Creative Class

Nashville is the Silicon Valley of the music industry – a concentrated cluster of musical talent,  venues, studios and all the inputs required to make music.  So it’s no surprise the city take the music business seriously.  In May 2009, the mayor launched a Music Business Council (h/t: Ian Swain -my MPI colleague, music project collaborator and DJ).  To signal the initiative’s importance, he sits on the council whose members not only include label execs and entertainment lawyers, but also musicians like Emmylou Harris and Jack White. The Council’s goals extend all the way from supporting and expanding the presence of music festivals in Nashville to aiming to develop the best music education program of any public school system in the world.

Nearly 40 years ago, the geographer Jean Gottmann documented the rise of the great megalopolis of Bos-Wash – the Boston-New York-Washington corridor – as a massive new kind of geographic form. My own research (PDF) has used satellite imagery to plot the rise of mega-regions – integrated systems of cities and their suburbs – across the globe. The world’s 40 largest mega-regions produce two-thirds of all economic output and nine in 10 of the world’s innovations. With their massive scale and market size, mega-regions are becoming a key economic and social organizing unit of our time.

But mega-regions are not only important to markets, economics, and technology, now it appears they are important to music as well. Case in point, the indie-rock band The Walkmen whose newest single was recently released. Half the band live in New York, half live in Philadelphia. They maintain recording space in both places, and recorded their upcoming album from BOTH studios. Walkmen frontman Hamilton Leithauser described the logistics of their arrangement to Pitchfork in February: (more…)

It’s pretty well-known that our economy – and society – is transforming from one where wealth and prosperity came from industrial products and material goods to a system where new ideas, human creativity, and experiences play a greater and greater role. As societies become more educated and basic needs are fulfilled, the attention of their populations shift to favor experiences and self-actualization over physical goods and even luxury items – what sociologist Ronald Inglehart calls the rise of “post-materialist” values.

This shift can be seen in everything from the excitement around the sleek design and user experience of the Apple iPad to the rise in sales of organic, high-quality foods.

But my sense is that perhaps the best place to observe this transition is in the rapid evolution of the music industry. Music is a highly competitive business – one I like to think of as an innovative market in miniature. Musical entrepreneurs compete not only on the basis of musical talent and their ability to create new sounds and arrangements, but also on fashion, design, business acumen, and even spectacle. Music was one of the first industries to experience the brutal effects of the digital transition, and it’s clear that the ability to make money has shifted – even for the most established acts – from selling albums, CDs, and even digital downloads to live performance and, well, designing experiences. (more…)

GOOD links this map from a new report on state obesity from the Trust for America’s Health.

A quarter or more of all adults are classified as obese in more than two-thirds of states. The fattest states are all in the South. Colorado, California, Montana, and Mid-Atlantic and New England states have the lowest rates of obesity.

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Commuting is among life’s least enjoyable activities, according to research by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and others. The graph below shows the cities with the worst commutes in the world, according to IBM’s Commuter Pain Index (via Wired).

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Earlier this week, the American College of Sports Medicine released its new version of the American Fitness Index, which tracks the health and fitness level of America’s 50-largest metropolitan regions. The index is defined as a “composite of preventive health behaviors, levels of chronic disease conditions, health care access, and community resources and policies that support physical activity.” The table below shows the fitness levels for these 50 metros.

Source: American Fitness Index

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Are we moving beyond the auto age? Writing in Esquire, Nate Silver provides hard statistical evidence that America’s once-overwhelming car-culture and driving habits have peaked. This article in Advertising Age (h/t: Patrick Adler) provides additional evidence that we may well be in the early stages of a reset in attitudes about driving and car ownership, especially among younger folks. Here are some key statistics from the article:

“In 1978, nearly half of 16-year-olds and three-quarters of 17-year-olds in the U.S. had their driver’s licenses, according to Department of Transportation data. By 2008, the most recent year data was available, only 31 percent of 16-year-olds and 49 percent of 17-year-olds had licenses, with the decline accelerating rapidly since 1998.”

“Twenty-somethings went from driving a disproportionate amount of the nation’s highway miles in 1995 to under-indexing for driving in 2009.”

“It’s not just new drivers driving less. The share of automobile miles driven by people ages 21 to 30 in the U.S. fell to 13.7 percent in 2009 from 18.3 percent in 2001 and 20.8 percent in 1995.”

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That’s the question I asked earlier today at Twitter.  You answered a combination of new tech, like broadband and the internet; high-speed rail; and greater concentration, density, and walkability. Here with a sampling of responses from the twitterverse.  I’ll add more as they come in:

carlos9900: the equivalent of the highways today are the broadband internet, public transportation, electric & energy system

jamesschwartz: We can learn a lot from China (I’m in China now). High speed electric trains and segregated cycle tracks (more…)

My paper with MPI colleagues Charlotta Mellander and Kevin Stolarick is out in the new issue of Environment and Planning A. Its full title is “Music scenes to music clusters: the economic geography of music in the U.S., 1970 – 2000.” Here’s the abstract.

Where do musicians locate, and why do creative industries such as music continue to cluster? This paper analyzes the economic geography of musicians and the recording industry in the U.S. from 1970 to 2000, to shed light on the locational dynamics of music and creative industries more broadly. We examine the role of scale and scope economies in shaping the clustering and concentration of musicians and music industry firms.

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The National Bureau of Economic Research says we’re not out of the recessionary woods yet, though some think the economy is looking up. Floyd Norris of the Times, for one, thinks the numbers are pointed in the right direction. (More over at The Atlantic Wire). Restaurants certainly seem to be rebounding.

Today, I stumbled across another intriguing indicator. It’s called the Leading Indicator of Remodeling Activity – LIRA for short. Produced regularly by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, the index measures “national homeowner spending on improvements for the current quarter and subsequent three quarters,” and aims to track “future turning points in the business cycle of the home improvement industry.” The graph charts the trend. (more…)