Waiting for a Modern Music City Miracle
As Nashville’s population explodes and the music industry continues to evolve in the digital age, what does the dream of making it big as a country artist in the 10-year town even look like in 2018?Waiting for a Modern Music City Miracle
As Nashville’s population explodes and the music industry continues to evolve in the digital age, what does the dream of making it big as a country artist in the 10-year town even look like in 2018?
Ben Danaher stands alone on a stage in a small room in a large building that sits square in the middle of chaos. Just a few feet away, a door opens up to downtown Nashville in the middle of a June afternoon, where the city’s center is awash in bodies, pouring into and out of honky-tonks, some in camo shorts and others in American flag tank tops, many scattered along the continuum between drunk and hungover and drunk yet again.
It is the Saturday of CMA Fest, Nashville’s biggest tourist event of the year, a four-day festival with 11 stages, nearly 400 performers, and tens of thousands of visitors who arrive from Alabama or Sacramento or Australia or Saskatchewan or any other place on this planet where country music can be heard. They drink and they shop and each night they flock to Nissan Stadium to sing along to artists ranging from Carrie Underwood to Blake Shelton to Ricky Skaggs.
In between, they spend some time in rooms like this one, tucked just off the main lobby at Bridgestone Arena, where a few dozen festival-goers show up to listen to artists who are less famous, less polished, but maybe, if the fans get lucky, genuinely great. Now they look at Danaher. He adjusts his mic and returns their gaze. He has brown hair and eyes, and a few days’ worth of scruff, and he looks bashful when he smiles, as he does while saying, “I know most of you are probably only in here for the air conditioning, but I’m gonna play a little music for you.” A few people laugh and then he’s off, strumming his guitar and opening his mouth to reveal an aching and gorgeous voice. His songs are slow and sad and searching. They come from his new album, Still Feel Lucky, to be released in September, all drawn from a time in his life of great pain and loss.
At 34 years old, he is still trying to break through, now on Year 7 in what people have long called a “10-year town.” In April, Rolling Stone named him one of “10 New Country Artists You Need to Know.” Early this year, he booked seven opening slots on Wade Bowen’s European tour. But here, at a festival where the music itself can serve largely as a soundtrack to the party, in an industry and a city both undergoing massive changes, Danaher is, like so many who come to Nashville to pursue careers as musical artists, still very much trying to figure out where he fits in.
For now, he plays through his set, from the raw and biting “Jesus Can See You” to the soft and wistful “My Father’s Blood.” The fans are attentive. A few are clearly moved. But after 30 minutes Danaher slips off the stage, giving way to another artist chasing the same dream.
What does that dream look like in 2018? With a city that has exploded in population for reasons both related and unrelated to its most famous export, in an industry ravaged by listeners’ transitions from analog to digital consumption, the typical Nashville story has necessarily evolved. Gone are certain traditions, be they front porch cowrites along Music Row (the neighborhood that’s long been home to labels and studios) or dreams of seeing an album go platinum in its first week. In their place are new rituals and benchmarks, all fueled by the same senses of ambition and wonder that have brought aspiring artists to Nashville for more than 50 years.
When Doak Turner moved to town as a songwriter in 2002, the city felt smaller, the business more accessible. “Up until a couple years ago,” he says, “you could walk down Music Row and see people writing songs together on porches. Now those places have been torn down and turned into condos.” It’s a bit of a stretch; while new high-rises do seem to shoot up by the month—Music Row still maintains a relatively quiet and neighborly feel—but Turner’s point remains. The city is growing. The culture is changing. And neither seems likely to return to their often-idealized pasts.
Today, Turner works as director of marketing for Music Starts Here, a social network for people involved with Nashville’s music industry, which Turner says has more than 80,000 people in its database. He arrived in town just as Napster was throwing the music business into a tailspin, and he watched the industry work to adjust to the decimation and rebuilding of its long-standing business model.
This city is so amazing. But it’s so competitive at the same time. And talent alone doesn’t cut it. You have to have the right song, and the look, the presence, the social media following the YouTube subscribers — everything.Rachel Horter, musician
Between 2000 and 2017, CD album sales dropped by 90 percent, industry-wide. Streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music now deliver vast libraries of music to equally vast hordes of subscribers, but the equation for artists and labels alike has drastically changed. “Everything has gotten smaller,” says Jeff Skaggs, VP of creative and publishing for Creative Nation, where he manages a roster of songwriters. “There are fewer writers with deals—it’s shocking to me, some of the writers who don’t have one. And when they write songs, there are fewer places to pitch them.”
