More Accolades for Nashville

[markhollin]

Nashville jumps 11 spots in Milken Institute's annual "Best Performing Cities Index," climbing to #14.

The region performs well in both one- and five-year job growth indicators and ranked 17th and 14th, respectively. Highlighting this job growth, more than 23,000 jobs were added to the health care, construction and leisure and hospitality sectors in the Nashville metro area from 2016 to 2018.

Although known primarily as "The Country Music Capital of the World," Nashville’s economy also comprises an emerging tech hub and a hot spot for corporate and entrepreneurial relocations and expansions. The region has recently attracted startups like Framework, Made in Network, and XOi Technologies, placing the metro and its vibrant tech scene at ranks 12th and 24th in our five- and one-year high-tech GDP growth indicators, respectively.

Milken's index ranks cities on a variety of metrics, including jobs, wages, salaries and technology output. It's designed to help both the public and private sectors evaluate and compare cities throughout the nation.

More at NBJ here:

https://www.bizjournals.com/nashville/news/2020/02/26/nashville-jumps-11-spots-in-ranking-of-best.html?iana=hpmvp_nsh_news_headline

[PianoKing03]

https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/soundtrack-city-nashville-awash-film-game-scores-69239629

 

I found this quite interesting. I feel like many people fail to appreciate the diversity of Nashville’s music scene.

[MLBrumby]

Nice find... during my senior year at Vandy, I took a class that studied the music industry, and there were Music Row execs who spoke each week. Part of the curriculum also included field trips to studios and other offices in the industry. Our final projects were judged by music executives.  Our class went to a studio (IIRC) in MetroCenter... and the young woman singing there was belting out the most beautiful song... it was not country... and I wish I'd written down her name and the song. Unfortunately, I didn't. Someone there said it was an agreement that part of it would be used for a commercial jingle, but I never heard the song again.  That was when I realized that much of what was being recorded in NSH was NOT country. 

[jmtunafish]

CEOWorld magazine has Nashville ranked among the world's 100 best cities.

The study looked at six different categories – Place, Product, Programming, People, Prosperity and Promotion – in order to compile a 2020 list of the world’s best cities. Factors included safety, weather, landmarks and attractions, diversity, culture, dining and economic prosperity.

The rankings:

1. London
2. New York
3. Paris
4. Tokyo
5. Moscow
6. Dubai
7. Singapore
8. Barcelona
9. Los Angeles
10. Rome
11. San Francisco
12. Madrid
13. Chicago
14. Abu Dhabi
15. Amsterdam
16. Beijing
17. Toronto
18. Doha
19. Hong Kong
20. San Diego
21. Boston
22. Sydney
23. Las Vegas
24. Miami
25. San Jose (CA)
26. Washington
27. Zurich
28. Berlin
29. Prague
30. Seoul
31. Milan
32. Houston
33. Melbourne
34. Seattle
35. Saint Petersburg (Russia)
36. Vienna
37. Munich
38. Dallas
39. Istanbul
40. Austin
41. Vancouver
42. Dublin
43. Orlando
44. Osaka
45. Montreal
46. Stuttgart
47. Frankfurt
48. Calgary
49. Phoenix
50. Lisbon
51. Budapest
52. Denver
53. Philadelphia
54. Tel Aviv
55. Atlanta
56. Minneapolis
57. Portland (OR)
58. Bangkok
59. Sao Paulo
60. Lyon
61. Riyadh
62. Brisbane
63. Perth
64. Hamburg
65. Copenhagen
66. Valencia
67. Athens
68. Stockholm
69. Marseille
70. Adelaide
71. New Orleans
72. Buenos Aires
73. Oslo
74. Warsaw
75. Rio de Janeiro
76. Brussels
77. Ottawa
78. Seville
79. Nashville
80. Baltimore
81. Delhi
82. Sacramento
83. Edmonton
84. Helsinki
85. Salt Lake City
86. Charlotte
87. Shanghai
88. Hanover
89. Cologne
90. Saint Louis
91. Tucson
92. Raleigh
93. San Antonio
94. Columbus
95. Santiago
96. Mexico City
97. Tampa
98. Auckland
99. Pittsburgh
100. Nurenburg

https://ceoworld.biz/2020/01/09/report-ranking-of-the-globes-100-best-performing-cities-for-2020/

[markhollin]

The Patsy Cline Museum voted #1 Music Museum in America in a USA Today poll.  Also nice to see Johnny Cash Museum come in at #3, Musicians Hall of Fame #4 (and other Tennessee museums like Stax in Memphis at #2 and Songbirds Guitar Museum in Chattanooga at #10):

 

[downtownresident]

25 minutes ago, markhollin said:

The Patsy Cline Museum voted #1 Music Museum in America in a USA Today poll.  Also nice to see Johnny Cash Museum come in at #3, Musicians Hall of Fame #4 (and other Tennessee museum like Stax in Memphis at #2 and Songbirds Guitar Museum in Chattanooga at #10):

 

Impressive that 5 of the 10 are from Tennessee. Hopefully the NAMAAM joins this list next year. 

