Hedi LaMarr
Rob Dz on stage at a Mad Lit performance.
Rob Dz, co-president of the Urban Community Arts Network, says developing a music brand is an 'important step' for the city.
City officials are looking to promote tourism through a new marketing effort meant to pitch Madison as a “music city.”
A resolution unanimously passed by the city council Sept. 16 authorizes the city’s planning division to enter into a contract with local marketing firm The Creative Company Inc. “to develop a regional music brand for the Greater Madison area.” The $14,060 contract is being funded through a $25,000 earmark in the city’s room tax commission budget for music tourism efforts.
The Creative Company would be expected to produce a narrative statement, logos, and other marketing materials, says Angela Puerta, a city planner and local musician. Three firms were reviewed prior to The Creative Company being selected, Puerta says.
Puerta says organizations like Destination Madison or Frank Productions could potentially use such marketing materials to promote events or artists and strengthen the city’s musical tourism profile — performance metrics might include increased page clicks or tourist visits. Similar efforts have been undertaken in Nashville and Albuquerque, she says.
Making Madison’s music scene more equitable is a key goal of the project. Puerta says the process of developing the brand “will have a lot of emphasis on inclusion.”
“We want to make sure that this is not to support the status quo,” says Puerta. “We want to make sure that everybody's included, every genre is included, as I said, hip-hop music or Latin music, not always the same styles that we typically hear in Wisconsin.”
The brand project is meant to represent diversity in Madison’s music scene, say Karen Reece and Rob Dz, co-presidents of the Urban Community Arts Network. Reece says “we want to see people start using that brand identity.”
“That might be putting it on a flyer or on a website and making sure that all different kinds of people feel like it's theirs, and feel some ownership in this music scene,” says Reece.
Madison has had a troubled relationship with hip-hop acts, in particular. Throughout the last two decades, multiple venues in the city stopped booking hip-hop acts, often citing acts of violence that occurred nearby. A 2018 study conducted by UCAN and researchers at UW-Madison however, found that incidences of violence were no more common at hip-hop performances than for other genres of music. Researchers sifted through more than 4,000 police calls from live music venues from 2008 to 2016 for the study.
“We went through a stretch of time where police would preemptively cancel events,” says Reece. “If they saw certain people's faces on a Facebook post related to an event, they would go directly to the [organization], to the building owner, and tell them they should cancel the event.”
The Greater Madison Music City initiative was formed in early 2020, with city support, to improve equity in Madison’s music scene and study music’s economic impact on Madison and Dane County. Among recommendations the group made in a 2022 report were that the city should create a music tourism strategy that would build “Greater Madison’s brand as a music city, increase knowledge of the city’s musical heritage, and promote local music.”
Reece and Dz view the music brand project as fulfilling that recommendation. Tourism plays a key role in determining who feels at home in a city, Dz says.
“If you get a kid that goes to a [historically Black college or university] and comes here for a job interview — if he doesn't see culture that looks like them, then what's the likelihood that they're going to want to come to this place?” says Dz.
The Creative Company will plan a workshop to bring members of the local music scene — including artists, venue owners, business owners and more — into the brand’s development process. Both Reece and Dz hope the brand will serve as a first step toward other conversations on how to make Madison’s music scene more equitable.
“It's an important step,” says Dz. “Hopefully leading with this kind of opens up the conversation to be having other areas.”
