleans (73%).
Makes that low cost of country living look sweet as Tennessee sunshine.
How about you: do you live and work in Nashville? Do the report's findings ring true for you? Or do you make a living in music elsewhere, and feel that your city's music industry got the short end of the stick?