During the long process of interviewing to lead Nashville’s new Entertainment Commission / Office of Entertainment, one of the questions I kept returning to was this:
What is Nashville actually trying to become?
The obvious answer is that Nashville is Music City, and that identity is one of the city’s greatest economic and cultural assets. It should remain so. But Music City is no longer a complete description of the entertainment economy that has grown around it.
Nashville now contains substantial activity across music, film and television, live entertainment, digital creators, branded content, experiential production, advertising, design, hospitality, tourism, and education. Those sectors are all present, but they are not yet functioning as one coordinated entertainment ecosystem.
A city can have a collection of strong entertainment sectors without having a strong entertainment system.
My view during the NEC process was that Nashville’s next competitive advantage would not come primarily from trying to become a larger version of Los Angeles, Atlanta, Austin, or New York. It would come from recognizing something Nashville already does unusually well: different kinds of creative and production talent exist here in close proximity, and the city has the potential to make visual, aural, live, digital, and experiential entertainment within the same market.
The opportunity is to organize around that strength deliberately.
In other words, Nashville could position itself as a full-spectrum, cross-medium entertainment city. Not a city with music over here, film over there, live events somewhere else, and creators treated as a separate category. A city where those sectors increasingly function as one interconnected economy.
The problem with treating entertainment as a set of silos
Entertainment has changed faster than many of the systems built around it.
Historically, it made sense to think of music, film, television, theatre, advertising, and live entertainment as separate industries with distinct career ladders, distribution systems, financing models, and institutions. That is far less true now.
A musician may record an album, perform live, create short-form video, license music for film or television, appear in a documentary, collaborate with a brand, produce a livestream, and build a direct audience through social platforms. A filmmaker may work across narrative film, documentary, television, music videos, commercials, branded content, creator media, live capture, and experiential production. A designer may move between touring, events, television, branded installations, and digital production. A performer may work across stage, screen, voiceover, live events, social content, and commercial work. A production company may develop a traditional film one month and produce a campaign, livestream, music project, or creator series the next.
The consumer does not experience these sectors as separate economic categories. Increasingly, neither does the workforce. Yet cities often continue to support them that way.
Film policy is discussed separately from music policy. Tourism sits somewhere else. Workforce development is divided by institution or industry. Creator businesses may not be treated as part of formal entertainment economic development at all. Live entertainment, film production, music, and branded media often develop their own networks, even when the same workers, vendors, venues, and companies move among them. That fragmentation leaves economic value on the table. It also makes entertainment careers less stable than they need to be.
Nashville’s advantage is not simply music. It is density.
Nashville’s music ecosystem is the foundation of this opportunity, but the strategic advantage is broader than music itself.
Music City has created an unusually dense concentration of musicians, songwriters, composers, producers, engineers, studios, managers, publishers, labels, venues, touring professionals, performers, and technical workers.
Around that base sits another layer of filmmakers, production companies, actors, editors, cinematographers, photographers, designers, event producers, digital creators, marketers, universities, cultural organizations, hospitality businesses, and entertainment-adjacent vendors.
The important question is not whether Nashville has all of those things. It does. The question is whether Nashville makes it easy for them to find one another, work together, and build repeatable economic relationships. That is where the opportunity lies.
Imagine the proposition to an outside production company: Come to Nashville and you can shoot the project here, source local music, hire composers, record the score, find performers, produce marketing assets, create a live event, work with local creators, develop branded extensions, host an industry event, and access a strong hospitality and tourism infrastructure without rebuilding a network in multiple markets.
That is a fundamentally different value proposition from saying Nashville has a film sector in addition to a music sector. The first describes an ecosystem. The second describes a list.
A cross-medium strategy would require real infrastructure
This is where I think discussions about “creative economy” can become too abstract. If Nashville wants to function as a cross-medium entertainment city, the work cannot stop at branding. It would require practical systems.
During the NEC process, I saw several pieces as foundational.
The first was ecosystem mapping. Before creating major new programs, the city should understand what actually exists: employers, production companies, venues, studios, vendors, educators, unions, freelancers, creator businesses, institutions, workforce pipelines, and infrastructure across mediums. That mapping should not be a static directory.
It should help answer questions such as:
- Where are the workforce shortages?
- Which skills transfer across industries?
- Which organizations are duplicating efforts?
- Where are there gaps between education and employment?
- What infrastructure is underused?
- Where are workers leaving the market?
- Which companies are producing repeatedly in Nashville?
- Which sectors are growing but not yet connected to formal economic development?
The second piece is cross-medium career pathing.
If entertainment work is increasingly fluid across sectors, workforce development should reflect that reality.
- An editor should be able to see pathways across film, television, branded content, music, and creator media.
- A stage technician should be able to understand how their skills translate into television, touring, corporate events, and experiential production.
- A composer should be able to see opportunities across recording, scoring, sync, advertising, games, and live performance.
- A creator should be able to understand how their skills overlap with production, marketing, entertainment entrepreneurship, and intellectual property.