In traditional record deals, labels negotiated a portion of royalties based on album sales. Now, the most common contracts are “360 deals,” which allow them to take a portion of sales, streaming revenue, ticket sales, merch sales, and damn near anything else. “It puts artists in a really hard spot,” says John Rich, of the hitmaking duo Big & Rich. For most artists, though, getting signed to a major label remains the goal. “If you want to get played on country radio,” says Rich, “you need the label.”
The path to the record deal has never been easy. Rich got started at 17 years old, playing at the Broken Spoke Saloon in the historically economically depressed East Nashville neighborhood. As long as he didn’t try to sneak any beer, the owners let him play alongside fellow future stars Trace Adkins and Tracy Lawrence. His partner, Big Kenny, tells stories of marching up and down Music Row, knocking on doors and handing out cassette demos. “It’s always been hard,” he says, adding that he went into more than $100,000 of credit card debt—twice—self-financing his dream before he and Rich made it big. “But no matter what the business does, the formula doesn’t really change. Above all else, you have to focus on being great.”
Danaher is trying. He grew up in Huffman, Texas, about 30 miles outside of Houston, the son of a songwriter and brother of a drummer and a boy who loved baseball and music in equal measure. As he grew, his love for summer double-headers in Texas heat waned, while his love for standing on stage with an instrument and a mic grew. He went to Texas State in San Marcos and played his first 50 shows at a local club, the Cheatham Street Warehouse. Soon, he was living in Austin and setting off from there all over Texas, establishing himself in the state’s robust but often insular music scene. He worked from 8 to 5 mowing grass every day, then drove to and from shows many nights. “I would pack up my van and drive three hours to Fort Worth or somewhere, play a gig, then drive back and be back behind the weed eater at 8 o’clock the next morning,” he says. Sometimes, if he had time for a break, he’d find a spot in the woods of his employer’s property to sleep off a hangover.
Then his brother died. In 2010, Kelly Danaher was shot and killed by a neighbor during a birthday party for his wife and daughter. Two weeks before the trial of his brother’s killer was set to begin, Danaher’s father died of cancer. As he grieved, Danaher found himself eager to experience life in someplace new. “I could see the walls closing in,” he says. And despite its reputation for music, Austin’s career opportunities had limits. “There’s just not much in the way of business infrastructure there,” he says.
So he packed up his van and moved to Nashville. “It felt like this is where you had to be,” he says. “Stuff happens in two weeks in Nashville that would take two years in Austin.” He found a room for $300 a month in a small house in East Nashville. He lied to a restaurant and told them he had experience waiting tables. He lied to a valet service and told them he knew how to drive a stick. He got both jobs. He continued writing songs. He felt like he was on his way to building a sustainable career.
Today, anyone showing up in Nashville with a suitcase and guitar arrives alongside many thousands of others with no connection to the industry whatsoever. Nashville has lately been the subject of untold numbers of trend pieces, many referencing the 2013 New York Times article calling it America’s “it” city and the oft-cited fact around 100 people move here every day. It has nestled its way into a category of American cities mostly populated by massive hubs like New York or L.A., or by beautiful destinations like Hawaii or Montana—a place where people show up with no job, no friends, and no plans, arriving with no more than the thought: “I would like to live there.”
If I stop doing this, then who am I? That’s a scary question. It’s so much scarier to stop than it is to keep going.Kendal Conrad, musician
For broke musicians, this can be a problem. Average monthly rents in the city have risen from $897 in 2011 to $1,349 in June of this year. Median home prices rose by 74 percent between 2012 and March of this year. Neighborhoods such as East Nashville were gentrified first by the musicians, later by other creatives, and now by damn near everyone. “It has become less and less possible for these young people to get here,” says Tammy Ragusa, a music industry veteran who worked in brand management at RCA and Capitol Records and who now consults with young artists. “They almost have to have four roommates and share a bedroom to make it happen. I tell them, ‘If you want it bad enough, you can come here and you can wait tables and find a cheap, scary apartment. But be prepared to dig in.’”
