aAccording to local legend, Nashville became music city A fateful performance by the Fisk Jubilee Singers in front of Queen Victoria in 1873. At some point in the 1920s and his 1930s, gravity moved downtown. Grand Ole Opry Of course, the Jubilee Singers kept singing, but the industry is concerned with what’s new, what’s popular, and most of all, what makes money.
A few more decades, and the count of this citySample the stars, labels, studios and executives built on Music Row’s 16th and 17th streets. The block that once dominated Nashville’s music industry has been marked with historic markers over the past decade. In 2014, artists, music industry personalities, and philanthropic real estate moguls gathered to Save RCA Studio A, The High Women, Jason Isbell, Chris Stapleton and more have given new life to one of the most sacred spaces in the country. But the sense of novelty behind Music Row also reflects that Music Row has lost its pole position in the industry and no longer creates the market or controls the music business. Instead, labels and publishers will have to look across the city to see if the money is returning to Midtown.
As people stopped buying CDs and started streaming in the 2010s, platforms and online marketplaces became the city’s new hitmakers. Over the past five years, streaming giants have established strong corporate presences in Nashville. In recent years, Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and Amazon have all opened local shops here, favoring Downtown and Wedgwood Houston over Music His Row. In May, Napster announced that it would move its global headquarters to Nashville. The company, which pioneered music streaming in the early 2000s before going bankrupt due to a copyright backlash, has plans to modernize its music service under new CEO John Blasopoulos.
The 2021 expansion of Live Nation, located on the corner of Chestnut Street and South Fourth Avenue, is a physical demonstration of another way for artists to make money in the post-CD era: selling tons of tickets for lots of shows. kind of reminds me. The Nashville Sounds’ retired guitar-shaped scoreboard now hangs as a lawn adornment in Live Nation’s backyard, but dozens are scrambling to justify its new-money throne. It’s an eerie statement piece for a billion-dollar company. Live Nation’s giant glass silo is a reminder that in today’s music business, a few companies control who gets to eat.
“They’re envisioning the future of music there,” says Chris Farren, president of independent music publisher Combustion Music on South 18th Street. “They are big money companies with deep pockets that can have a huge impact on how things go, for better or worse. Live Nation, Spotify and Apple alone make us small here. It’s a billion-dollar company.”
In the heyday of physical media, a single hit could sell an album. When the unit sold for $10 or $16 he threw the money all over the place. Farren called the 1980s and 1990s a “golden age” for Nashville labels and industry executives, when a hit record could bring in tens of millions of dollars. A typical record deal gives 85 percent of the revenue to the label and 15 percent to the artist.
Today, Spotify kicks back $3,180 in royalties for songs streamed 1 million times. For the same number of views, Apple will pay him $7,830 and YouTube will pay him $2,000. Based on the contracts between artists and songwriters and labels and publishers, that money is further split, giving more to those with rights to the music (“masters”) and less to songwriters. For Combustion, surviving the 2010s meant adapting to the industry.
“We embarked on this shift because owning a master can pay you 10 times more than just owning a song,” said Farren. scene. “We recorded more and tried to get artists to get better deals than labels. We’ve never worked with a big label before. Now we do.”
Streaming eliminated the high-margin CD, but it also democratized distribution. Once upon a time, printing thousands or even millions of CDs was an expensive gamble for labels like Sony and Warner Music Group, who could pay large sums upfront. Now anyone can post music on the platform. The challenge is how to drive listening through a combination of radio play, media exposure (especially social media), and featured on platforms. Curated playlists like Spotify’s Hot Country and RapCaviar connect huge followers to new songs and artists. They are also gatekeepers, deciding who listens and who gets paid. They make money either way.
“Streaming just destroyed the industry,” says Tristen Gaspaderek, a local artist who worked as a full-time musician from 2008 to 2018. Her songs have been listened to millions of times on Spotify, but that’s not enough to sustain her humble life in Nashville. . “If middle-class musicians are eating food stamps, this is no longer an industry. People are buying houses and I’m starting to see things that are impossible for me as a musician, and I don’t think anyone makes a living other than really popular musicians. “
As streaming became more popular, Tristen began to diversify her skills as an artist. Recording, marketing, advertising, videography, and anything else that affects the already meager income was done in-house. We are in an age of mass creation, she says, and everything depends on a huge imbalance of power. She points to the Musicians’ Union Workers Union as a way forward for artists and a beacon of hope that creative work may become economically viable at some point in the future. She also cites public funding for musicians, a model being developed by the European Union.
“On other platforms, you pay for content,” says Tristen. “I pay for audiobooks. But Spotify opened the floodgates. Live prices have been the same for 30 years. won’t buy records anymore.We need to organize and we need to strike.”
