Maybe We've Been Measuring Success All Wrong

For decades, we've celebrated the artists who leave.

A local band signs a major label deal. A songwriter moves to Nashville. An artist relocates to Los Angeles. We point to them as proof that our local music ecosystem is working.

But what if we've been measuring the wrong thing?

One of the questions we've started asking creatives in our Music Census work is surprisingly simple:

Which of the following best describes your goals for what success in music currently looks like for you?

The answers have challenged one of the biggest assumptions in our industry.

In one city, a legacy music city whose sound helped shape entire genres and whose name carries weight anywhere in the world, 73% of respondents told us their ideal career is primarily local or regional. Only 27% said their goal is primarily national or international.

In another community, a mid-sized city in the middle of the country without that kind of global reputation, the numbers were even more striking. Eighty-five percent chose local or regional as their definition of success. Only 17% chose national or international.

Think about that for a minute. These are two very different music communities. Different histories, different sizes, different genres. One has a legacy the whole world knows; the other is still writing its story. And yet they arrived at the same conclusion

Most creatives aren't trying to leave. They're trying to build a life.

That doesn't mean they lack ambition. For one person, success might be selling out arenas around the world. For another, it might be making a living playing several nights a week, teaching lessons, recording original music, and still being home for dinner with their family.

Neither goal is more valid than the other.

I've heard a version of this in conversations with artists all across the country. Many of them told me they were happy. Happy to have a career, health insurance, and a job they could step away from every six or eight weeks to go play a regional run. That's not settling. That's a working artist who has figured out how to keep music at the center of their life on their own terms.

The problem is that most communities often design their entire music strategy around the aspirations of the smallest group, while overlooking the hundreds of musicians, venues, engineers, educators, presenters, and entrepreneurs who want to build sustainable careers right where they are.

And our support for artists has almost always been one-size-fits-all: a single ladder that assumes everyone is climbing toward the same national stage. If your ambition doesn't point out of town, most of that support was never really built for you.

Imagine if a parks department judged its success only by how many Olympic athletes it produced… Of course it wouldn't.

Its real job is creating places where everyone can participate, whether they're training for the Olympics or simply taking an evening walk.

Music ecosystems aren't that different. A healthy music community shouldn't be judged solely by how many artists it exports, but by how many people can build a meaningful, sustainable creative career and never feel forced to choose between their work and their home.

There's an economic case here too. Creatives spend money the way everyone else does rent, gear, groceries, studio time, the late meal after the gig. A musician who builds a career at home keeps that spending circulating through local venues, shops, and studios year after year. The artist who leaves takes it with them.

None of this diminishes the artists who reach national and international stages. Those stories matter, and every community should celebrate them. But they're one path among many, and our data says most people are walking the others.

So as cities invest in music as an economic and cultural asset, I think it's time to ask a different question.

Instead of “How do we create the next superstar?”

Maybe: “How do we build a community where every creative can succeed on their own terms?”

In practice, that means infrastructure that matches aspiration instead of assuming it.

Want to master the local scene? Here's your playbook: the venues, the teaching pipeline, the rehearsal space, the fair-pay standards.

Building toward a regional circuit? Here's that playbook: the routing, the presenter networks, the flexibility to tour every couple of months and come home.

Aiming for national and international stages? There's a path for that too.

Same community. Different doors.

I think this is one of the more important and practical ideas to come out of our census work. It doesn't tell communities to stop dreaming big. It tells them to stop assuming that everyone shares the same dream. And that's a much more inclusive way to think about building a healthy music ecosystem.

Because if 73% to 85% of creatives in your music community defines success as local or regional, shouldn't that be the community we're building for?

Maybe it's time to stop measuring success by how many artists leave and start measuring it by how many never have to.