Some musicians live in the suburbs to avoid the city’s expenses. One artist mentioned collaborators canceling cowriting appointments because they don’t have gas money. Most do it with a side gig. Danaher no longer parks cars, but he still tends bar four or five times a week at 3rd and Lindsley, an iconic and intimate venue just south of downtown. On a recent Monday night, he shuffled behind the bar in a T-shirt and jeans, grabbing menus and calling out orders, mixing whiskey gingers for a crowd of mostly middle-aged fans there to see the Time Jumpers, a 10-piece Western swing ensemble featuring Country Music Hall of Famer Vince Gill.
“They’re amazing,” Danaher says, eyes flicking toward the stage. And it’s true. They are. Sometimes, though, the acts who perform while he’s behind the bar are less so. “There are nights,” he says, “when there are people who you might feel you’re better than or you’ve worked harder than, and they’re on the stage. And you see people watching them, on fire, and you just think, ‘Why isn’t this happening to me?’”
The ladder can be long and winding. All of the young artists interviewed for this piece schedule regular cowrites with others, as often as four times a week. Sometimes they write with songwriters in similar positions. Others times, with bigger names. Any session could be the one that leads to a hit—whether for themselves or for someone else. “I listen to several new songs every day,” says Jeff Skaggs, whose Creative Nation outfit employs 10 songwriters, who often cowrite with newer arrivals to town. Skaggs then pitches songs to labels and managers—and sometimes directly to big-name country stars themselves. “You never know when the next song that turns into a single is going to show up in your inbox,” he says.
Younger artists also work to get slots on tour or in festivals with more established stars. Danaher played the same festival as Jason Isbell and Iron & Wine this summer. Sometimes these slots come by impressing the headlining artists themselves, others by working connections to tour and festival managers. Often, landing an opening gig results from being in the right place, with the right sound, at the right time. “There’s this sense from some people,” says Danaher, “that unless you’re someone who can help the headliner sell more tickets, they’re really doing you a favor.” But getting those slots—and the exposure to large crowds of potential new fans—can feel like a major step forward.
Still, one night playing before thousands does not make a career. Until an artist gets a major record deal, a critical mass of fans, or both, they’ll have an incredibly difficult time getting by on earnings from music. Gigs in town pay notoriously little. Even with tourists flocking to town to hear up-and-coming artists, the supply of live music talent still dwarfs the demand. Touring, for many, is a break-even proposition. Play enough gigs in enough cities—as an opener or scattered around in smaller venues—and if they sell enough merch, to go along with their cut of ticket sales, they might earn back enough to cover travel costs. Some earn income from writing songs cut by other artists. Danaher has had a couple of songs he wrote featured as background music on TV shows—one for The Ranch, another for Nashville. Still, he says, “Something like that is decent money, but it’s not enough to live on. You’ve still got to have a job to get by.”
One exception: Kendal Conrad, a 26-year-old pop country singer-songwriter who moved to Nashville in 2015 from her hometown of Pottstown, Pennsylvania. When she was 17, Conrad begged a bar in town to let her play a three-hour set of covers by promising, “If you don’t like it, you don’t have to pay me.”
They liked it. They paid her. And then she played there again, and then again, and soon she was playing in bars around the town and then the region, through the rest of high school and then four years at Ursinus College, until she was playing every Thursday through Sunday, week after week. She traveled to Nashville first as a tourist, later as an artist, cutting an EP at Starstruck Entertainment. It was then, on that trip, when she met with a manager who she says told her, “No one is going to take you seriously unless you move here. This town will not accept you.”
So she moved. She arrived in Nashville with no friends and few connections, and she started showing up at open mics and writer’s rounds, long a staple among newly arrived Nashville musicians who perform less for the money than for the chance to network. (“One thing unique to Nashville,” says Brandon Gill, VP of management for Creative Nation, “is you can you go to multiple different shows every single night. It’s almost too much sometimes. And some of it’s not good. But some of it’s great.”) There, Conrad would nurse a coffee, or slip into the crowd with no drink at all, and she would wait until the end of the show to approach the performers and ask whether she could write with them. Many said no. Some said yes. Over time, she built relationships with a number of other singer-songwriters in town.
