Opportunity can happen anywhere — not just the “big” cities of the old music business.
Welcome to the decentralization of opportunity.
There was a time when opportunity in music had an address in a big city. The Troubadour in Los Angeles, The Bitter End in New York and The Bluebird Cafe in Nashville were not simply great clubs with famous photographs on the walls. They were places where talent, audiences and the machinery of the music business repeatedly occupied the same room. You went because other artists went, but more importantly, the people who could do something about what they heard went too. Managers, publishers, producers, record company people and established musicians circulated through these relatively small ecosystems. If something extraordinary happened onstage, there was at least a reasonable possibility that somebody in the room could turn that performance into another opportunity.
Those places still matter. The Troubadour is still the Troubadour, and I have no interest in pretending that history, reputation and physical community suddenly became irrelevant because somebody invented Wi-Fi. But the old-school belief that the music business is located in a particular city or region has been over for some time. We just have not completely updated the way we talk about it. Nostalgia rules.
Los Angeles still has a sprawling music industry. Nashville has an extraordinary concentration of songwriters, publishers, studios and musicians (with many transplants from LA). New York and London remain major cultural and commercial centers with artists fleeing high rents in Manhattan for upstate New York. Music companies still have offices, the lawyers still have conference rooms and people still enjoy having expensive lunches with one another. What has changed is more important: an artist’s career no longer has to live where the industry lives. That is the new geography of music… Live music.
The Center Was Never Really About Creativity
We tend to romanticize the traditional music cities as though there were something mysteriously creative in the water. Talented musicians moved to Los Angeles, New York, Nashville and London, so eventually those places became synonymous with talent. But we have the equation backwards. Artists moved because opportunity was there.
If you wanted to compose for television, it helped enormously to be where television was being produced. If you wanted to become a professional songwriter, it was useful to live near publishers and artists who needed songs. If you wanted a major recording contract, management, important studio work or session opportunities, there were only so many places where those relationships existed in sufficient density. Creativity was never centralized. Infrastructure was.
I know this from my own career. Working in television, advertising and film meant being connected to the places where that work was actually happening. In my case, New York City. Relationships mattered enormously, and before the Internet became the infrastructure beneath almost everything we do, knowing people usually meant eventually being in the same place with them. Proximity was not a lifestyle preference. It was part of the business model. Hanging out in the lobbies and control rooms of Manhattan studios in the 1980s, 90s and early 2000s was crucial. It was wonderful.
But that model is largely gone. The old centers remain powerful, but the requirement that a serious artist physically relocate to an approved entertainment capital before a serious career can begin belongs to another era. We should probably stop giving young artists career advice as if Pan Am still has a flight to Los Angeles and somebody at Warner Bros. is waiting at the gate. They are not.
The Old Business Had Rooms You Needed to Get Into
The legendary clubs made perfect sense inside that system because they concentrated opportunity even further. The Troubadour was not important simply because great artists played there. Great artists have played in thousands of rooms nobody remembers. It mattered because great artists were performing in a room surrounded by an industry capable of responding to them. Lightning struck at NYC’s CBGBs in the 1970s and 80s because the music executive who lived in the neighborhood went to the show and signed the band. That’s response.
The Bitter End served a similar function in New York City (and to an extent still does). The Bluebird Cafe became woven into Nashville songwriting culture because somebody performing a new song might be separated by twelve feet and two drinks from another writer, a publisher, a producer or an artist who could actually use it. A club could function simultaneously as a performance space, meeting place, proving ground, social network and unofficial employment office. Now tourists sit at Bluebird’s tables hoping that a “star” decides to walk in to do a one-off performance in the iconic room.
To be clear, there was plenty of mythology attached to this system as legends were told and retold artist to artist across the country. For every magical night when the right artist was heard by the right person, there were presumably several thousand excellent performances witnessed by a bartender, somebody’s girlfriend and nine other musicians waiting to play. Still, the logic was sound: put enough talented people and enough opportunity in the same neighborhood and eventually something happens.
What has changed is not our need for those collisions. It is our need to assemble an entire career around one neighborhood in order for them to occur.
