America’s Most Creative Cities In 2014

When Jenny Olivia Johnson was up for tenure at Boston’s Wellesley College, she knew recording an album would help her candidacy. She already had plenty of songs ready. Her challenge was coming up with the money.

So Johnson, a professor of music composition and theory, sketched out a $10,000 budget and began writing grant proposals. “Obviously a professor salary only goes so far,” she says. She decided to post her project on Kickstarter to raise the rest. With more than three weeks left to go, Johnson’s debut album, a cassette tape and VHS recording called “Don’t Look Back,” has already surpassed her $5,000 funding goal. “I do have a lot of supportive people in my life,” she says, “but I didn’t think it would kick off this fast.”

Boston’s thriving, supportive music community is one of the reasons Johnson enjoys living and working there. Her colleagues are building instruments and breaking new ground in computer music. She attends performances at Boston University, MIT, and the underground Sick Puppy music festival at the New England Conservatory.

“I think we are a creative city because we have so many colleges and universities in a concentrated area,” says Darla Hanley, dean of the Professional Education Division at Berklee College of Music, whose graduates include John Mayer and the Dixie Chicks. Recently, Hanley tapped into that community, running a hack-a-thon where computer programmers helped music therapists build technology to help patients. Add to the plethora of universities Boston’s many arts organizations, top-notch museums, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Boston Ballet, visiting Broadway shows and concerts of all types, and Boston is a creativity brew pot.

Lingerie startup Luxxie Boston, which makes functional, comfortable slips and camisoles for women, tapped that brew by asking students and alumni from local universities to test-drive its product. Now, with 13 days left to go, Luxxie has already reached 143% of its Kickstarter $10,000 funding goal. Says Stefanie Mnayarji, the former quant who founded Luxxie: “We chose Boston to be our location because innovation is so strong in Boston.”

America’s Most Creative Cities

Behind the Numbers

To find America’s Most Creative cities, we started with America’s 50 largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) and Metropolitan Divisions (MSADs), home to half the U.S. population.  MSAs and MSADs are cities and their surrounding suburbs as defined by the Office of Management and Budget. We then ranked these places based on four metrics. While other such lists measure creativity by the presence of art galleries and patents granted, we felt these wouldn’t get at the heart of a city’s true creative spirit. (Galleries better indicate the presence of successful art sellers rather than makers. And patent trolls have skewed the validity of patents as a reliable indicator.)

To capture a more organic, art-music-entertainment-design form of creativity, Sperling’s Best Places (Forbes’ content partner for this list) searched for cities where people are actively engrossed in creative projects. We looked at sites where people promote or manage their projects—creative funding platforms Kickstarter and Indiegogo, and music sites Bandcamp and ReverbNation—measuring the number of projects or artists per site as compared to the local population.

Why go this route? “The chances are excellent that most of a city’s artists and musicians list their occupation as teacher, librarian, barista or whatever, since this is how they earn the bulk of their income,” says Bert Sperling, of Sperling’s Best Places. Studies that attempt to capture creativity via job roles would thus miss many of these folks. ”Thanks to the Internet, they now have a way to share their passion with the world, and we have a way to measure which cities have the highest proportion of these creative people.”

Who’s Number 1? San Francisco.

Not surprisingly, the city with the highest level of creative activity overall was San Francisco, arguably the American city most steeped in using online tools to promote and fund creative projects. San Francisco had the highest number of Bandcamp works and Kickstarter projects per capita. It also had the second-highest number of ReverbNation artists and fourth-greatest number of Indiegogo projects. Boston was more of a surprise at No. 2, with music-focused city Nashville ranking in at No. 3. Although the Southern city is traditionally a home to country music, boasting venues like the Grand ‘Ole Opry and breeding stars like Willie Nelson and Garth Brooks, over the last decade the city has built a bustling scene in genres including rock, indie, and punk.

“What has made Nashville a destination for folks who want to make music a career is the infrastructure that does exist because of country music: more studios, more professional musicians, more clubs,” says Patrick Rodgers, music editor at the Nashville Scene.

The proliferation of music in Nashville has also led to other supporting creative endeavors, including programs in the business of music at Belmont University and Middle Tennessee State University in nearby Murfreesboro. The three major performance rights organizations–Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI), The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), and the Society of European Stage Authors and Composers (SESAC)—are all headquartered here. Hatch Show Print, an organization that makes concert posters, has contributed to the homegrown printmaking industry. And the city has recently become home to its first big DIY-style flea market, Porter Flea.

After Nashville, Austin, Tex. clocks in at No. 4, and greater New York City ranks No. 5. Check out our full list of America’s Most Creative Cities.

 

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