All the while, she would fly back home almost every Thursday, where she would return to the same bars, now paying higher rates, that she’d been playing since she was 17. Even today, this is her routine: take meetings in Nashville Monday through Wednesday, fly to Philly on Thursday, play three or four shows in three or four nights, and then fly back to do it all again. She trades in her frequent-flier miles for Kroger gift certificates, which is how she affords to buy groceries. For the first two years she was in town, she slept on an air mattress. Last year, after she saved enough money, she finally managed to buy a bed.
She has two bachelor’s degrees, in English and in theater, but she has only ever had one typical job: at a restaurant, back in high school, before she started hustling to make money playing shows. She hated it. She has other curiosities, interests, and talents, but no desire to pursue any other career. Sometimes, the workload—setting up and breaking down her own equipment, playing three-hour sets, night after night—can feel overwhelming. “When I just fly in, and I’m exhausted, and some guy is shouting, ‘Free Bird!’ the whole night, it’s a lot,” she says. Yet she has never actually considered giving up music to try something else. She sees progress: She opened for Charlie Daniels in July and will open for Blake Shelton on August 17. Her entire life, she has been known for her voice—first among her family, later at school, and now among other musicians and to her growing group of fans. “If I stop doing this,” she says, “then who am I? That’s a scary question. It’s so much scarier to stop than it is to keep going.”
On a Monday night on Broadway, Rachel Horter is calm and sober in a room that is neither. She’s standing on the stage at Ole Red, a newly opened bar owned by country megastar Blake Shelton, who joined Alan Jackson (AJ’s Good Time Bar), Florida Georgia Line (FGL House), and Dierks Bentley (Whiskey Row) by putting their imprint on Broadway’s trail of inebriation.
“Are y’all drunk?” she shouts.
Yes, the crowd informs her, with its high-pitched screams and unbalanced movements, they are, indeed, quite drunk.
Horter looks to her left, where she sees a woman who deserves her attention. “We have a tiara over here!” she shouts, pointing at the woman, who is surrounded by friends who immediately inform Horter that the tiara wearer has just turned 21.
“If you want to get played on country radio, you need the label.” —John Rich of Big & Rich
“Someone buy her a drink!” Horter shouts. And now she stomps. “Right now!”
Horter just got this gig, playing at one of Nashville’s newest and shiniest honky-tonks. For her, it feels big: somewhere to play music, in a full bar with an excited crowd, every single week. It is not yet the fulfillment of what she dreamed of when she moved to Nashville from Indiana just after graduating high school, but still. There is a stage. There is a mic. And there are fans. Life could be worse.
She plays the hits. “Party in the USA.” “Before He Cheats.” “Toxic.” Country and pop, back and forth, again and again. She moves across the stage with an energy befitting the room, coaxing people from the bar to the dance floor, then from the dance floor back to get another drink at the bar. Her voice is powerful, pristine, arriving at high notes and just sort of staying there, with force and precision at any pitch.
Horter began singing right around the moment she began talking, using a turkey baster as a mic and an elevated concrete step in her grandparents’ basement. She sang Shania Twain and Julie Andrews, and she fantasized about a day when her voice could move people just like theirs. In high school she started building a path toward making her dream her career, traveling to Nashville for a master class with renowned vocal coach Renee Grant Williams, and then taking private lessons with Williams by Skype every week.
Her senior year, she applied to colleges, and she settled on Purdue, imagining a life in which she attended classes during the week and drove five hours down to Nashville every weekend. A few weeks before the fall semester of her freshman year was set to begin, she met with a manager in Nashville who laid out a potential schedule—meetings, cowrites, vocal lessons, performances, and rehearsals. It all sounded thrilling and overwhelming and right away, Horter knew: “I have to move here.”
She told her parents. They gave their support. She ditched plans for college, packed up a truck, and moved to town at 18, alone. Her first night in Nashville, she cried, missing her family. Her second night, she cried again. But soon she settled into the rhythms of the newly arrived, playing open mic nights and searching for writing partners. When she got her first gig, at iconic meat-and-three restaurant Puckett’s Grocery in the nearby town of Leiper’s Fork, she felt sick to her stomach with nerves. She survived, sang well, and met other musicians in the building who would soon become collaborators and friends.