The point is not to make every worker do everything. The point is to make adjacent pathways visible. That matters especially in a gig economy, where career resilience often depends on having more than one source of work.
Mid-career retention matters more than cities often admit
Nashville has strong entry points into entertainment. It has universities, training programs, young talent, and a steady supply of people who want to enter music, film, production, and live entertainment.
The harder problem is keeping experienced people. That became one of the clearest workforce concerns in the strategy I was developing. Entry-level workers are relatively replaceable. Experienced department heads, producers, editors, crew leaders, managers, engineers, and technical workers are not.
When mid-career workers leave because the work is too unstable, the cost of living is too high, or there is not enough year-round opportunity, the ecosystem loses much more than an employee. It loses relationships, institutional knowledge, mentoring capacity, production competence, and trust.
A cross-medium strategy can help because it expands the amount of work available to experienced people without requiring every sector to be busy at the same time. The goal should not simply be to create more entry-level pipelines. It should be to make it possible to build an adult life in entertainment.
Minimum viable infrastructure for small entertainment employers
Another issue I identified during the process was that many entertainment businesses are functionally small companies operating without the infrastructure we would expect in other industries.
Production companies, festivals, venues, creator businesses, and project-based employers may hire workers, manage contractors, handle disputes, supervise teams, navigate safety issues, and make consequential employment decisions without dedicated HR capacity. That creates risk for workers and employers.
One proposal I developed was a Minimum Viable HR framework for entertainment: a legal-reviewed set of practical tools for smaller entertainment employers covering policies, agreements, safety, onboarding, workplace expectations, local resources, and basic people practices.
This is not glamorous economic development. But it is economic infrastructure. If Nashville wants entertainment companies to grow here, those companies need to become better employers as they scale. If Nashville wants experienced workers to stay, workplaces need to be safer, more predictable, and more professional.
That is part of what a functioning ecosystem looks like.
The creator economy should not sit outside the strategy
Nashville also has a large and varied creator population that does not fit neatly into older entertainment-industry categories. That matters because many creators are effectively small media companies. They write, perform, shoot, edit, distribute, market, sell advertising, negotiate partnerships, manage intellectual property, analyze audiences, and sometimes employ other people.
From an economic-development standpoint, it makes little sense to treat that work as somehow separate from entertainment. Creators also create an important bridge between traditional entertainment and brands.
Nashville already has the ingredients for a strong creator-and-brand ecosystem because the city combines production talent, music, live entertainment, design, storytelling, hospitality, and cultural identity. The opportunity would be to make those relationships easier to form while protecting the authenticity that makes them valuable in the first place.
A brand should be able to come to Nashville and build a campaign that includes music, short-form video, live performance, photography, creator partnerships, branded storytelling, and experiential work with local teams.
Again, the advantage is not any one sector. It is the intersection.
Film and music should be much more deliberately connected
One of the clearest cross-medium opportunities is sitting between Nashville’s best-known industry and one it continues to grow. Music and screen already overlap constantly.
Film and television need composers, songs, sync, music supervisors, performers, studios, sound engineers, music documentaries, concert films, promotional content, and live capture. Nashville has extraordinary depth in many of those areas.
A more deliberate Music-on-Screen strategy could connect filmmakers with local music resources while connecting Nashville musicians and music businesses with more screen opportunities. That might include composer and music-supervisor relationships, sync education, soundtrack development, music-documentary support, live-capture partnerships, industry exchanges, and stronger connections between Nashville’s music businesses and outside production companies.
This is exactly the kind of cross-medium opportunity that becomes more valuable when someone is responsible for seeing the whole ecosystem rather than representing only one industry.
Attraction matters, but embedment matters more
Entertainment economic development often becomes a competition for projects. Which city gets the movie? Which state gets the television show? Which market lands the corporate activation? Those questions matter, but I think they are too short-term.
The more important question is: What would make a company build an ongoing relationship with Nashville?
A single production generates temporary economic activity. A company that returns repeatedly generates something much more durable. A company that eventually bases staff, vendors, operations, or intellectual property here generates even more.
That changes what the city should optimize for. The goal is not simply attraction. It is embedment.
A company is more likely to return when municipal processes are understandable, workers are available, vendors are reliable, problems can be resolved quickly, relationships are maintained, and the city remembers what happened the last time the company was here. That last piece is particularly important.
Institutional memory is an economic-development tool
One of the less visible ideas I developed during the NEC process was the idea of treating institutional memory as economic infrastructure.
Entertainment offices routinely spend enormous amounts of time solving project-specific problems. A production needs access to a location. A vendor problem emerges. A neighborhood concern arises. An event needs a particular permit. A company encounters an unexpected logistical issue. The city solves the problem, the project ends, and too often the knowledge disappears with the people who handled it. That means the next production may encounter the same problem and begin again from zero.
A more sophisticated entertainment office would track productions, vendors, issues, solutions, neighborhood impacts, internal contacts, and project histories so that every production makes the system slightly smarter.
