Hypebot ran this three-part post recently.
Part I: Music & The Creative Class: A Fruit Fly Industry
Richard Florida and his 2005 bestseller The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life
gave voice to a movement to revitalize cities by attracting and nurturing the “creative class” – a socioeconomic group of 40 million that makes up 30% of the US workforce. There is no shortage of evidence of the power of the creative class to transform post-industrial cities, but how music, along with the companies that follow and feed it, contribute to the Creative Class is just beginning to get special attention.
Musicians make up a small subset of the Creative Class which also includes artists, scientists, engineers, educators, programmers, researchers, designers and media workers as part of a “super creative core” that accounts for just 2% of US jobs. Knowledge based workers in professions like health-care, business and finance, the legal sector, and education that “draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems” make up a larger group of creative professionals.
But music is now being recognized as a fruit-fly industry – an early indicator of new technologies, new business models, and the economy in general. “Music is a highly competitive business – a hyper-competitive market in miniature…
But just as music matters to cities; cities also matter to music. Even in an age when messages and mixes travel around the globe in seconds, where musicians and other members of the creative class live and create matters.
Part II: Music & The Creative Class: How Music Can Transform America’s Cities
When Richard Florida wrote The Rise of the Creative Class in 2005 music was barely a blip on the social economist’s radar. Now Florida and his colleagues are beginning to recognize music and the businesses and professionals that follow and service it as “fruit fly” industries – early indicators of new technologies, new business models, and the economy in general.
“Musicians are quintessential examples of free-agent workers, mixing income and seeking out affordable, creative places to do their work. And the concentration of musical talent and firms into clusters and scenes – in an industry which requires little in the way of capital infrastructure and fixed costs – can help us better understand geographic clustering across a wide variety of fields”.
Others from Memphis to Mussel Shoals to the Blue Ridge Mountains around Roanoke, VA are using their musical heritage to try to revitalize their cities and regions. In some areas new scenes are also being built from the remnants of the old.
Proof that clusters of musicians or “scenes” can transform a community abound. Berlin, London, Los Angeles and New York were once, and to some degree still are, in part defined by the music created and musicians that live there. More recently Nashville, Austin and Brooklyn have all benefited from the music.
Part III: Music & The Creative Class: Why Place Matters To Music & Music Matters To Place
In previous installments of Music & The Creative Class, I explored the importance that musicians and the business that follow them play in the growing Creative Class that is reshaping America and much of the developed world. Not only does music add flavor to a neighborhood or city, as they have in Nashville, Memphis or New Orleans; but musicians are also often “fruit fly indicators” or harbingers of future growth as they have been from Austin, Texas and Brooklyn Heights, New York.
But if musicians mater to place, how much does place matter to musicians. In an era of net based social networking and online collaboration combined with fast and easy travel, it is tempting to say that where musicians live matters far less than it once did. But in Who’s Your City?, the follow up to Richard Florida’s groundbreaking The Rise of the Creative Class
Music is most often a collaborative art form and it would be easy to answer…
But wherever White or others makes music, they will need people to perform with and fans to come see them. Look to your left and to your right the next time that you walk down the street. Are your surrounded by other creatives and the people that support them? Is this your tribe? If not, can you build one?
The question of how much place matters to music with that fact alone. Musicians need to be near other musicians, but for them to thrive, they also need affordable housing, places to perform and fans to see them. And along with each of these comes businesses, managers and support staff. Over time, a community grows that then attracts more of the same.
In “Who’s Your City”, Florida recounts the tale of Jack White of the White Stripes moving his band from the grit of Detroit which shaped his sound to the polish and twang of Nashville. Despite the seeming incongruity, White is thriving because he finds the Music City more professional, less confrontational and less melodramatic. “Like Silicon Valley, it is a place where the best and brightest in their fields can collaborate with other top talent”, Florida writes, as well as be supported by a shared infrastructure.