Now she’s 23. She has been here five years. She has opened for Loretta Lynn. She has been on tour in Germany. She has seen one of her YouTube covers, of Beyonce’s “Love on Top,” go viral in Korea, amassing more than 1.4 million views. She has released two singles—“My Turn” in 2015 and “Sooner or Later” in 2016. Now she works at Milk & Honey, a restaurant in the Gulch neighborhood, and she performs regularly at Ole Red, and she works to put the final touches on an EP she plans to release sometime soon.
Progress can feel slow. Last year she scrolled through social media and looked at pictures of her high school friends graduating from college and felt a pang of something resembling longing, thinking to herself, that could be me. “This city is so amazing,” she says. “But it’s so competitive at the same time. And talent alone doesn’t cut it. You have to have the right song, and the look, the presence, the social media following, the YouTube subscribers—everything.” Her dream for the EP is no different than the dreams of so many who have come to Nashville before her. “I want the right ear to listen to it,” she says. Someone at a major label, or perhaps at a robust management company. “What I really want is for someone who can make things happen to call me and say, ‘I dig it. Let’s meet.’ Just getting that would be an amazing next step.”
But for now she remains on stage, singing songs that are mostly not her own for a crowd composed largely of tourists—not of industry execs. Some in the room give applause and screams, and others slip out the door and onto the next bar where there is surely another singer behind another mic with loads of talent and charisma and ambition, waiting for their own chance.
It’s not just about that one powerful person with the resources to change Horter’s life. The tourists who walk through her set, the strangers who encounter her YouTube channel or Instagram stories—they all matter. Social media and streaming services allow independent artists to get music to fans more easily than ever before. But, says Brandon Gill, VP of management at Creative Nation, “in country, we’re a little bit behind pop and rap when it comes to streaming. Our demographic isn’t as big on those services just yet.” Streaming continues to grow, though, and as it does, it’s changing the ways traditional industry gatekeepers search for talent. “When you walk into a meeting,” says Conrad, “people want to see numbers. Spotify, Instagram, YouTube subscribers, Twitter, ticket sales.”
In the past, executives looked for a sound and an image they could sell. Now, they want proof that artists have already been able to sell themselves. “Labels want to see momentum,” says Gill. “They want to see you proving yourself in some form or fashion—whether that’s selling tickets or getting streams or anything else. It’s more than just getting them excited about your music. You have to show something concrete.” Adds Turner: “In the past, they might put some time and energy into teaching you to perform and getting you ready, but then if they put out that single and it doesn’t go anywhere, you might end up back on the shelf as an artist. Now, hopefully you’ve already built a fan base on your own. So they know there are people out there who are going to request or download or stream your songs. It takes out the risk for them.”
All of this, for Stephanie Hudacek, is incredibly exciting. “This is an amazing time to be in this business,” Hudacek says. “Amazing.” Hudacek is president of Soundly Music—not exactly a record label, not exactly a management group or a distributor, but a company that can function in varying combinations of all three. While traditional labels typically take some ownership stake in artists’ creative content, Soundly finds other ways to share revenue while leaving artists with complete ownership of their own material. The company is small and nimble, adjusting to a time when channels of distribution have proliferated and barriers between artists and fans have eroded.
“There are new gatekeepers now,” she says. Once, artists had to go through traditional record labels and radio program directors in order to get their music heard. While people in those roles still carry plenty of weight, artists can now find many more paths to an audience. Now, says Hudacek, “the rules are out the window. There are opportunities everywhere.” A key strategy has been to target Spotify and Apple Music playlists, whether those curated by the services themselves, by major brands such as Nike or CMA, or by individual users with large followings. “If you get on a big playlist,” says Danaher, “it can move the game for you.”
After years spent working in the artist-development department of major record labels, Tammy Ragusa now works as an independent consultant with young musicians, helping them navigate the realities of the industry. Her first question, in every initial meeting: What does success look like for you? Some envision world tours, packed stadiums, red carpets. “Most of them, though, just want to find a way to get their music out there,” Ragusa says. “They just want to be heard.”
Labels want to see momentum. They want to see you proving yourself in some form or fashion—whether that’s selling tickets or getting streams or anything else. It’s more than just getting them excited about your music. You have to show something concrete.Brandon Gill, VP of management for Creative Nation
Streaming and social media have made it easier to deliver music to the ears of potential fans than ever before, but a few thousand Spotify followers or YouTube subscribers is not enough to earn a living. Many thousands of musicians have rotated through this city with talent and drive and even a little bit of luck, but still never built fully fledged careers as artists. That’s as true in 2018 as ever before.
