A Vision of the Pittsburgh Music Industry, or “Why isn’t every town like Nashville?”
Note: This was originally a letter mailed to Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato and Allegheny County Councilperson At-Large Bethany Hallam.
How does a city with a music community transform into a city with a music industry? Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania of course has a large and flourishing music community – in fact, one could say that it has many flourishing music communities. There’s the jazz community, the punk rock community, the heavy metal community, the hip-hop community, and so on. Yet, according to a 2018 survey funded by The Heinz Endowments and Henry L. Hillman Foundation, 85% of creatives in the region are relying on their own personal funds to finance their music careers. So while it would be reasonable to suggest that making music is a popular hobby or pastime in Pittsburgh, any attempt to apply the label of “industry” to the city’s status quo would be quite a stretch.
And yet a paradox seems to emerge when we begin looking at cities across the nation that are traditionally considered hubs of the music industry. I’ve been the owner/operator of a record label for over 10 years and was an independent musician for a decade prior to that, so I can tell you with confidence that 1) touring is the only reproducible method for a musical artist to achieve success with a wide audience today, and 2) touring musical acts can come from anywhere in the country. So why are musicians still consistently moving to Nashville? Wouldn’t it be cheaper and easier to use one’s hometown as a base for touring?
While we can explain some of this behavior by reason of misinformation (musicians not realizing they’d be better off touring while remaining based in their hometowns), the other explanation implies that we’ve been looking towards the wrong solutions this entire time. Live music is not the problem; music venues are certainly nice things to have in a city, but many cities have fantastic music venues and music festivals with wonderful homegrown talent to perform in them. If this was the obstacle, every major metropolitan area in the country would be a thriving center of the music industry. But as it stands, we must conclude that the status quo has likely already reached current market saturation levels when it comes to the present demand for live music in Pittsburgh.
The only remaining logical explanation for why someone would upend their life and move to a more expensive town like Nashville when, as I explained above, touring is the only reproducible method for a musical artist to achieve success with a wide audience today, is because of the unique opportunity that can be found there to land a publishing deal – essentially, to be hired as a full-time professional songwriter – and the economic ripple effects originating from said unique opportunity.
It would have been a surprise to me when I was just getting started in this line of work, but it turns out that not everyone aspires to a level of “rock star” success. Many are simply content to earn a decent, middle-class income while doing something that they love for a living. We can easily translate this into a maxim that politicians will find familiar: people will move to an area if there are jobs to be had in a line of work for which they feel suited.
The question then becomes, is it possible to replicate these types of opportunities in Pittsburgh as well? I believe that the answer is yes, although it won’t happen overnight. My long-term goal is for Pittsburgh to be seen nationally as a legitimate alternative to Nashville – the “Nashville of the North”, if you will. If a kid grows up somewhere in Ohio, graduates from high school, and wants to become a professional songwriter, the goal should be to convince them that the opportunity lies just as equally in Pittsburgh but for a more reasonable cost of living. This is an element of the “creative class” that former CMU professor Richard Florida has long advocated for; not only will we better retain our current population of talented young people throughout Allegheny County and Southwestern Pennsylvania in this scenario, but we will also achieve net-positive migration from other regions as well.
The challenge is one of basic supply-and-demand economics: the current market has no incentive to shift. There’s no inherent need for the music industry to at least partially relocate itself at the moment, and therefore there’s no reason that it will at least partially relocate, let alone to Pittsburgh. Then again, we should remember that there wasn’t an inherent reason for Nashville to eventually become a large home for the music industry, either. And since the first modern songwriter in American history, Stephen Foster, hailed from the Lawrenceville neighborhood of Pittsburgh, why shouldn’t the industry return to its roots, so to speak, to some extent?
My solution, in the face of little to no existing local market demand, is to personally create local market demand. As of this writing, I now have four (4) songwriting agreements in place with Pittsburgh-based talent to provide me with compositions on a regularly-occurring basis in exchange for wages, with plans to not only scale up the number of songwriters but also to scale the number of compositions commissioned and the amount of compensation (with the eventual goal to also provide additional benefits such as health and dental coverage). These actions are intended to short-circuit the status quo by unilaterally altering the trends and forces driving the overall market.
Is this plan, in some sense, an attempt at privatized Keynesianism? The truth is that I’m simply too impatient by nature to do anything other than act when I have the ability to do so. I didn’t want to take my idea to a committee or run it past a board – it’s my money and I get to decide if I use it in the pursuit of free enterprise. Local government and competing businesses can follow me if they’d like.
But even in spite of the risks that come with jumping in with both feet, I’ve always bet big on the creativity and determination of Pittsburgh, and I don’t intend to stop anytime soon. The purpose of this letter is to not only share my diagnosis of the problem and propose a solution, but it’s also to inform that I’ve already begun to act on my solution. Of course, I welcome any and all additional support, but I have a vision, and it won’t be delayed until or unless I receive additional support from others. My faith, as always, is placed in the people of Pittsburgh.
Publisher’s note: Be sure to read the companion piece, “Jeff Betten and 2020k: The Future of the Pittsburgh Music Scene” -SM