[smeagolsfree]

MIA are The CMHoF & The RnRHoF.

[donNdonelson2]

3 hours ago, smeagolsfree said:

MIA are The CMHoF & The RnRHoF.

I know CMHoF was nominated, as they pushed voting via Facebook. These awards are basically Facebook “popularity contests” where you can vote once per day for a couple of weeks. Whichever nominee has the most fanatic group of followers will emerge victorious. Nice to see the South has so many enthusiastic music lovers! In this competition, at least, the South surely did rise again. 

[Binbin98]

7 hours ago, downtownresident said:

Impressive that 5 of the 10 are from Tennessee. Hopefully the NAMAAM joins this list next year. 

I am actually returning to Nashville in May to check this out. I figure this will easily become the best museum in Nashville, given the management handles the exhibits properly.

[downtownresident]

Just now, Binbin98 said:

I am actually returning to Nashville in May to check this out. I figure this will easily become the best museum in Nashville, given the management handles the exhibits properly.

I can’t wait, I love only a few blocks away from it, and, everything I’ve seen about it has me excited! 

[Mr_Bond]

On 2/28/2020 at 3:05 PM, downtownresident said:

Impressive that 5 of the 10 are from Tennessee. Hopefully the NAMAAM joins this list next year. 

The Bluegrass Museum in Owensboro is actually closer to Nashville than Memphis is, about 2 hours away.

Edited March 2, 2020 by Mr_Bond

[markhollin]

Nashville area home sales were up 10% in February over the same month in 2019.

More behind the Nashville Post paywall here:

https://www.nashvillepost.com/business/development/residential-real-estate/article/21120836/nashville-sees-february-home-sales-up-10

[markhollin]

New York Times:  What It Means to Be Nashville Strong:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/08/opinion/nashville-tornado.html

[jmtunafish]

11 minutes ago, markhollin said:

New York Times:  What It Means to Be Nashville Strong:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/08/opinion/nashville-tornado.html

I don't have a subscription to the NY Times so I'm not able to read the article.  But the picture they have in their teaser is from Cookeville, not Nashville.  I sure hope people in NY don't think Cookeville and Nashville are the same.

[markhollin]

What It Means to Be #NashvilleStrong

The tornadoes that tore through Middle Tennessee felt like the apocalypse. But people here had other plans.

By Margaret Renkl

Contributing Opinion Writer

• March 8, 2020

NASHVILLE — My husband and I would’ve slept through the tornado that hit Nashville in the middle of the night last week, but our nocturnal middle son woke us up to say his phone had just issued a tornado warning. The wind was hardly blowing.

True, it was unseasonably warm for early March. And in winter, warm temperatures often herald storms. But earlier in the evening the National Weather Service had calculated the likelihood of severe weather during the night as “a slight risk,” with a 2 percent chance of tornadoes within 25 miles of Nashville. We got up anyway.

My husband turned on a local news channel. I opened Twitter and pulled up Nashville Severe Weather (@NashSevereWx), this town’s go-to source for up-to-the-minute information on changing weather in the area. Here is the first tweet I saw:

Confirmed tornado northwest of Downtown Nashville. TAKE COVER NOW IF YOU ARE IN DAVIDSON, WILSON, OR SUMNER COUNTIES!

— NWS Nashville (@NWSNashville) March 3, 2020

Shortly after that, Sam Shamburger, lead forecaster for the National Weather Service in Nashville, tweeted a video of the tornado moving through downtown, just north of the Tennessee State Capitol.

Just filmed a #tornado pass north of my building and just north of the state capital! Wow!pic.twitter.com/HUd40rvdsD

— Sam Shamburger (@shamnadoes) March 3, 2020

I watched that video over and over again, trying to understand what I was seeing with my own eyes and yet not seeing at all: Six miles away, people were being thrown from their beds, thrown from their homes. Windows were exploding, walls were collapsing, roofs were carried away into the sky, enormous trees were being wrenched from the ground. None of it was touching me. Hardly a leaf stirred in my yard. How was it possible for something so monstrous and so nearby to be, at the same time, so utterly invisible?