Still, Hudacek thinks that changes in the industry are paving more paths toward financial viability—if not necessarily toward riches—than ever before. “We tend to think of artists as either superstars or as people down there busking on Second Avenue,” she says, referring to one of Nashville’s biggest tourist corridors downtown. “But there’s actually a middle that’s expanding.” She sees artists earning income through traditional channels of ticket and merchandise sales, through downloads and streaming, and even through social media partnerships with brands. One Nashville singer-songwriter, Dawn Beyer, earned $74,000 in one year, largely through donations and private performance opportunities generated on Facebook Live.
With his album scheduled for release on September 7, Danaher is planning tours through his native Texas and around the Northeast and in any other cities, nationwide, where he can book shows. There will be another single and a requisite press push, and then, if all goes well, something that leads to his own version of success. “Really,” he says, “if I could just get to a point where I don’t have to bartend anymore, that would be killer. I mean, I could give you the dream scenario. You headline the Ryman. You win the Grammy. Everybody recognizes you for this great artistic piece that you did, for being so vulnerable. But if I could just gain fans and be able to make another record and make a living from that, then I’d be ecstatic.”
Earlier this summer, Danaher set off for a tour around Europe. For most of the dates he booked, he was slated as the opener for Wade Bowen. He’d play seven shows across Scotland and England, then three in Germany, Amsterdam, and Sweden. Danaher had to pay his own travel expenses, but with ticket sales, he felt confident he’d break even. If he sold enough merch, he might even come out of the tour with a little extra cash in his wallet and a couple of weeks’ worth of shows in front of potential new fans halfway across the world.
Then, Bowen had to undergo surgery on his vocal cords. He canceled the entire tour. Only, Danaher had already bought nonrefundable flights to, from, and all around Europe. He had only one gig booked apart from the dates he was set to open for Bowen, at Black Deer Festival in Kent, England. “Getting on that was a big deal,” he explains, a couple of weeks later, sitting in an East Nashville coffee shop. “Even just having my name on the flyer”—alongside the likes of Jason Isbell and Iron & Wine—“was worth it. Just being on that list had people saying to me, ‘Oh, man, you’re making moves.’”
So he went. He flew to London and crashed on a stranger’s couch—the boyfriend of a woman he’d talked to while bartending one night—and then he pieced together a few more gigs in Scotland and Germany. At every step, he ran into travel nightmares—airlines asking him to buy a seat for his guitar, auto rental companies who wouldn’t give him a car because he couldn’t provide a credit card, a day spent lugging his gear through the London underground, bumping into people every few seconds. After originally expecting to break even, he ended the trip $1,500 in the hole. “The whole thing,” he says, “was insane.”
And yet, there were moments that made him realize he’d made the right choice. In Germany, he talked with fans who spoke very little English but wanted to buy his album all the same. “Having people connect to the music,” he says, “even when they don’t understand a lot of it, was an amazing thing.” But the most meaningful moments were those away from the stage. The hardships themselves gave him the motivation to keep going. “I surprised myself,” he says. “In every artist’s career, you grind and you grind and you grind, and you ask yourself if it’s worth it to keep grinding. I realized that continuing to grind really isn’t as scary as I thought it might be. Like, if I get done with this record and at the end of the cycle I still have to go back to bartending to save more money, then fuck it. I’ll do it. Let’s go. I’m not sure if I realized that I have that in me, but I do.”
And so Danaher writes and sings and plays, and in between, he does what’s needed to make ends meet. So do Horter and Conrad and untold numbers of others who’ve shown up this city hoping to turn talent and passion into something more.
Danaher’s father wrote songs, too. He had a small studio in their family’s basement, where he would spend hours making music, often alone. He sold a few and recorded a few himself, but he never became famous or rich. Late in his life, in the middle of his last round of chemotherapy, he called Danaher one day. He’d written a new song. He wanted his son to hear it. He held his phone to the speakers and pressed play. “And it wasn’t like the next week he was going to be able to go get Alan Jackson or somebody to record it,” Danaher says.
He was writing just to write, playing just to play. This was music made with no grander ambitions. Ben listened as he let the song play to the end there on the phone, satisfied and proud.