The objective is simple: The second project should be easier than the first. That may sound like basic administration, but it has real economic value. When a state cannot always offer the largest incentive, a city can still compete on reliability, predictability, responsiveness, and relationships. Those things matter to producers.
Nashville should become more than a service market
There is also a larger economic question. Cities benefit when productions spend money locally. They benefit much more when intellectual property originates locally.
That was another strategic direction I was developing: helping Nashville evolve from primarily a service market into both a service market and an origin market. That does not mean a city entertainment office should start producing entertainment. It means the ecosystem can become better at identifying local stories, ideas, creators, and rights-holders, then connecting them with producers, platforms, financiers, distributors, and collaborators. The office can facilitate relationships without becoming the creative owner. This matters because the economics of intellectual property are different from the economics of production services.
A city benefits once when an outside project comes in and hires local crew. A locally originated project can continue generating value through licensing, distribution, adaptation, touring, merchandising, catalog ownership, and future derivative work.
If Nashville wants to become a more powerful entertainment city, local ownership matters.
Tourism should be part of the entertainment strategy
Another area where I saw unnecessary separation was between entertainment and tourism. Nashville’s visitor economy is enormously sophisticated, but entertainment and tourism do not always operate as one system. There is significant opportunity in changing that.
Film festivals, live events, music activity, creator gatherings, cultural institutions, production history, and entertainment neighborhoods can all become visitor experiences.
That thinking eventually led me to develop the concept I called Movie City: coordinate Nashville’s two fall film festivals with the tourism infrastructure surrounding them so that, for a period every year, “Music City becomes Movie City.” The idea is not to merge the festivals or create another one. The idea is to create a tourism layer around activity that already exists: hotels, dining, itineraries, destination marketing, visitor programming, industry events, hospitality, and citywide experiences.
That is another example of the broader philosophy. Do not immediately build something new. Connect the things Nashville already has.
Community trust belongs inside economic development
Entertainment industries also need a more mature relationship with the communities in which they operate. Sports organizations have generally understood this better than arts and entertainment organizations. Teams invest heavily in community programs because they understand that civic goodwill has economic value.
Entertainment organizations often do much less of that, even when they depend on the same communities for workers, audiences, public infrastructure, permits, and political support.
I was interested in developing simple community-benefit frameworks that could make participation easy for productions and entertainment businesses. That might include school engagement, service partnerships, neighborhood communication, local-business participation, workforce opportunities, or other forms of contribution appropriate to the project. The objective would not be to burden every production with another requirement. The objective would be to make community benefit easier to execute. Trust is infrastructure too.
Physical infrastructure has to be protected before it disappears
A cross-medium entertainment strategy also has to account for the physical city. Studios, venues, rehearsal spaces, production facilities, affordable creative workspaces, and independent cultural spaces face constant development pressure in a rapidly growing market. Once those spaces disappear, rebuilding them can be extraordinarily expensive. The city therefore needs early visibility into which entertainment spaces are strategically important and which are at risk.
That does not mean freezing development. It means bringing planning, economic development, entertainment stakeholders, and property interests together earlier, before the only options are “demolish it” or “stop the project.”
Entertainment infrastructure should be treated as infrastructure.
The role of the entertainment office should be connective
This ultimately informed how I thought the Nashville Entertainment Commission itself should operate. I did not think the office needed to become a massive programming organization. In its first years, I believed it should focus on relationships, tools, playbooks, data, and coordination.
- Map the ecosystem.
- Understand employers.
- Understand workers.
- Identify friction.
- Build institutional memory.
- Create cross-medium pathways.
- Develop employer and worker toolkits.
- Coordinate with state incentives.
- Strengthen community relationships.
- Protect important spaces.
- Improve production processes.
- Connect local IP with outside opportunity.
- Bring tourism and entertainment closer together.
- Measure what works.
Only then build larger programs where there is demonstrated need.
That approach is less visible than launching a series of branded initiatives, but I think it is more likely to produce durable economic value.
What Nashville could actually become
The long-term vision is not complicated. Nashville could become the city where entertainment mediums meet. A musician should be able to find film work. A filmmaker should be able to find music infrastructure. A creator should be able to find professional production support. A production company should be able to move easily from screen to live to branded work. A worker should be able to build a career across sectors. A visiting company should find it easier to return than to start over somewhere else. A locally created idea should have visible pathways toward production and ownership. A neighborhood should experience entertainment activity as an economic and civic asset. A city department should learn from every project rather than solving the same problems repeatedly.
That is what I mean by a cross-medium entertainment city. It is not a slogan. It is an operating model.
Nashville already has most of the ingredients. What it lacks is enough connective infrastructure to make those ingredients function as one system.
Music City remains the foundation, but the larger opportunity is to recognize what has grown around it and organize accordingly. The strongest version of Nashville’s entertainment future may not be one in which the city becomes known for another single industry. It may be one in which Nashville becomes known as the place where the industries connect.
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