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.