Nashville's staging business is the anchor component of the increasingly-elaborate productions that chug out of Music City every year. But like the sets that the handful of companies here fabricate, the business is glossy on the part that the audience sees and less so back in the shop. It's a business of careful expenditures and, in more and more cases, watching what you build showing up the following year as part of someone else's tour design, annoying both for the fact that it might be just a piece of a larger puzzle you'd sweated over only to see it now out of context, and because it's one more production design you didn't get to execute and get paid for. On the other hand, the work seems to be steady and the competition seems to be manageable, at least for the time being.
Jim Rue, one of two owners of SetCo, based in the Nashville suburb of Springfield, has done staging design and construction for artists ranging from Garth Books to Kenny Chesney and Martina McBride. He says he's kept the focus of the company tightly on sets, not letting it be lured into expanding into lighting or video, businesses with substantially more competition and overhead. Like many in Nashville's touring infrastructure, SetCo's marketing relies on the city's relationship-based model, which has kept Brooks and others coming back for each new tour for new sets. However, the fact that touring set building in Nashville remains based around a relatively small band of providers, some business is lost to the allure of the larger set companies on the West Coast, which pull designs from work they do for theme parks and Hollywood films. Rue acknowledges that two artists he's done tour staging for in the past, Keith Urban and Sugarland, have both more recently used L.A.-based set companies. As a result, says Rue, he tends to run a lean shop, at the core of which are he and his partner. They bring on additional labor as needed. "It's been that way for 35 years," he says, noting that they've been able to do fine even without a website.
Where SetCo is a home-grown proposition, one of its two or three local competitors is Accurate Staging, an outpost of a larger West Coast-based set design and construction company that set up shop in Nashville three years ago and has succeeded with a combination of country clients including Taylor Swift, Carrie Underwood and Billy Currington, as well as regionally based rock acts like the Kings of Leon and Paramore. Tye Trussell, who runs the Nashville office, says his strategy is to stock more items than local competitors and to create a mindshare link to the work that the company does on the Left Coast with artists like Guns ‘n' Roses and KISS. Nashville also acts as a base to cover clients based anywhere east of the Mississippi.
Trussell says he's been able to double the Nashville office's revenues in each of the three years Accurate has been here, but adds that Nashville's generally lower budgets for touring mean that the Music City outpost has yet to top $3 million in annual revenues, compared to the $16 million he says the L.A. office generates yearly. It's more those lower budgets, compared to rock clients, than competition that has been keeping pricing down, Trussell says. SetCo's Jim Rue agrees, noting that he's been unable to sustain price increases for the last four years. "If we did [raise prices], we'd lose more of the newer country artists with their smaller touring budgets," he says. But lower prices are also a form of investment in the future: Rue says that while management companies often take over decisions about touring technology in a bid to keep a lid on costs, when artists do maintain a piece of that decision-making process, they tend to reinforce the loyalty that all of Nashville's music industry prizes above all else in business.
However, where one part of Nashville's culture can work in the business' favor, other aspects of it may not. Set professionals say it's common to see parts of their sets made for one artists show up as pieces of other touring artists' productions, particularly if the acts share a common manager, or else a country artist will keep the same basic set for several years, making only slight modifications to it for each tour. "The management knows what their artists' tour schedules are and they can find ways to use it year-round," he says. "Years ago, artists would always want to go out each year with a new look, but the budgets aren't there for that all the time anymore." Says Trussell, "There's a lot of recycling going on out there. I've had people try to sell me their old sets. It's just part of the mentality here."
This less-than-glamorous economic landscape for set building in Nashville may be having the unintended but nonetheless salubrious effect of minimizing new competition. L.A.-based set design and construction company All Access also has offices and depots in Atlanta and New Jersey, as well as in the UK and Australia, but has not entered the Nashville market, though CEO Clive Forrester won't necessarily rule that notion out for some point in the future. "Nashville has a very good infrastructure for touring, and it's a great hub for musicians," he says, adding that it can be attractive for set companies and other touring technology providers for that reason and because of its lower operating costs. But, he adds, "It's also a very saturated market and that can cap the growth you can achieve there. And not all touring starts and ends in Nashville – there's still plenty going on out of the coasts." Finally, says Forrester, All Access' television work makes Los Angeles a key location for them.
The Nashville area also offers staging companies opportunities in other market sectors, including corporate events and especially in churches, which have continued expanding their own entertainment infrastructure for live music and theatrical performances. Those same houses of worship also help boost the bottom lines of the sound, lighting and video projection sectors, as well, but for those whose main toolset is a hammer and nails, everything that Nashville has to offer probably looks pretty good.