 

By first light, the true scope of the tragedy was already becoming clear: whole swaths of the city — neighborhoods and schools and businesses and churches — ground into rubble. Twenty-five people across the region, almost all of them in the Cookeville area, where the monster twister reached a magnitude of EF-4, were killed in their sleep. Among the dead were young and old, well-off and poor.

 

It’s pointless to rank suffering. Loss is always loss. Grief is always grief. Tornadoes aren’t worse than hurricanes or flash floods or wildfires. But tornadoes are unique among natural disasters in the pure randomness of their destruction. They can slam one house to splinters and leave teacups untouched on the kitchen table next door. They can hopscotch around a city, reaching down here and there, unpredictably, like a malevolent finger rubbing out an ant. It’s the arbitrariness of the destruction, as much as its shocking power, that makes a tornado so fearsome. We don’t deserve the suffering it brings. We cannot protect ourselves against it.

Photos and drone videos from last week’s tornadoes reveal exactly what you expect them to reveal. People picking through piles of debris, people embracing, people bowing their heads in prayer. Row after row of apartments and cottages, their facades peeled away like a shadowbox, opening to full view the private lives that unfolded within. The floral sheets. The brass chandeliers. The Formica countertops. The flat-screen televisions. It’s impossible not to feel a tenderness for the lives of those strangers, an urge to tiptoe up and pull the door closed, to unsee what we were never meant to see, to give them back their secrets.

Perhaps that’s why Nashville has responded to the wreckage by urgently pitching in. All across this city, people are showing up to help friends and strangers. They are showing up with work gloves and chain saws and garbage bags and tarps. They are making casseroles by the dozens and sandwiches by the hundreds. They are making repeat trips to big-box stores for flashlights and batteries and blankets and nonperishable food and baby formula and diapers and tampons and hand wipes and over-the-counter medicines, and then they are giving it all away.

Some of this is happening through the expert efforts of existing community organizations like Hands On Nashville, Gideon’s Army, the Second Harvest Food Bank of Middle Tennessee and the Community Resource Center Nashville. Some of it is happening organically, by word of mouth (or word of media), as people hear from somebody who knows somebody who needs help. Some of it is happening because people keep just showing up and looking around for an opportunity to help — so, so many people that it can sometimes become a problem for power crews with heavy equipment trying to get through.

And what would Music City be without a benefit concert or 10? Or a plan to help get musicians themselves back on their feet? People who can’t help in person are donating to the Middle Tennessee Emergency Response Fund or GoFundMe campaigns that now routinely top their target goals. All by herself, Taylor Swift gave $1 million to tornado relief.

None of this is surprising. This is what Southerners, what all rural communities, are famous for. The response to Middle Tennessee’s tornadoes is simply a barn-raising in the city, the death-in-the-family casserole and the Sunday second collection writ large. Like all emotional states, compassion is infectious.

The day after the tornadoes, I was texting with a friend of mine who moved to Middle Tennessee from Bay St. Louis, Miss. Her family had made it through Hurricane Katrina, a calamity that happened on a far larger scale, but making comparisons wasn’t what was on her mind. “Louis and I now talk about the ‘private Katrina’ our friends might have: cancer, death of a child, you name it. One day the sun is shining and all is intact, the next day everything is broken. And the rest of the world goes on. You’re trapped in your own crazy snow globe that’s been shaken so hard all the pieces fly loose.”

This is a truth we all instinctively recognize. That random funnel cloud of death and destruction could have happened anywhere — it could come for any of us any time. And while we understand that we have not been singled out by God for survival, we also understand that we can be God’s hands here in the rubble, helping our neighbors dig out.

[CenterHill]

Margaret Renkl is a Nashville treasure. 

[markhollin]

Nice feature on Nashville in the latest issue of American Way (AmericanAirline's in-flight magazine):
 

[PianoKing03]

3 hours ago, markhollin said:

Nice feature on Nashville in the latest issue of American Way (AmericanAirline's in-flight magazine):
 

 

Quite the interesting read. Also, props to them for using a recent skyline shot...

[markhollin]

In February Middle Tennessee had an employment rate 3.1% higher than the same time in 2019.

(Of course, with the massive Coronavirus situation, all of these numbers are going to be wiped out in March)

More behind the Nashville Post paywall here:

https://www.nashvillepost.com/business/economic-development/article/21125077/jobs-data-update-region-was-still-growing-at-3-prior-to-shutdowns

[markhollin]

March home sales in the Nashville area rose 3.4% compared to March of 2019. Average sale price was $330,000 (up 8%) for a house, and was $240,238 (up 3%) for a condo.

