Tomorrow night on July 7, 6:30 pm The Nashville Metro Council will vote to finally legalize home studios and other home businesses in Music City.
EVEN IF YOU ALREADY EMAILED BEFORE… The Metro Council needs to hear from you again now for this meeting.
Email now with this easy link: BalanceNashville.org/#support
If you live in Nashville email the council and ask them to vote “YES” on BL2019-48
Or email directly to CouncilMembers@nashville.gov
Make sure to include “Vote YES for BL2019-48” in the subject line and add your name and address in the email body.
Watch the meeting tomorrow night live July 7, 6:30 pm here: SaveHomeStudios.com/Live
(Look for BL2019-48 in the meeting agenda.)
Learn more about the home business bill that will Save Home Studios and other home businesses in Music City: BalanceNashville.org
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Here is my personal email that I sent the Metro Council:
Your email does not need to be this long…
“Dear Councilmembers,
I am a homeowner and music producer with a Grammy-awarded home recording studio. I need to be able to work from home with other musicians and songwriters in my home studio to support my family and be a good parent.
I am not alone…
There are many others all across Nashville in other professions who need to be able to work from home as well.
We are already here and have been your great neighborhoods for decades. But we have had to keep our heads down to avoid being noticed for our work.
There is a risk that despite being a great neighbor we could get singled out due to Nashville’s discriminatory home business prohibition and “Don’t ask. Don’t tell” policy.
This is not fair and does not promote growth in the arts.
Often we are the reason why our neighborhoods have improved since we moved in and started working from home.
We care about where we live and build strong relationships with our neighbors.
A house in my neighborhood just sold for nearly half a million dollars. That’s five to ten times what a house cost here in 2000.
The new owners (whom I know) told me that a deciding factor in their purchase was the comforting thought that I was already here in the neighborhood so it must be a good neighborhood.
The cost of living in Nashville has gone up significantly over the twenty years since I bought my home.
Food that used to cost two or three dollars twenty years ago now costs ten dollars or more.
But income in the music industry has gone down considerably…
The first commercial studio I started working at in 1995 was charging a record label $600/day for the studio and more on top of that for the engineer and assistant.
And that was a discounted rate!
A decade or two later the studio was lucky to charge half that rate.
That studio is in Berry Hill and zoned commercial.
The cost to purchase or lease a commercial studio space is typically greater than the perceived opportunity to pay for it.
For many music producers, the home studio is an environment that offers affordability, comfort, and creativity where independent musicians can create with limited means.
A home studio is a place where Nashville’s music is historically born.
Songwriting, rehearsing, recording, mixing, and mastering are all things that have traditionally taken place in homes.
Most artists launch their own career on a small budget from the safety of a home studio. Then later, when they are successful they hope to have the budget for a commercial recording studio on the next record.
Or they might choose to start a record in a commercial studio for a larger recording session and then move the rest of the process of overdubs and mixing to a smaller home studio.
In fact, in the 1990s many home studios started appearing throughout Nashville to fulfill the need for a lower cost for overdubs and mixing. Artists just didn’t need to book a large expensive studio setting for some of the simpler recording tasks.
More recently COVID and the quarantine have shut down the music economy. We will now see a greater need for home studios than ever before.
Nashville is Music City and one of the few places left in the world where world-class musicians still get together in from of microphones to record great songs. This is a beautiful thing…
I moved here from Boston in 1991 to get a degree at MTSU and chose to stay here for 30 years. When I was in school they taught us how to record musicians with microphones that required big studios.
But even that is changing with technology. MTSU, Belmont University, and SAE Institute have students from all over coming to Nashville to learn how to produce and record music.
These accredited schools now teach young producers how to make the music that the kids want to listen to today. That is music is often created with a computer and a microphone. It doesn’t require a massive recording studio.
But Nashville is telling these students that they are not welcome to create their music here in their home studio. And so the young producers will choose to move away rather than stay where they can’t create their music.
And more recently COVID and the quarantine have devastated the music industry. Grammy-winning producers whose voices I respect are saying that it will be a long time before we see the music industry bounce back in a way that we were familiar with.
Let’s send a message that it’s ok to create music in Music City to rebuild the music industry from the grassroots level. Don’t extinguish the light of creativity here in Nashville.
If people can’t create new music together professionally from the safety of their own home studios…
Then I guess you had better get comfortable listening to your oldies station. Because that’s all that will be left.
Please vote “YES’ on BL2019-48 to allow us to work from home with customers.
Cheers!
Lij Shaw
2407 Brasher Ave
Nashville TN 37206″
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Thank you for your help and for sharing this update!
Cheers,
Lij Shaw
Got questions? SaveHomeStudios@Gmail.com
TheToyBoxStudio.com
SaveHomeStudios.com
PS in case you missed the article in Forbes magazine explaining more about this historic fight to Save Home Studios in Music City: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobbyowsinski/2020/07/04/nashville-home-studios-crucial-vote/#78199da97858