We Have Been Living in The New System for Years
Consider how an album can be made now. I can compose in one place, have musicians recording in several others, work with someone on orchestration remotely, send files to a mixer or mastering engineer in another city and release the finished project throughout the world without most of the people involved ever standing in the same room. Nobody considers this particularly remarkable anymore, which may be the most remarkable part. Most of my recording collaborations of the last 10 years have been done as remote sessions. I wonder what would have changed if the bands I had assembled were in the same room at the same time.
The manager may live somewhere else. The distributor almost certainly does. Publicity can happen from multiple cities. The artwork can come from another country. A collaborator can be thousands of miles away, and the largest group of listeners for a recording may eventually appear somewhere nobody involved in making it was thinking about when the piece was written.
For most of the recorded music era, “worldwide” was an enormous industrial accomplishment. Records had to be manufactured, shipped, stocked, promoted and supported territory by territory. International distribution required infrastructure, relationships and significant amounts of money. Now worldwide availability is basically a setting, although worldwide success unfortunately remains unavailable in the drop-down menu.
That distinction matters because the Internet solved one problem while creating another.
We Solved Distribution. We Did Not Solve Attention.
It has become incredibly easy to make music available almost everywhere and incredibly difficult to make anybody notice that you did. An artist can now achieve the impressive feat of being ignored simultaneously in 193 countries, which is certainly a kind of globalization.
The old gatekeeper controlled access to the marketplace. The new marketplace is largely open, but it contains an almost incomprehensible quantity of music competing for a finite amount of human attention. When distribution was scarce, simply getting the record into stores, onto radio or in front of an influential industry person was most of the battle. Now your recording can sit instantly beside work from the biggest artists in the world. Congratulations. You are on the shelf, and so is everybody else.
The challenge has therefore moved from gaining access to generating significance. This is where the geography story gets more interesting, because removing geographic barriers does not make place or local identity less valuable. It may make distinctiveness more valuable, since artists no longer need to abandon what is specific about where they came from simply to reach people somewhere else.
Local Doesn’t Mean Minor League Anymore
For generations, being described as a “local artist” often implied that the important thing had not happened yet. You developed locally, built a following and eventually hoped to graduate into the national business. Somewhere above the local scene sat the real industry waiting to decide whether you belonged.
That hierarchy makes less sense every year. An artist can now make deeply local music for an audience scattered around the world. The musicians, clubs, language, culture and community surrounding the work do not have to disappear as the audience expands. In some cases, those characteristics may be precisely what make the work compelling outside its place of origin.
Latin music does not have to become American pop before becoming global. Korean artists do not have to erase Korean identity. Music coming from Nigeria, India, Brazil or anywhere else does not need to fly through Los Angeles first so somebody can remove whatever makes it unfamiliar. The enormous growth of music outside the traditional Anglo-American markets is not simply a business story. It reflects cultural traffic moving in many directions at once.
For years, globalization often meant making things sufficiently generic that they could travel. Now specificity can travel, and I think that is considerably more interesting.
Maybe This Makes Better Art
When ambitious artists are repeatedly pulled toward the same handful of places, those places inevitably exert aesthetic gravity. The same producers work with multiple artists, the same musicians play on multiple sessions, everybody goes to similar shows and everyone participates in variations of the same professional conversations. Eventually people start making different versions of things everybody around them already understands. Even originality can develop a regional dress code.
Great musical movements have often grown under very different circumstances. A collection of people in one environment starts doing something before the rest of the world knows enough to have an opinion. A local club matters. A producer has some strange piece of equipment. Musicians exchange ideas. Cultural traditions collide. Somebody cannot afford the conventional solution and invents another one. Ten people become obsessed with a sound that initially makes absolutely no commercial sense, and then somebody outside the scene hears it.
The important change today is that a local scene can remain local in its formation without remaining local in its reach. That may allow more regional differences to survive long enough to become artistically meaningful instead of being professionally corrected out of existence.
