The big winners in Sunday night’s Grammy Awards took many by surprise. Arcade Fire took home the record of the year for “The Suburbs” and the country group Lady Antebellum’s song “Need You Now” won awards for best record and best song of the year. The former is from Montreal, the latter hail from Nashville.  The internet and social media exploded with a raft of incredulous messages – - a Tumblr called “Who is Arcade Fire?” compiled dozens of them.  The Today show’s Matt Lauer blurted: “I’ve never heard of the Arcade Fire. I’m going to have to download them.”

Could these wins reflect something of a broader trend?  Is the landscape of popular music changing? Could it be that new upstart music scenes in Nashville, Montreal, and elsewhere are gaining ground on New York and LA, the long-established hegemonic centers of commercial and recorded music?

My team and I have been involved in an ongoing project to track the changing dynamics and geography of the popular music industry. The chart below shows some of the preliminary data we have collected.  Compiled by my colleague Ian Swain, who is now our tour with his own band, Bonjay, it uses a statistical measure called a location quotient to chart the concentration of music business establishments—including record labels, distributors, recording studios, and music publishers—in metro areas in the U.S. and Canada with populations over 500,000. Interestingly, Canada U.S. figure of 1.2.

The top ranked city is Nashville, which is literally off the chart.  LA is second, Montreal third, Toronto (where Grammy nominated artists Justin Bieber and Drake hail from) fourth, and Vancouver (home to Michael Buble winner of the award for traditional pop vocal album), followed by New York in sixth.

Nashville has become a major force in the music business. Miranda Lambert was nominated for three Grammys this year and took one home for best female performance for her record “The House that Built Me.”  Alison Krause, who won the 2009 Grammy for her record Raising Sand with Robert Plant, has won 26 Grammys, the third most in history after George Solti and Quincy Jones. Taylor Swift, last year’s Grammy Queen, has a home in Nashville.

Over the past several decades, Nashville transformed itself from a rather narrow country music outpost in the 1960s and 1970s into a major center for commercial music. By the mid-2000s, only New York and Los Angeles housed more musicians. Nashville’s rise is even more impressive when you look at its ratio of musicians to total population. In 1970, Nashville wasn’t even one of the top five regions by this measure. By 2004, it was the national leader, with nearly four times the U.S. average. Today, it  is home to over 180 recording studios, 130 music publishers, 100 live music clubs, and 80 record labels.

While Nashville lacks the diversity of genres found in LA and NY, according to an analysis of MySpace data conducted by my colleague Dan Silver, it has large concentrations of commercial genres beyond country, spanning Christian, pop, rock and punk—so much so, that over the past decade or so Nashville has begun to suck in talent from the rest of the country and the world.  Australian Keith Urban first moved there in 1992; he moved back with Nicole Kidman in 2005. They were shortly joined by the legendary rocker Jack White, who relocated to Nashville from Detroit and established his new multipurpose headquarters, Third Man Productions, where he produced country veteran Loretta Lynn`s Van Lear Rose, Wanda Jackson`s  The Party Ain’t Over ; emerging acts like the Smoke Fairies and the Black Belles; and  his own records with the  Dead Weather and Raconteurs, as well as remastering and re-releasing his albums with the White Stripes.  The ongoing evolution of Nashville has made it into something of a Silicon Valley of the music business, combining the best institutions, the best infrastructure, and the best talent, as I noted in a post here in May, 2009 (“The Nashville Effect”).

Though Montreal may not have the commercial punch of Nashville, its musical assets extend far beyond Arcade Fire. In a study of Montreal’s creative economy I conducted with Stolarick and consultant Lou Musante in the early-2000s, we found musicians from around North America relocating there to take advantage of the city’s historic and cultural heritage, openness, and affordable real estate.  Montreal is also home to Cirque de Soleil, a cultural force in its own right.

Upon accepting the award for best record, Win Butler, the leader of Arcade Fire—who hails originally from Texas—noted the bond between music and his adopted city.  “I just want to say thank you, merci, to Montreal, Quebec, for taking us and giving us a home and a place to be in a band.” Talking with reporters after the show he added: “There’s such a beautiful arts scene and music and dance (and) a lot of creative forces there.” This is clearly a guy who thinks a lot about place: his band’s award winning album is titled “The Suburbs.”

True, the rise of Nashville and the smaller but influential scenes in Montreal and elsewhere will not threaten the position of LA, NY and London atop the pop commercial music hierarchy.  But intriguing  and influential indie rock scenes have grown up in far flung places, from Austin and Seattle to Portland (home to The Decembrists) and Omaha (home to Conor Oberst), not to mention the rise of Atlanta as an R&B and hip-hop mecca – where the much-talked about meeting between Bieber and Usher took place.

The effects of this extend far beyond music per se. The San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, and Austin are as well-known for their clusters of entrepreneurial high-tech industry as their music.  Places with flourishing music scenes have underlying economic and cultural systems that are open to new ideas and that enable technology entrepreneurs as well as musicians and artists to mobilize the resources they need to realize their dreams and visions. Understanding the factors that led Win Butler to choose Montreal and caused acts as diverse as Lady Antebellum, Taylor Swift, Alison Krause and Jack White to end up in Nashville provide a powerful lens not only into our popular culture but the very inner workings of our increasingly idea and talent-driven economy.

We all know Lady Gaga as a singer, dancer and performer.   But in the last two years, she’s climbed from just an entertainer to a monster endorser and creative visionary.

According to CCG’s very own CEO Rana Florida,

She [Lady Gaga] has changed the way endorsement deals work. She’s putting more of her influence, thought and creative energy into a line rather than just endorsing them. She has been able to successfully marry music, fashion and culture, making her a truly visual maven. She is her own movement.

