Economy

Nashville’s strength as a community truly rests on one solid foundation—its economic diversity. The city is a great “neighborhood” of private and public business and industry, where people are as likely to go to work each morning in banks, hospitals, or government offices as to drive trucks, punch cash registers, or work on assembly lines. The area has benefited from low unemployment, consistent job growth, heavy outside investment and expansion, and a broadening of the labor force. Although the city’s economy is not reliant on any one area of production, Nashville is a leader in finance and insurance, health care, music and entertainment, publishing, transportation technology, higher education, biotechnology, plastics, and tourism and conventions. In June 2003, Moody’s Investors Service placed Nashville 8th in a ranking of the top 10 most diversified local economies. Also in 2003, Nashville ranked 25th inForbesmagazine’s May issue listing top places for business and careers.

Health care is one of Nashville’s top industries; according to the Nashville Health Council, the city is known as the nation’s health care center. Twenty-one healthcare companies are based within the city; in total 350 health care companies have operations here. Many service firms specializing in the industry (including accounting, legal, and others) are based in Nashville, including 12 investment and venture capital companies dealing primarily with health care. Health care services companies based in Nashville control more than 2,400 operations outside the city, as well. In 2002, almost 90,000 people in the Nashville metro area worked in the health care industry, earning more than a $4 billion payroll.

Nashville is the largest publishing center in the Southeast and one of the top ten largest in the country. Some of the nation’s leading printers operate alongside scores of small, family-owned shops. The city is home to Thomas Nelson, the world’s foremost publisher of Bibles, and two of the country’s largest religious publishing houses. Nashville is also becoming a major distribution center for books and other print media.

Of all of the products manufactured in the city, music is what makes Nashville most famous. The local recording industry and its offshoots have not only brought worldwide recognition to what was once a sedate southern city, but they have also pumped billions of dollars into the local economy, created a thriving entertainment business scene ranked behind only New York and Los Angeles, and given the city a distinctly cosmopolitan flavor. Nashville music—country, pop, gospel, and rock—generates well over a billion dollars in record sales each year. As a result, spinoff industries have flourished: booking agencies, music publishing companies, promotional firms, recording studios, trade publications, and performance rights associations such as BMI, the Broadcast Music Inc. There are approximately 200 recording studios in Nashville, and most major record labels have offices on Nashville’s Music Row, Sony, RCA, Mercury Nashville, MCA, Warner Brothers, Capitol, and Columbia. As Nashville remains a center for the music industry, it continues to draw support businesses and industry to the area. Local music-related advertising firms (especially jingle houses) bring in vast revenues, music video production in the city is at an all-time high, while a burgeoning radio, television, and film industry has enticed some of the country’s top producers, directors, and production houses to set up shop in Nashville. The music industry in Nashville is responsible for a good chunk of the city’s tourism activity.

An influx of new industry in recent years has resulted in hundreds of jobs and on-site training opportunities for local actors, editors, artists, technicians, and other production people. Nashville’s entertainment scene brings in more than revenue, however. It draws millions of people to the city each year as well. Tourism is one of Tennessee’s biggest businesses with annual revenues of $2.2 billion, and Nashville is known as the hottest spot in the state.

New technology is a burgeoning factor in the Nashville economy. Dell Computers operates a manufacturing and technical support center near the airport, which opened in 1999 and employs about 3,000 people. The plastics industry is growing here, as is the biotechnology (including pharmaceuticals and life sciences) industries.

Partnership 2010 (formerly Partnership 2000) was created as a regional, public-private economic development initiative for the region. The four cornerstones of the program strategy are business recruiting of corporate headquarters and administrative offices, retention of existing businesses, entrepreneurship through fostering growth and supporting start-up businesses, and community improvement. By 2005 the initiative has resulted in more than 350 companies relocating their corporate headquarters to Nashville. Expectations for the initiative include a $10 billion impact on the region’s economy as well as the creation of 50,000 new jobs. Partly as a result of the initiative, Nashville ranked among Expansion Management’s 2005 “America’s 50 Hottest Cities.”

Items and goods produced:printing and publishing, automotive products, trucks, automotive parts, clothing, shoes, lawnmowers, bicycles, telecommunications equipment, aerospace products, thermos bottles, kerosene lamps, computers

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