Film Already Changed Its Map
Film offers a useful comparison because nobody seriously believes Hollywood disappeared when production expanded into Georgia, New Mexico, Toronto, Vancouver and other places like New Jersey and the UK. Hollywood remains enormously powerful because financing, studios, agencies, executives and intellectual property still create enormous gravitational force. What changed is that professional production became viable elsewhere.
Studios were built, crews developed, local vendors became sophisticated and enough work accumulated that places once treated as locations became functioning production communities. Filmmakers did not collectively wake up one morning and decide Atlanta seemed charming. Opportunity moved there, and people followed opportunity.
Music can disperse even further because its physical requirements are dramatically smaller. A functioning musical ecosystem can grow around musicians, studios, engineers, producers, venues, schools, filmmakers, small labels, promoters and an audience willing to participate. A city does not need to recreate Nashville in miniature. It needs to make it possible for interesting work to happen there and for talented people to have enough reasons to remain.
The Live Business Is Where Geography Bites Back
There is one major place where this new geography crashes directly into physical reality: live music. A recording can travel instantly, but a concert cannot. Eventually actual human beings have to walk into an actual room at an actual time, preferably after purchasing actual tickets. That makes the economics of live music stubbornly and brutally local.
For an emerging artist, this creates one of the strangest contradictions in the contemporary music business. Venue owners increasingly want to know how many people you can bring before deciding whether you deserve the opportunity to play. How many tickets can you sell? What is your draw? How large is your mailing list? What are your social numbers? Can you guarantee enough butts in seats to make the evening worthwhile? Somewhere in that conversation comes another question that once mattered rather substantially: are these people any good?
I understand the economics. Clubs have rent, insurance, staff, sound engineers, bartenders, utilities and an impressive collection of other expenses. Nobody pays the electric bill by explaining that the band has tremendous artistic potential. Venue owners are operating businesses, often very difficult ones, and expecting them to subsidize every developing artist would be ridiculous.
But we have created a peculiar circular problem. Playing live is supposed to be one of the ways an artist develops an audience, yet increasingly an artist has to demonstrate an audience before being allowed to play live. The old club system was hardly a charitable utopia, but it did contain an element of discovery. A booker occasionally put somebody onstage because the artist was compelling. Maybe thirty people came. The performer learned how to command a room, the material improved, word spread and perhaps fifty people came next time. A live career was built partly by being allowed to have a live career.
Today the sequence is often reversed. Develop the audience elsewhere, demonstrate the numbers and then the venue may become interested. The stage once helped create demand; increasingly, demand gets you the stage. The young performer is therefore expected to arrive as a musician, recording artist, marketer, videographer, social media strategist and miniature ticketing company before somebody will take a chance on a Wednesday night.
There is something slightly nuts about this because the live venue risks abandoning one of the functions that made the old geography valuable in the first place: discovering people before everybody else knew they were valuable.
A Great Music City Needs People Willing to Be Wrong
Cities love announcing that they have vibrant creative communities. A couple of venues open, somebody creates a festival, the mayor stands beside a guitar for a photograph and suddenly there is an “arts district”. That may be useful economic development, but it is not necessarily a music scene.
A real music ecosystem requires people willing to take chances on things whose value has not already been certified. A healthy scene needs some bookers who will occasionally say, “I have no idea whether these people can sell 150 tickets, but they’re fantastic and I want them in the room.” Sometimes that decision will produce an embarrassingly empty room, but being wrong occasionally is part of genuine discovery.
If every venue waits until Spotify, TikTok, Instagram or somebody else’s ticket data has already demonstrated demand, the venue is not discovering anything. It is arriving after the difficult work has been done and selling drinks to people who have already been persuaded. The Troubadour, The Bitter End and The Bluebird became culturally important because they were not merely pieces of real estate containing stages. They participated in developing scenes.
A city can therefore have thirty venues and still have no meaningful music ecosystem if none of those rooms wants anything to do with an artist until the artist arrives pre-approved by the marketplace.
