Change is coming to Nashville's country music scene, says Kix Brooks
Janel Shoun |
Click here to see Channel 2's tape of Kix Brooks' speech
Click here to see coverage of Kix Brooks on Channel 4
(Note: these links are time sensitive and may not be accurate in days after 02/20/08.)
Music downloading will have permanent, industry-changing effects on the music industry and the annual Country Music Festival needs more community involvement and financing, said Kix Brooks, one-half of the platinum-selling country music duo Brooks & Dunn, at the first Nashville Business Breakfast of 2008.
| (l to r) Lipscomb Pres. Randy Lowry, Kate Herman, publisher of the Nashville Business Journal, Kix, and Randy Goodman, president of Lyric Street Records, president of the Country Music Association and 1977 alumni of Lipscomb. |
In his role as a member of a Blue Ribbon Committee dedicated to bringing the city of Nashville and the music industry closer together, Brooks recently learned that 10 times as many songs are now illegally downloaded as are legally purchased, he told the crowd.
“I think within five years we’ll be saying, hey, you remember those big CD boxes we used to have to carry around,” he said. As music-focused stores like Tower Records and Sam Goody’s disappear, the lack of CD sales will have far-reaching effects on the production of music as well, he said.
“We’ll lose a lot of good music along the way, because record companies will not have the money to invest in young artists. It costs $1 million to break a new act,” he noted.
Brooks, who served as president of the Country Music Association (CMA) in 2004 and as chairman in 2005, gave the audience a history of the transformation of Fan Fair into the Country Music Festival, which now draws 200,000 people to Nashville, pumps as much as $20 million tourist dollars into the economy, and has donated more than $1 million to Nashville public schools.
The Country Music Association has shown its commitment to the community, but now its time for the community to show its commitment to the Country Music Festival, he said. He sees the festival at a crossroads, and hopes that it takes on an “economic model, rather than the current volunteer model.”
“There’s a lot of opportunity for this city to take big time ownership of this festival,” he said.
The Nashville Business Breakfast is a lecture series featuring business leaders with local economic impact presented by Lipscomb University and the Nashville Business Journal. Past speakers include former Mayor Bill Purcell, Wayne Smith, CEO of Community Health Systems, and Gregg Morton, president of AT&T Tennessee.
The next Nashville Business Breakfast will be held May 9 and feature Dan Crockett, president of Franklin American Mortgage Company. Under Crockett’s leadership, the company has grown from a small brokerage operation to one of the top 50 mortgage banking companies in the nation. Crockett will speak on the current mortgage crisis in the U.S.