Read more about Lady Gaga’s influence  at CNN International.

Is Lady Gaga the first artist to truly exemplify the qualities of the creative class?  How has she leveraged the 3-T’s: technology, talent and tolerance to build her brand  and influence?

There’s lots of good music emerging out of the T-Dot urban music scene right now, which seems to be indicating something interesting about the city’s profile with respect to talent, at least in that scene. Toronto has a notoriously coarse urban music culture, known internationally as “The Screwface Capital” – in the analogue world, we used to get the music early from our cousins in New York and play it out just so that we could be over it first. We can’t wait to be apathetic about your music. Especially if the artist is out of the GTA. Something about that metabolism has always devoured artists from the area before they could break international ground. And yet within the last few weeks or so:

K’naan released his hotly anticipated album Troubadour yesterday:

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Drake has been generating quite a bit of buzz around the recent release of his “Mixtape” So Far Gone:

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K-OS single called 4 3 2 1 from his forthcoming Yes! album has been picking up steam with the release of the video:

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And Zaki Ibrahim’s recent EP Eclectica (Episodes in Purple) has just received a Juno nomination for R&B / Soul Recording of the Year – she’s making noise in the UK and other places around the world as well:

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So here’s a question: How many of these artists, each of whom has been experiencing great success abroad, and represents Toronto not only on their MySpace pages but also in their lyrics and music, were born in the GTA or even the province?

The answer: Only K-OS.

And while K-OS represents something of the “old guard,” one of the last monuments to the early 90s scene, K’naan, Drake, and Zaki Ibrahim are arguably some of the strongest talent cultivating some of the strongest international buzz out of the city. And they are all imports – K’naan from Somalia, Drake from Tennessee, and Zaki from… well… all over, starting with Vancouver.

While each represent the city in their own way, they are unapologetically hybrid – much like Toronto itself. These artists have been able to come to the city, call it home and find the right people, layers of connectivity, and industry infrastructure to launch their careers into the national/international stratosphere.

So what is it about Toronto’s music scene – at least the urban music scene – that international talent has found so enabling? Why has it seemed to be less kind to its “native” artists?  Why haven’t we seen this kind of talent-spiking in Halifax, or Vancouver, or even Montreal? What is it about a city that gives it the capacity to not only attract and incubate such a diversity of talent, but the capacity to launch it as well?

I know there’s already enough music in this post, but here’s some more.

Warning: If you’re over 30, please proceed with caution. I mean it. This may upset you.  I just caught wind of a 28-year-old musician who goes by the name of ‘Girl Talk’ who is ‘sampling’ The Band, The ‘Stones, R.E.M, AC/DC, and Aretha Franklin, and mixing their iconic sounds with the likes of 50 Cent, T-Payne, Gwen Stefani, and Bubba Sparxx (who!?)

Listen here.

Because he (Girl Talk is a he) started his own ‘independent label’ he thinks he can basically do whatever he wants! No royalties, no fees. And his album is basically free! His website says, “Pay whatever you want.” And he encourages YOU, the listener, to use and sample his music. This internet-driven model threatens to bury the whole record industry!

Here’s another way to look at Girl Talk: as an artist and as an MC, but not in the traditional sense of the word. He has no records, no turn-tables, and no CDs. He has a laptop. That’s it. Girl Talk is commonly described as a mash-up artist: someone who takes the vocals from one song and the instrumentals from another and mixes them together into a new, unique sound. Think The Beatles’ The White Album meets Jay Z’s The Black Album to create Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album. But Girl Talk takes the style to a whole new level. 50+ samples in one four-minute song are not uncommon, and he mixes his massive database of music at live shows in real time on a plastic wrapped computer. Because his samples are so short, nothing he does is illegal according to “fair use” copyright law in the U.S.

I believe Girl Talk’s music is a metaphor for my generation. His songs, which sample from Roy Orbison, Queen, Nirvana, and T.I., to name a few, require a very broad musical knowledge to be fully appreciated. N-Geners today listen to a lot of music and can give a wink and a nod to the clever way older songs are used. Even if they don’t know those songs, odds are many kids will go online and discover them afterward.  OK, kids listening to and/or learning the greatest rock/pop songs of all time. That’s a good thing.

On the other hand, his music can be construed as the ultimate symbol of our short attention spans and our obsession with short, easy-to-digest sights and sounds (think Sneezing Panda on YouTube). One could argue that digital technology has left us incapable of focusing on a good song for more than a few minutes (so let’s jam 50 samples into one track instead!), and Girl Talk is my generation’s answer. OK, that’s a Bad thing.

Girl Talk understands his target audience. He knows his music will be widely disseminated online, for free, before he has the opportunity to release a CD. So he embraces an open, online platform for his music where payment is optional:

“I think what we went for seems like an obvious game plan now, just because as soon as it hits the internet, anyone…can get it for free if they want to. So why not tap in and let them actually take a step back and think about it, and maybe offer some money?”

Get the whole interview with Pitchfork Media Here.

In this open and collaborative model, more money goes directly to the artist (and not a major label), he fosters good will with his fan base, more people get to hear his sound, and as a result he attracts a wider audience to live shows. I think this is a good thing.

This last question depends on your perspective. Some of his mash-ups take important songs out of context and use them only as a means to an end. How would you feel if he mixed Sam Cooke’s powerful and spiritual ‘A Change is Gonna Come’ with the vacuous and asinine ‘My Humps’ by the Black Eyed Peas just to get a ‘cool’ sound? In this regard, his music can be construed as not respecting the wholeness and message of his songs. I’m not a music critic, so I’ll stop there before I start sounding foolish, but I encourage you to share your thoughts.