A Music Scene Is Not a Marketing Slogan
The traditional music centers understood something that is difficult to manufacture through economic-development brochures: creative ecosystems require density and time. Musicians need to hear one another. Producers need artists. Filmmakers need composers. Young players need opportunities to become experienced players. People need to meet, recommend one another, argue about music, start projects, abandon projects and develop relationships from which other opportunities emerge.
You cannot shortcut that process by declaring yourself “the next Austin.” What has changed is that a local ecosystem no longer needs every component of the global music industry inside it. It needs enough creative density to sustain serious work, enough opportunity to keep talented people engaged and enough openness for people who have not yet been commercially validated to participate.
That could be transformational for smaller cities and regional scenes, but only if they understand what actually attracts creative people. Artists do not remain somewhere because the city has excellent branding. They stay because something is happening, because other people are making things, because opportunities appear and because remaining there does not automatically mean accepting a smaller ambition.
Place Still Matters
The easier it becomes for music to travel, the less necessary it becomes for all musicians to occupy the same few places. That does not make geography irrelevant. It changes what geography is for.
Being around other people making things still matters enormously. Musicians challenge one another, recommend players, introduce collaborators and occasionally hear your new piece and explain that the ending does not work, which is annoying because you were hoping they would simply congratulate you. That friction is part of creative life, and I do not think a broadband connection replaces it.
The fantasy that technology will liberate us into millions of perfectly independent artists sitting alone in rooms connected exclusively through laptops does not sound particularly liberating to me. It sounds like a very efficient insurance company. Artists still need communities, but those communities no longer need to control access to the global marketplace in order to matter.
That may ultimately be the most important change. A local scene can be valuable because of what happens creatively inside it rather than because of its ability to deliver an artist to somewhere supposedly more important.
What Can Happen Where You Are?
The old music business trained artists to think geographically because geography controlled access. Los Angeles, Nashville, New York and London were not just cities; they were concentrations of opportunity. The studios, publishers, managers, labels, media and influential venues were there, so being physically close to them often had direct professional value.
That logic no longer determines where serious work can begin, but local communities still have responsibilities if they want artists to build serious creative lives there. They need affordable places to work, small venues that can survive, independent studios, collaboration between musicians and other creative fields, and opportunities for young performers to become experienced performers. Most importantly, they need circumstances in which people repeatedly encounter one another before the economic value of those encounters is obvious.
That is what the famous addresses did so well. We remember the stars who passed through The Troubadour, The Bitter End and The Bluebird, but the deeper asset was not celebrity. It was concentration. Those places increased the likelihood that talent, experience, ambition and opportunity would bump into one another accidentally.
The twenty-first-century version does not have to look like those clubs, and every city does not need to pretend it is the next Nashville. What matters is whether a place supports an actual creative life. Can you find collaborators? Can you afford enough time and space to work? Are there producers, engineers, filmmakers and musicians around you? Are there venues willing to let artists grow before they can guarantee a sellout? Does living there create more possibilities than it removes?
If the answer is yes, the old distinction between “local artist” and “serious artist” becomes increasingly meaningless. Serious work can develop in many places, and the artist no longer automatically has to abandon the culture that helped produce it in order to reach a larger audience.
Technology helps make that possible, but technology is not the interesting part. It can reduce distance, distribute music and connect people who may never share a ZIP code. It cannot create a scene, make a booker take a chance, generate the chemistry that occurs when talented people repeatedly run into one another or make the music worth hearing. Those things remain stubbornly human and stubbornly local.
So perhaps it is time to retire the old assumption that the music business is “in” Los Angeles, Nashville, New York or London. Important pieces of it certainly remain there, and there are still excellent reasons to work in those places, visit them and build relationships there. But they are powerful ecosystems, not mandatory checkpoints, and changing ZIP codes does not magically make creative work more serious.
The future is not a world without music cities. I hope it is exactly the opposite: a world with more places where musicians can develop serious work, find serious collaborators and build sustainable creative lives without assuming that success eventually requires departure.
The old music business had a handful of famous addresses because opportunity needed to be concentrated there. We do not live in that world anymore, even if parts of the industry still talk as though we do.
The question is no longer whether you are close enough to the center.
The better question is whether enough can happen where you are that you no longer need one…
