Tag: Texas Music Office

Y’all Street Rising: Why the Future of Music Finance Won’t Be Made in Manhattan

There’s a new gravity well in American finance, and it’s not New York. It’s not even Silicon Valley. It’s Dallas. It’s Austin. It’s Y’all Street.

And anyone paying attention could have seen it coming. The Texas Stock Exchange (TXSE) is preparing for launch in 2026.  TXSW is not some bulletin board; it’s backed by billions from institutions that have grown weary of the compliance culture and cost of New York. Goldman Sachs’s Dallas campus is now operational. BlackRock and Charles Schwab have shifted major divisions to the Lone Star State. Tesla and Samsung are expanding giga-scale manufacturing and chip fabrication plants.

A strong center of gravity for capital formation is moving south, and with it, a new cultural economy is taking shape. And AI may not save it:  Scion Asset Management, “Big Short” investor Michael Burry’s hedge fund, disclosed to the SEC that it had a short bet worth $1.1 billion against Nvidia and Palantir.   He’s also investing in waterthat AI burns.  So not everyone is jumping off a cliff.

A New Realignment

Texas startups have raised roughly $9.8 billion in venture capital through Q3 2025, pushing the state to a consistent #4 ranking nationally. Austin remains the creative and software hub, while Dallas–Fort Worth and Houston lead in AI infrastructure, energy tech, and finance.

The TXSE will formalize what investors already know: capital markets no longer need Manhattan to function.

And that raises an uncomfortable question for the music industry:

If capital, infrastructure, and innovation no longer orbit Wall Street, why should music?

Apple Learned It the Hard Way

Despite New York’s rich musical legacy—Tin Pan Alley, Brill Building, CBGB, and the era of the major-label tower when Sony occupied that horrible AT&T building and flew sushi in from Japan for the executive dining room—the city has become an increasingly difficult place to sustain large-scale creative infrastructure. Real estate costs, over-regulation, and financial concentration have hollowed out the middle layer of production.  As I’ve taught for years, the key element to building the proverbial “creative class” is cheap rent, preferably with a detached garage.

Even Apple Inc. learned long ago that creativity can’t thrive where every square foot carries a compliance surcharge. That’s why Apple’s global supply chain, data centers, and now content operations span Texas, Tennessee, and North Carolina instead of Midtown Manhattan.  And then there’s the dirty power, sump pumps and subways—Electric Lady would probably never get built today.

The lesson for the music business is clear: creative capital follows economic oxygen. And right now, that oxygen is in Texas.

The Texas Music Office: A Model for How to Get It Done

If you want to understand how Texas built a durable, bipartisan music infrastructure, start with the Texas Music Office (TMO). Founded in 1990 under Governor Bill Clements, the TMO was one of the first state agencies in America to recognize the music industry not just as culture, but as economic development.

Over the decades—through governors of both parties—the TMO has become a master class in how to institutionalize support for creative enterprise without strangling it in bureaucracy. From George W. Bush’s early focus on export promotion, to Rick Perry’s integration of music into economic development, to Greg Abbott’s expansion of the Music Friendly Communities network, each administration built upon rather than dismantled what came before.

Today, the TMO supports more than 70 certified Music Friendly Communities, funds music-education grants, tracks economic data, and connects local musicians with investors and international partners. It’s a template for how a state can cultivate creative industries while maintaining fiscal discipline and accountability.

It’s also proof that cultural policy doesn’t have to be partisan—it just has to be practical.

When people ask why Texas has succeeded where others stalled, the answer is simple: the TMO stayed focused on results, not rhetoric. That’s a lesson a lot of states—and more than a few record labels—could stand to relearn.

Artist Rights Institute: Doing Our Part for Texas and Beyond

The Artist Rights Institute (ARI) has done its part to make sure that Texas and other local music and creators aren’t an afterthought in rooms that are usually dominated by platform interests and coastal trade groups.

When questions of AI training, copyright allocation, black-box royalties, and streaming transparency landed in front of the U.S. Copyright Office, Congress, and U.K. policymakers, ARI showed up with the Texas view: creators first, no speculative ticketing, no compulsory “data donation,” and no silent expropriation of recordings and songs for AI. ARI has filed comments, contributed research, and supported amicus work to make sure Texas artists, songwriters, and indie publishers are in the record — not just the usual New York, Nashville, and Los Angeles voices.

Just as important, ARI has pushed financial education for artists. Because Y’all Street doesn’t help creators if they don’t know what a discount rate is, how catalog valuations work, how to read a mechanical statement, or why AI licenses need to be expressly excluded from legacy record and publishing deals. ARI programs in Texas and Georgia have focused on:
– explaining how federal policy actually hits musicians,
– showing how to negotiate or at least spot AI/derivative-use clauses,
– and connecting artists to local music industry infrastructure.

In other words, ARI joined other Texas and Georgia organizations to be a translator between Texas’s very real music economy and the fast-moving policy debates in Washington and the U.K. If Texas is going to be the place where music is financed, ARI wants to make sure local artists are also the ones who capture the value.

Music’s Texas Moment

Texas is no newcomer to the business of music. Its industry already generates over $13.4 billion in annual economic activity, supporting more than 91,000 jobs across its certified cities. Austin retains the crown of “Live Music Capital of the World,” but Denton, Fort Worth, and San Antonio have joined the state-certified network of “Music Friendly Communities”.

Meanwhile, universities from UT-Austin to Texas A&M study rights management, AI provenance, and royalties in the age of generative audio.

The result: a state that treats music not as nostalgia, but as an evolving economic engine.  Plus we’ve got Antone’s.

