New Orleans Music Executive Says the City Already Has a Real Industry Built on Labels, Venues, Studios and Artists From Louis Armstrong to Lil Wayne

NEW ORLEANS, LA — A New Orleans music lawyer is pushing back on the idea that the city still needs to become a “real” music industry town. Instead, he argues the infrastructure is already here, spread across songwriters, performers, record labels, publishers, venues, studios, engineers, managers, tour operators, festivals and other businesses that make money from music.

In a personal essay for NOLA.com, he says decades of working with local clients helped him realize the Crescent City already functions like a music business hub, just on a smaller scale than Los Angeles or New York. The difference, he says, is not whether the industry exists, but that it is built differently and operates in a city with far fewer resources and more fragile conditions.

Why New Orleans looks different from bigger music centers

The writer compares New Orleans with larger hubs and says the city has many of the same pieces, just not the same size. He notes that the market is smaller than Los Angeles or New York and does not have corporate giants on the scale of Sony or Universal, but it does have local labels carrying out the business of commercial music exploitation.

He also points to Nashville as a different model, where performance rights organizations are based and songwriting has flourished around that concentration. In New Orleans, he says, the creative network grew more organically, in a way he likens to improvisational jazz rather than a tightly managed corporate system. That structure, he argues, is part of why the city’s music scene has long produced outsized cultural influence.

He says that influence runs from early jazz and Louis Armstrong to the partnership of Dave Bartholomew and Fats Domino, then to Cosimo Matassa’s Quarter studio, Wardell Quezergue’s work on “Tutti Frutti” with Little Richard, Allen Toussaint’s catalog and the rise of Cash Money Records and Lil Wayne. Those examples, he writes, show that New Orleans has been generating valuable music assets for generations.

Rights, money and the value of staying local

The essay also takes aim at the idea that New Orleans simply needs more “IP,” or intellectual property, to matter in the music business. The lawyer says many artists have sold rights to outside companies because major corporations often offer the most attractive deals, but he adds that plenty of local musicians have kept ownership and continue to license their work.

He says most of his clients today are holding onto their rights, a sign that the industry has changed and that local creators can still benefit from their catalogs. At the same time, he argues that New Orleans faces bigger structural problems that make it hard to attract new business of any kind, including hurricanes, steep insurance costs, busted drainage, potholes, failing traffic lights and constant road closures.

His larger point is that the city should focus less on becoming Nashville or Austin and more on protecting what already exists. He says New Orleans’ music identity is tied to its population, its businesses and its fragile cultural ecosystem, and that losing residents or creative workers would threaten the city’s legacy. The goal, he says, should be to grow without stripping away the qualities that make the city distinctive.

A global reputation built on music and place

The writer says New Orleans’ cultural pull comes from a mix of grit and magic that has made it an international treasure. He points to the World Monuments Fund’s Irreplaceable America program, which designated the entire city as part of the effort and, he says, made New Orleans the only city in the world to receive that status.

He also cites the city’s dense network of venues, festivals, live-music restaurants, local magazines and WWOZ-FM, which he calls the world’s greatest local radio station. In his view, those assets prove that New Orleans is already functioning as a music city in full, not waiting to become one later.

For him, the real challenge is to invest in that ecosystem without forcing it to imitate other places. New Orleans, he writes, should grow its music economy by supporting the artists and businesses already there, not by chasing a version of the industry that would make it lose its own identity.

Chicago's music scene, one story at a time — Chicago Music Guide.