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July 21st, 2025. Red eye home to Miami from Vegas.
Three women walked onto a stage and taught an economics lesson most business schools can’t.
132 days later: 27,000 subscribers. The most subscribed economic development channel on YouTube. Nine times larger than IEDC. More reach than the federal government.
The gatekeepers still think it’s just music.
This episode is the full story of year one. Every show. Every framework. Every lesson.
BABYMETAL in Vegas. Lovebites at the Fremont Theater. Accept on Wolf’s bus. Nicko McBrain’s parking lot with 800 people for a drummer. Obituary at Gramps. Churchill’s Pub reopening after five years dark.
Iron Maiden is economic development. Lovebites is economic development. Tampa death metal is economic development. Wacken is economic development.
No city ever became a music city through cover bands.
Cover bands are service providers. Original bands are product businesses. They create IP. They spawn studios, producers, managers, lawyers. Actual industry clusters.
Music isn’t a metaphor. It’s infrastructure.
The winners create categories. They don’t compete in them.
2026: Eddie. Nicko dinner. Sabaton. Brewtality Festival. Joan Jett. Hanabie. Lacuna Coil. Kreator. Milwaukee Metalfest. Wacken.
The claim is staked. The tribe is building.
#LetsDoIt
2025 WRAP EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
The Music Cities December 31, 2025 Runtime: 23:05
It’s July 21st, 2025, and I’m on a red eye from Las Vegas back home to Miami. Three hours earlier, I got an economics and an innovation lesson from three women who walked out on the stage at the Pearl Theater at the Palms Casino, and they did something that no business school teaches.
BABYMETAL didn’t try to out-metal the metal bands, and they didn’t try to out-pop the pop acts. They created kawaii metal, a category that didn’t exist until they did. See, winners create their own categories. They don’t compete in existing ones.
I’ve spent over 30 years in economic development watching cities and downtowns make the same mistakes over and over. Competing for the same corporate relocations. The same retail chains that just come in and extract your wealth and send it back to the corporate mothership. Using the same generic downtown playbook. The same cash-for-jobs incentives. Chasing what worked somewhere else instead of building what only they can build. Trying to be the next Austin or the next Nashville or the next Silicon Valley, instead of who you actually are.
And so somewhere flying over the desert, I started building something else. I just didn’t realize it. Especially didn’t realize what it would ultimately be.
But now, at the end of 2025, December 31st, The Music Cities has become the most subscribed economic development channel on YouTube. 27,000 plus subscribers. Far larger than IEDC, the world’s largest economic development association’s channel. And more reach than even the federal government’s own economic development channel.
Now the gatekeepers may think that this is just about music, but it’s about economic development. So here’s the story of what happened, which will show you why they are wrong.
ACT ONE: THE EXPERIMENT
We started on August 20th. Zero subscribers. No formula.
But I started with a philosophy from Rick Rubin, the music producer. You don’t create for the audience. You create for yourself. It’s that authenticity which resonates.
And so that’s why I just decided I would start talking about what I see as the connection between music and economic development and place. If it resonates with people, great. If not, I get my thoughts out. I have my voice. I have my platform. But I’m doing it for myself in the way that I want to do it.
The early episodes, the early conversations, they were experiments. Testing different frameworks.
We talked about music tribes. The difference between fans and tribes. How fans consume products. Tribes belong. It’s much more than just consumption.
Jimmy Buffett built a tribe with the Parrotheads. But he also built a billion dollar empire around a place that didn’t exist. Margaritaville. He created that desire before he built the infrastructure. Before he built the actual place. And before he built this incredible billion dollar economy around it.
But cities don’t build tribes. Most downtowns don’t build tribes. They build plans. And they build a place for customers. And that’s why they often fail.
Seeing BABYMETAL, what I saw was an innovation framework. Where these schoolgirls created a market that didn’t exist, rather than compete amongst all the noise in the broad heavy metal genre with all the other bands around the world trying to make it. They created one. They didn’t fit into one. But now they own 100% of the one.
In North Miami, Criteria Studios. Seven blocks from the office. One of the most important recording studios in American music history. Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. The Allman Brothers. This is where Duane Allman joined Eric Clapton to record Layla. Ronnie James Dio with Black Sabbath recording Heaven and Hell. Even engineering and mixing things like Judas Priest live albums.
This is all recorded right down the street here in a city that has no visible music scene. They have an unfair advantage sitting right here in plain sight in this building that nobody involved in civic life even understands or realizes what an asset they have. They have such cultural infrastructure here. That’s what it looks like. And that’s what you lose when cities don’t see it.
I also thought about talent and BlackPink. There’s this talent incubation myth. We’re actually seeing it play out right now on the pages of the Wall Street Journal with the biotech industry in Boston.