Wall Street’s ‘Great Sucking Sound,’ Replayed

Ross Perot once warned of “that giant sucking sound” as jobs moved south. Thirty years later, the sound you hear isn’t manufacturing—it’s money, data, and influence flowing to Y’all Street.

If the major labels and publishers don’t track that migration, they risk becoming cultural tenants in cities they no longer own. The next catalog securitization, the next AI-royalty clearinghouse, the next Bell Labs-for-Music could just as easily be financed out of Dallas as from Midtown.

Because while New York made the hits of the last century, Texas may well finance the next one.  We’ve always had the musicians, producers, authors, actors and film makers, but soon we’ll also have the money.

Y’all Ready?

The world no longer needs a Midtown address to mint creative wealth. As the TXSE prepares its debut and Texas cements its position as the nation’s innovation corridor, the music industry faces a choice:

Follow the capital—or become another cautionary tale of what happens when you mistake heritage for destiny.

Because as Apple learned long ago, even the richest history can’t compete with the freedom to build something new.  

Pandemic: The Local Culture Card Solution Lets Public and Private Sectors Cooperate to Save Our Local Musicians and Retailers

The Local Culture Card would be a limited purpose debit card that permits the cardholder to purchase goods or services from a designated group of “local arts vendors” who would be artists, retailers or nonprofit arts organizations operating in the locality of the user.  It would be like a targeted gift card sponsored by state or local government, local corporations, radio or television stations.

Local culture cards would be distributed free of charge to local residents charged up with a minimum payment that must be spent within 30 days of activation.  Once funds are used, the issuer or sponsor could elect to replenish the funds on the same 30 day basis.

Alternatively, the local culture card could be sold like a gift card on the same terms.

The purpose of the Local Culture Card would be to empower consumers with purchasing power to directly inject cash into a local artist community—and quickly.  This would help everyone in the supply chain from vinyl manufacturers to one-stops to local record stores to the artists themselves and their songwriters.

Those local arts vendors would sign up to accept the Local Culture Card as payment for goods or services.  The Local Culture Card could not be used at Amazon, Spotify,  Target, Best Buy, Apple or other big box retailers because the benefit would be too diffused and would not retain local funds in local communities.  The card could instead be used for purchases at a local brick and mortar store’s online operation or to make a Venmo contribution for a live stream performance for a local artist (or purchase directly from the artist’s Bandcamp account).

The Local Culture Card would initially be charged with a minimum amount of credit or could be purchased like a gift card.  It could be branded by locality, state or region and could also be branded as a sponsored card by either state or local government or other private sector sponsor.  It could be included or branded as Record Store Day collateral or similar commercial efforts as it will be effective in both commercial and noncommercial applications.

For example, an Austin Culture Card could be sponsored by the Austin Music Office or the City of Austin Economic Development Department.   City funds would be used to charge up the card with a minimum amount of spending power, say $50.

Artists like Guy Forsyth or Dave Madden could sign up to accept payment through a webpage for their direct online sales or contributions through Venmo or Paypal for live streaming events.  Local retailers like Waterloo Records could sign up to accept the Austin Culture Card for purchases at their online store of recordings by any artist.  Ballet Austin could sign up so that patrons could use the Austin Culture Card to donate to that organization.  Alternatively, Austin Creative Alliance could sign up to accept donations for any of its member organizations.

The same process could be repeated by the Texas Music Office for artists statewide through the TMO’s “Music Friendly City” operation, or by the Small Business Administration for regional or national artists, retailers or organizations.

Alternatively Local Culture Cards could be sponsored by corporations and distributed to their customers or radio stations and distributed to their listeners.  Indie labels could sponsor cards as a tie in with local record stores that carry the label’s recordings.

The only other requirement for using the Local Culture Card would be that the money had to be spent within 30 days of issuance or it would expire.   Ideally a bank issuer would agree to provide the card as either a physical or virtual credit card for a zero transaction fee.  Remember–the Local Culture Card is not scrip, it’s cold cash placed directly into the hands of artists, retailers and arts organizations  by their fans.

While the examples I’ve given are from Austin, there is nothing unique about Austin.  The Local Culture Card would be relevant for any city with a cultural community from New York to New Orleans–that the fans want to retain during and after the pandemic.

 

@TXMusicOffice: Music Industry Economic Impact Study Quoted by Sen. @JohnCornyn

The good news is the bad news is wrong.  And someone has the data to prove it.

If you watched Smokey Robinson’s riviting testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee this week, you may recall that Senator John Cornyn read some statistics from the Texas Music Office Economic Impact study on the benefits to the State of Texas from the music industry.

This one exchange should give the lie to the usual cant we hear from lobbyists both in and outside the music business that we will never win against the broadcasters on terrestrial royalties because there’s a radio station in every Congressional district.  There’s music industry in every state at least, if not every Congressional district.

The economic impact study concluded:

Combined, music business and music education directly account for over 95,000 permanent jobs, $3.6 billion in annual earnings, and just over $8.5 billion in annual economic activity, up from 92,000 jobs and about $7.5 billion in annual activity during 2015.

  • The ripple effects associated with the direct injection related to music business and music education bring the total impact (including the direct effects) to over 178,000 permanent jobs, $6.5 billion in earnings, and $19.8 billion in annual economic activity. The State of Texas also realizes over $323 million in tax revenue from these impacts.

In addition to the TMO economic impact study, you should also read Titan Music Group’s Austin Music Census that really drills down deep on the local impacts and has become a rally point for Austin musicians.

The Texas Music Office sets the gold standard for providing federal lawmakers with the information they need to defend the music industry as important job creators rather than an afterthought.

Senator Cornyn’s exchange should debunk forever the idea that there’s no support for music industry initiatives outside of New York, Nashville and Los Angeles, so nobody bothers to explain themselves to residents of flyover states.