ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how contemporary music communities form and persist, how more macro-level structures like geography and market conditions affect these communities of music makers, and even how lyrics provide a window into this world of songwriters, refracting issues of class, gender, and place. The television show Nashville dramatically portrays the lives and careers of various Nashville musicians and songwriters to millions of viewers. The fictional show relies on the city of Nashville's real life reputation as "Music City" and as a place with a strong community of music makers. Nashville can, indeed, make such claims: almost 8 out of every 1,000 Nashvillians work in the music business, creating the highest density of music professionals of any city in US A benefit of taking side jobs in the music industry is that the writer can choose which studio recording gigs, song mixing projects, or production jobs to take and which ones to pass on without diminishing their focus on songwriting.