More behind the Nashville Post paywall here:

https://www.nashvillepost.com/business/development/residential-real-estate/article/21127255/nashville-sees-march-home-sales-up-34

[Binbin98]

Well, Even amongst this world changing pandemic Nashville is making travel lists for 2020. Pretty much the only city I know that is still making these types of lists which really tells you something about Nashville's appeal as a tourist destination.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestravelguide/2019/12/13/forbes-travel-guide-20-top-destinations-for-2020/#120619373df2

It is one of Forbes top 20 destinations in the world to travel to this year (if you even can)

https://www.cntraveler.com/gallery/best-places-to-go-in-2020

Same with conde nast (which by the way includes whole countries in comparison to Nashville, a city of half a million!!)

https://www.globaltravelerusa.com/leisure-lifestyle-awards-2019/

It was ranked the best leisure destination in the USA for 2019, beating New York, New Orleans and even Las Vegas which is unbelievable to  be honest.

I am hoping that these accolades will translate to more international tourism after the pandemic is over. I really think the African American Museum of Music will do wonders for Nashville's perception abroad, which still sometimes can be too 'honky tonk'. Everyone stay safe and healthy and Nashville strong!

[jmtunafish]

41 minutes ago, Binbin98 said:

Well, Even amongst this world changing pandemic Nashville is making travel lists for 2020. Pretty much the only city I know that is still making these types of lists which really tells you something about Nashville's appeal as a tourist destination.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestravelguide/2019/12/13/forbes-travel-guide-20-top-destinations-for-2020/#120619373df2

It is one of Forbes top 20 destinations in the world to travel to this year (if you even can)

https://www.cntraveler.com/gallery/best-places-to-go-in-2020

Same with conde nast (which by the way includes whole countries in comparison to Nashville, a city of half a million!!)

https://www.globaltravelerusa.com/leisure-lifestyle-awards-2019/

It was ranked the best leisure destination in the USA for 2019, beating New York, New Orleans and even Las Vegas which is unbelievable to  be honest.

I am hoping that these accolades will translate to more international tourism after the pandemic is over. I really think the African American Museum of Music will do wonders for Nashville's perception abroad, which still sometimes can be too 'honky tonk'. Everyone stay safe and healthy and Nashville strong!

Sort of.  Those lists were all made in 2019, and the last one was made nearly a year ago.  So they were made well before this pandemic.  Who knows what areas would make these rankings during a pandemic when almost no one is traveling.

[BnaBreaker]

2 hours ago, jmtunafish said:

Sort of.  Those lists were all made in 2019, and the last one was made nearly a year ago.  So they were made well before this pandemic.  Who knows what areas would make these rankings during a pandemic when almost no one is traveling.

2020 CONDE NASTE TRAVELER BEST DESTINATIONS IN THE WORLD

1.  Your own basement

2. South Pole

3. That one big empty field eighty five miles north west of Boone's Junction, Kansas just off of the dirt section of county road 22 about five miles past the big oak tree

4.  The vast dark void of outer space

5.  That one abandoned cabin from the movie The Revenant 

6. N/A

7. N/A

8. N/A

9. N/A

10.  Nashville, TN

Edited April 17, 2020 by BnaBreaker

[markhollin]

A major PGA tournament may be in the works for Nashville.  Scott Ramsey of the Nashville Sports Council has been leading the charge.  

According to Ramsey, Nashville needs four key elements to align at once to secure a regular stop on the PGA Tour:

• When on the calendar would it happen? Nashville would need the course conditions and weather to be ideal for a tournament.
• When would it fall on the PGA’s tour scheduled for broadcast purposes, and to attract a high-quality field of players?
• Location and course. Which course would not only be willing to give up the course for the time and tournament, but also be able to host it logistically with all the necessary hospitality tents, venues, parking, moving around thousands of people on their property and other logistics?
• Lastly, what’s going to be the real key is sponsorship — a lead sponsor and the secondary support sponsors.
  
  More behind the NBJ paywall here:
  
  https://www.bizjournals.com/nashville/news/2020/04/17/a-major-pga-tour-event-in-music-city-its-possible.html?iana=hpmvp_nsh_news_headline

[smeagolsfree]

9 hours ago, BnaBreaker said:

2020 CONDE NASTE TRAVELER BEST DESTINATIONS IN THE WORLD

1.  Your own basement

2. South Pole

3. That one big empty field eighty five miles north west of Boone's Junction, Kansas just off of the dirt section of county road 22 about five miles past the big oak tree

4.  The vast dark void of outer space

5.  That one abandoned cabin from the movie The Revenant 

6. N/A

7. N/A

8. N/A

9. N/A

10.  Nashville, TN

Number 6. Your front Yard

Number 7. Your back Yard