When we talked about BlackPink and this talent incubation myth, what South Korea did was they built a factory model, much like Boston built biotech centers. And it works for what it is and what it’s supposed to work for. But talent doesn’t just get found. Talent gets connected through ecosystems that make them visible. And they become visible in places where talent wants to be.
We talked about Arch Enemy. We talked about Arch Enemy in an episode about leadership change and transition. Because Arch Enemy was on their third lead singer and had gotten better and better and stronger and stronger as an organization, as a band.
But the morning we dropped that episode, about two hours later, the band and the vocalist jointly announced that they were separating. So here the lesson we were just talking about, coming out and playing out in real time. Institutional survival beyond a single individual. This is relevant to bands. This is relevant to cities, both city managers and when elected officials change. It’s relevant to any organization that thinks that it can’t survive a transition.
Every episode, every exploration that we do, is about the economic development lessons. And it’s about validating the legitimacy and the foundation of the music itself and of the genre itself.
But we were still searching for our groove. We hadn’t quite found our groove yet in terms of an audience.
ACT TWO: THE SHOWS
This brings me to the year in music that actually told the story before the data did.
October 25th in Austin, at the Circuit of the Americas amphitheater. Corrosion of Conformity. Judas Priest. Alice Cooper. Three generations on one bill. Priest is still heavier than most bands half their age.
November 1st, back to Los Angeles. The Intuit Dome. This time BABYMETAL at the scale of an arena. 18,000 people watching precision and production that most bands just do not achieve. Audience engagement. Tribal engagement. Just at scale.
Back to California again on November 14th, up to San Luis Obispo to the historic Fremont Theater. This was the night.
This was Lovebites headlining with Edge of Paradise opening. This is Tokyo and Los Angeles on the same stage. Built on the same foundation. Built on the same riffs I learned in West Texas in 1983. Iron Maiden. Judas Priest. AC/DC.
Mi-ya from Lovebites learned the same riffs from a Japanese instructional book when she was learning guitar. On a different continent. In a different decade. But the same fire. The same inspiration.
Maiden and Priest built us all. And that became relevant to the channel.
November 29th, back here in Fort Lauderdale at the Culture Room. Accept and Queensryche. Two of the bands that were big influences on me back in the 80s. Especially Accept. Because when Metal Heart came out and I heard Tchaikovsky and Beethoven woven in, along with the hard-hitting metal, that resonated with me. Because I’d started on piano learning classical music.
After the show, I ended up on Wolf Hoffman’s bus. Talking to the guitar player about 50 years of building something that lasts. Accept is also Tchaikovsky. Metal Heart opens with March Slav. Classical infrastructure embedded in heavy metal since 1985.
December 6th. Coral Springs. Rock N Roll Ribs. Nicko McBrain’s place. 16th anniversary party. The drummer from Iron Maiden building cultural infrastructure in South Florida. A restaurant that’s really a gathering place. A tribe headquarters. 800 people in a parking lot for a drummer. That’s not marketing. That’s economic development.
December 12th. Miami. Kill the Robot at Las Rosas. Obituary at Gramps. Original music. Death metal. The scene that Tampa built, still producing.
December 13th. Gramps again. Raw Brigade and Agnostic Front. And down the street, Churchill’s Pub. The CBGB of the South. Reopened after five years dark during the pandemic. 20,000 acts since 1979. World record for most acts at a single venue.
Cultural infrastructure doesn’t wait for a city to plan it. It finds a room.
Each show was a lesson. Each venue was proof. The content was living what it was teaching.
ACT THREE: THE BREAKTHROUGH
November 18th. The Lovebites episode dropped.
Here’s what I’ve learned about Japanese women-led metal.
Outsiders look at them and see costumes. Cute girls. Novelty acts. Gimmicks.
That tells you everything about the outsider. Nothing about the music.
The visual package gets them through the door. The elite-level musicianship keeps the tribe there.
Lovebites said it themselves: We’re not here to be cute. We’re here to be heavy.
Outsiders see gimmicks. Insiders see excellence.
Pretty faces are for groupies. Talent is for the tribe.
The gimmick accusation reveals the limitations of the critic, not the band. If you can’t see past the kawaii to the metal, you don’t belong in the conversation. You’re irrelevant to it.
But you see, it’s the same barrier in economic development.
City leaders look at organic music scenes and they dismiss them. Because maybe it’s not their style and they don’t understand it. Maybe they think it doesn’t look like a legitimate industry. Cities put art and culture in a different basket from economic development. They don’t see art and culture and music as foundational industries because it’s not what the playbook told them to recruit.
Tampa, Florida. Death metal. Morrisound Studios. Obituary. Morbid Angel. Death. Cannibal Corpse.
