Aug 072012
What's your town's MMI?
Need some kindling for sparking your rock-nerd sense of pride or outrage, as appropriate? Then you would be wise to check out this article on “The Geography of America’s Music Scenes,” as appearing in The Atlantic Cities site.
Thanks to a neighborhood friend who recently discovered my secret life as a blogger for passing this along. Our apologies for the new avenues in time mismanagement we are providing him.
Boston is 31 while Pittsburgh is in the top 20? Well I’m sold. I’m moving to Pittsburgh so I can see Donnie Iris or to Milwaukee to catch those up and comers The Violent Femmes.
While happy to see Minneapolis in the top 10, coming in behind Rochester, NY, makes me pause.
They used MySpace as a part of their research? Does anyone in the world even still know their login for MySpace?
Rochester, NY? Are there any bands from there? Or labels? Not that it matters much what anyone’s “study” shows, but I’m glad I live where I do. We get lots of great music here, and it’s generally affordable. I’m always surprised at how many of the albums I own are by bands or musicians from Ohio, and I guess it makes me feel good to support the home teams.
Poor SF – just out of being a medal contender.
I get SF, I get Oakland, but Fremont????? I did hear and see a loud Lion Dance at a Chinese wedding in Fremont a couple of weeks ago, and there is a thriving Southeast Asian population there, so perhaps Fremont is the clandestine site for Bollywood soundtrack production? Outsourced to Cali!
I’m not completely convinced, but at least everything I’ve read from Richard Florida has some hard data and statistical method behind it. For instance, I think a lot of bands and clubs keep a MySpace presence. It helps to understand the methodology that leads to some cities placing higher than you’d think. Las Vegas isn’t considered a place that music is from but you have to admit they probably have a lot of working musicians (maybe not creators) in the casino / entertainment economy.
I would still like to hear how some of the head scratchers in the list got to where they are at. Rochester? Can a concentration of classical music resources really make that much of a difference. Boston has all of that classical plus a rock history and it ranks awfully low, maybe because they have so little RnB and Hip Hop? Unfortunately, I can understand the great soul cities (Memphis, Detroit and Philly) low rankings since that segment of the business now looks elsewhere.
Friend of the hall, Snyder, sent that article to me a couple of days ago. One thing that leapt out to me is that the study used the Bureau of Labor Statistics to determine musician employees. I don’t think all musicians self-identify as such to the BLS. Everyone knows they are wait-rons and bike messengers. Philly and Boston indie musicians get undercounted that way. Seems entirely unreliable and silly.
Other friend of the hall, Schwartz, shared an article about the guy that ran the study and how his previous studies employed suspect methodology.
k, could you do a book review of Florida’s “Cities and the Creative Class” for us?
Or, we could just do a map of RTH member residence locations and save ourselves the 200 or so pages.