Does every musician need to pack up their instruments and flock to the nearest music mecca to make it? Florida argues that “super star cities” attract and support many creatives. But musicians and artists, who are so fed by individualized muses may be a bit different than computer programming creatives tethered to their own brand of keyboards. Overtime, for example, Nashville may change the music that Jake White makes just as Detroit helped form it.
June 11th, 2009 at 9:19 pm
“The question of how much place matters to music with that fact alone. Musicians need to be near other musicians, but for them to thrive, they also need affordable housing, places to perform and fans to see them.”
“Despite the seeming incongruity, White is thriving because he finds the Music City more professional, less confrontational and less melodramatic.”
Exactly why in electronic dance music (EDM), especially minimal techno, but not exclusively — as pretty much any eccentric, aspiring electronic musician can attest to — Berlin is still widely known as THE place to go to. It’s almost a cliche now in the industry (in fact, that term has been used by edm journalists) to describe a musician from around the world who does this. My suspicion is that much of this has to do with the exact factors mentioned in this piece and Prof. Florida’s research:
1) Berlin is cheap to live in (abundant space in the East part of the city, keeps rents low, and allows for artists to survive while developing their sound and experiment styles that might not be so formulaic nor easiest to sell to mass audiences.
2) It has a connected community of musicians, record labels, and other industry types is quite prevalent.
3) Berlin is a large city with an eccentric and well regarded club culture that attracts party tourists, as well as easy access to the large European market (with lots of urban settings/cities that usually have enough of a population open to “underground” styles of music & edm) via cheap airlines like RyanAir and EasyJet to perform in clubs, at festivals, etc. and earn money.
4) Within Berlin’s community of producers/djs/live pa acts, is far less of a competitive attitude (which I gather has to do with some of the other factors, i.e. cheap to live in, easy/cheap access to many markets) and very professional/cutting edge.
5) Most of the new sounds, styles, and uses of technology, (i.e. Ableton Live, Traktor) in EDM, comes from Berlin based EDM musicians and producers, which pushes the marketplace for demand of products and new technologies, even affecting other music genres that are increasingly relying on these technologies for music production.
This leads to part of the problem the U.S. faces as a creative nation, in my view, in that our most developed urban centers are extraordinarily expensive, and the rest for the most part lack urban development/attractiveness to certain types of creative class folks, especially musicians. Most of our cities also lack cheap transportation/access to other centers in the way Europe has.
I could see the NorthEast with Bos-Wash, Chi-Pitt, Buf-Tor region being the best option of place given the proximity and population density that exists within this area, and relatively short travel distance via plane or, hopefully, one day high-speed rail.
One underlying problem I see is that while humans are treated as capital in our late post-industrial capitalist society, by institutions and businesses, immigration laws are not libertarian enough for anyone to move to any country of their choosing, and inequality, relating to some possessing privilege to move and work easier between countries (i.e. EU member nations), make it so that even an American citizen interested in furthering their career as a musician, connecting to a place they are interested in living might not be able to so legally due to EU restrictions.
Here’s an article written on Beatportal (a blog of Beatport, the biggest seller of downloaded electronic music) last summer that documents many of the points about Berlin’s attractiveness:
http://www.beatportal.com/feed/item/berlin-the-electronic-music-commune/
June 12th, 2009 at 12:06 am
“Musicians need to be near other musicians”
I think this is also true across styles, the more kinds of music that are available the more cross-fertilization. Portland was favorably compared to Nashville for variety in a recent post. In the last month or so:
We went to hear Pink Martini (a sort of Latin flavored big band) play with the Oregon Symphony,
Another time to listen to Tom Waits songs sung as Opera by the Portland Opera’s understudies,
I heard an excellent cellist playing his own minor key classical compositions at the Farmers’ Market (among all the folkies and bluegrass bands),
A student in my grantwriting class had a grant project to revive the gamelan at Lewis & Clark College.
The point is when there are many different kinds of music available, the musicianship gets better. Rock drummers go listen to jazz drummers, symphony violinists to listen to fiddlers, and the combinations give way to new forms.
September 21st, 2009 at 4:56 pm
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