In my post, I expressed some curiosity over what exactly the council has done and what the council plans on doing in the future. The council did, in fact, have a meeting recently. None of my Scene colleagues or I happened to know it was going down, so we didn't get the chance to attend. However, a representative with the mayor's office by the name of Jim Hester was kind enough to send along a list of the Nashville Music Council's plans and accomplishments. One of the more important goals of the council is apparently to place major emphasis on music education in public schools. I benefited greatly from the small amount of music education I received as a hyperactive grade-school scamp, so I'm delighted to hear about that bit. Anyhow, I posted the full release from the mayor's office — which outlines a mission statement, some goals, et cetera — after the jump. Have a look. Share your thoughts.

Music Council First Year Overview, June 2010

Co-Chairs: Nashville Mayor Karl Dean and Mary Ann McCready (Partner, Flood, Bumstead, McCarthy & McCready)
The mission statement for the Nashville Music Council is: The Nashville Music Council is a group of leaders dedicated to cultivating and advancing the ever expanding music community to further establish Nashville’s position as the global music capital.
The Music Council’s work has been divided among four sub-committees:

Branding and Jobs
Co-Chairs: Mark Montgomery (EIR, Claritas Capital), Jason Moon Wilkins (Next Big Nashville)

Goal: Nashville will be the leading music business city in America.
• Building the story of the music business in Nashville/Research: Building the first comprehensive searchable database of every music and entertainment company in Nashville (where they are located, how many people they employ, what sector they are in, etc.). Once the database is complete, “the story” will be developed and pitched to the outside world.
• Guerilla recon and promotions at SXSW: Nashville made its first foray into promoting our music industry at the South by Southwest Conference this year. Collected around 300 surveys gauging perception of Nashville as a music business town and handed out Nashville SXSW t-shirts. Nashville’s presence generated some buzz and led to some national media.
• Targeted strategies to recruit music and tech centric business and jobs to Nashville: The Nashville Chamber and the Mayor’s Office of Economic Development work on business retention and recruitment full time. Nashville’s economic development officials can leverage the relationships of the Council. Opportunities for recruitment fall into three categories:
1. Conglomerates that can save money by moving operations here;
2. High growth start-ups, particularly technology companies, that we can incubate in the Nashville Entrepreneur Center (which launches this summer);
3. And targeting new industry sectors like music supervision, film scoring, and copyright administration — areas that we see as great growth opportunities for the city.

Live Music
Co-Chairs: Rod Essig (Vice President, Creative Artists Agency), Shelly Todd (Outback Concerts)
Goal: Nashville will have the best, most diverse live music scene in America.
• Festival analysis, support & expansion: The questions that we have asked are “how do we support and expand existing festivals in Nashville?” and “do we need more festivals”?

o We assisted in efforts to recruit the National Folk Festival to Nashville for a three year run, thanks to the hard work of Garry West, Alison Brown and council members like Emmylou Harris. This will take place for three years starting in 2011.

o The CMA Music Fest was the biggest most successful fest ever. The Council continues to discuss and explore opportunities with the CMA to grow that festival into the biggest, best festival in the world;

o The Americana Music Festival continues to be a premiere event for music in the city.
The city has been supporting this conference and awards show and we have recommended increasing this support. The International World of Bluegrass is Sept. 27-Oct. 3, and this year there’s a great new alignment of Next Big Nashville and Leadership Music’s Digital Summit which will take place Sept. 29- Oct. 2. And don’t forget about Gospel Music Week, the Jefferson Street Blues Festival and Bonnaroo down the road which had another almost sell out year.

o The committee is actively encouraging the city, the Convention and Visitors Bureau and various sponsors to support these festivals and we will continue to explore ways we can help them grow.

• Amphitheater & larger venues: The committee has been studying models that have worked in other cities and making recommendations for what fits Nashville. That work is still underway, so stay tuned. Members of the committee were involved in discussions with the Riverfront Development team to give advice on how to make that venue a better place to hold and promote larger shows.

• Support for live music clubs and venues: We wanted to find out “what we, as a city, can do to support the success of our existing live music venues, and how do we support the creation of more venues?”

o We’ve hosted a meeting with a number of live venue owners to ask these questions and are exploring actions ideas like ways to be sure our local and state laws are helpful, not harmful for club owners. We put these venue owners in direct contact with the Metro Codes Director and the Fire Chief to facilitate discussion about those sort of issues. One of the issues discussed was state ABC laws concerning obtaining a liquor license and the food requirement. The state law was actually changed this week and creates a limited food service liquor license. This a positive stride forward for the club scene in Nashville. We’re figuring out if there are other policy issues — be it noise ordinances, or fire codes — that we can work on to make Nashville a better place for music venues.

o And we’re looking for better ways to promote and connect our venues — from a one stop web portal that makes live music easy to find to a night-time shuttle service connecting the venues downtown to those in midtown and surrounding areas.

Creative Talent
Co-Chairs: Tim DuBois (VP & Managing Executive, ASCAP). Connie Valentine (Arts & Business Council)

Goal: Nashville will be the friendliest, most supportive city for musicians and creative people in America.
• Connecting and consolidating a “one-stop resource center”: A Nashville-branded web portal that will connect and consolidate information for people moving to Nashville to be in a creative field. This is about connecting all of the great resources that are here already (NSAI, ASCAP, BMI, CMA). But the idea is to provide a one-stop “road map” so we can accelerate people and companies getting plugged into the creative community here.
• Support infrastructure for creative people in Nashville: The Council is exploring affordable housing alternatives for songwriters and creative people, working in partnership with the Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency. Other communities like New Orleans have done affordable housing developments strictly for people in the music business.
• Strategies for keeping the creative talent employed: We hear every day that we need to keep our musicians and creative people working, so we are working with the jobs committee on assessing potential new industry sectors to grow in Nashville. This includes music supervision for films, music scoring and copyright administration.
• Establishing a creative zone: Working with the jobs committee to look at best practices in the country for business incentive districts — perhaps a “creative zone” that could provide incentives for creative businesses. This sort of idea would require Metro Council approval, but this could also help Nashville brand and promote our creative community.

Music Education
Chair: Nancy Shapiro (Vice President, the Recording Academy)

Goal: Nashville will have the best music education program of any public school system in the world.
• Inventoried public education music programs in place currently;
• Brought all the partners to the table for discussion: A large number of organizations are involved in music education in our public schools, including PENCIL, Alignment Nashville, the Alliance for Public Education, CMA, and the Country Music Hall of Fame. This is the first time everyone came together in one room. From the discussion, the Council decided that we would need to find a respected national expert on the topic to work with the school system to develop a master blueprint to reach our goal.
• Developed a Request for Proposal (RFP) to hire a consultant to build that blueprint;
• Raised the funds to hire the consultant;
• Hired Momentum / Project Lab: After reviewing all of the proposals, they stood out as the most forward-thinking experienced minds in the world to help develop the plan. We have developed a series of deliverables and a timeline to guide the process, which will be a year-long project. The consultant will work directly with Metro Schools, with Music Council involvement, to develop the plan to create the best public school music education program in the world.