I spent the last ten days in LA recording my latest CD and networking. I met with a new music publisher I recently signed with, I attended several music business meetups, including one I hosted for How To License Your Music.com, and met a bunch of great people while I was there. It was a really productive time and it was great to meet many people in person I had previously only known via the internet.
I had such a productive time networking and meeting new people that it really got me thinking; just how important is it as a musician to live in one of the major music industry cities? Although many US cities have interesting music scenes, and there are talented people everywhere, I think it's fair to say that are really just a handful of cities that would qualify as "major" music industry cities. These cities would be New York, LA, Nashville and to a certain extent, Atlanta.
Although there are other cities like Austin and Chicago that have lots of musicians and opportunities to connect and network with people in the music industry, they don't quite compare to places like New York and LA. I've often thought about just how important it is to live in a city like LA or New York and this recent trip has given me even more to think about. Although I haven't reached a definitive conclusion, I thought I would explore the topic in this post.
1) High Cost Of Living - Cities like LA and New York have a significantly higher cost of living than many other cities. Chicago isn't the cheapest city in the world to live in either, but based on the little bit of research I did when I was in LA, it seems less expensive than LA overall. Pursuing a career in music has a high degree of uncertainty built into it, so I'm reluctant to add to the stress of that by increasing my overhead substantially. However, if I were to move to LA there are certainly affordable ways to do that. I could share a space with other musicians for example. But my quality of like would most likely diminish at least marginally, based on the research I've done in terms of cost of living.