The way metal is viewed by non-metalheads, they didn’t understand that what they actually had was a production economy. And it shaped an entire genre worldwide from a Florida suburb while the planners were chasing something else. And it influenced multiple subgenres that are still evolving and producing today. All started in Tampa. In the suburbs of Tampa.
Music isn’t a metaphor. It isn’t a nice-to-have. It is absolute economic infrastructure.
So our algorithm on the channel started finding not just economic developers, but especially started finding metalheads who have been defending our music for 50 years. The Satanic Panic. The PMRC. Misrepresentations. Misunderstandings and misconceptions about who and what we are and our music.
What they found with us is a channel that armed them with intellectual ammunition.
And then we came to our Iron Maiden episode. 50-year brands don’t chase trends. Cities chase trends. Downtowns chase trends. Protect your core. Innovate at the edges. Evolve without reinventing.
We followed that up with Judas Priest. They modernized their sound. They tried to evolve. They updated their production. They never stopped being Judas Priest.
Especially when they tried to experiment with synthesizers with Turbo, and they learned their Turbo lesson that cities need to learn. Where they had to pull back because the tribe pushed back. They didn’t reinvent. They tried to evolve. And they experimented. But they stayed heavy in who they are.
Your downtown doesn’t need a rebrand. And your city doesn’t need reinvention. You just need to remember who you are and be that.
We talked about talent with BlackPink. And one of the things we realized was that talent is geographic. So we talked about the geography of metal. It’s not random. It’s not genetics. And it’s not luck. Tampa and Tokyo and Stockholm. You can’t plan your way into creativity as a city. You build your environment where it grows. And again, based on who you are.
We talked about Wacken. 85,000 person city for a week in Germany, where normally there’s a 2,000 person village. This is cultural infrastructure at city-level scale and delivery.
Our most recent exploration was the Scorpions. We had talked about geography. Hanover, Germany, where the Scorpions are from, is not London. It’s not Los Angeles. It’s not even North Miami. It’s a city with zero music infrastructure in 1965. But the Scorpions were still able to build a 60-year empire that outlasted the Cold War anyway.
And we started noticing this wasn’t just an American story, as our audience started finding us. They came from everywhere. Colombia. Argentina. Japan. Indonesia. Germany. The UK. And all over the United States.
Men and women. Every age group. Especially one of our important ones, which are the 55 to 65 year olds. Us Gen Xers. Because we’re the ones who stay and watch the whole thing. We’re the ones who understand it. We’re now the people running your cities and running your companies, making the decisions. And a lot of us are metalheads. And a lot of us appreciate that economic and intellectual validation of the staying power that our music has, as opposed to almost any other genre.
December 31st. 27,000 subscribers after less than 140 days.
International Economic Development Council has 785 subscribers on their YouTube channel. And the US Economic Development Administration has 867 on theirs.
We didn’t even need permission to do this. We just came to do it.
ACT FOUR: THE LESSONS
But what are the lessons that we find? Because that’s what this is all about. It’s about that connection of music and metal and economic development and place.
The lessons are simple.
Iron Maiden is economic development. Lovebites is economic development. The Tampa death metal scene is economic development. Wacken Germany is economic development. Churchill’s Pub and Las Rosas reopening in Miami after five years is economic development.
Cities don’t become music cities with cover bands and food trucks.
Cover bands have their place. And they’re great. They provide entertainment and income for a lot of people. But they’re service providers. They’re trading hours for dollars. There’s no intellectual property involved. It’s not an exportable product. It’s like a franchise compared to an entrepreneur and a startup venture.
That’s the original bands. They’re producing and manufacturing a product. They’re creating intellectual property. They spawn studios and managers and lawyers and merchandise operations and actual industry clusters.
Cities keep investing in consumption economies. The festivals and the activations and the weekend events. They’re ignoring the production economy that’s happening in rooms in their cities that they never see. That they have no idea what’s happening behind those doors.
27,000 or more people have found a channel now that explains why.
We didn’t create The Music Cities for economic developers. We created it about economic development and for ourselves. We create it for everyone else.
The economic developers who get it are going to enjoy it. The rest still have conferences and industry events and the echo chamber.
ACT FIVE: 2026
So where do we go from here?
Our next episode is going to be about Eddie, the Iron Maiden mascot. The mascot. The brand identity as infrastructure. 50 years of consistent iconography. How many cities can say that they’ve been able to have that consistency in brand for 50 years? I Heart New York, maybe.
In January, I’m going to have dinner with one of the top drummers from heavy metal over the last 50 years. It’ll be interesting to see what insights I get out of that conversation about the connection to place and economic development and entrepreneurship.
In February, we’ve got Sabaton at the War Memorial in Fort Lauderdale. Military history education through metal is what they bring to us. And then we’re going to sponsor and participate in the Brewtality metal festival with a lot of local original bands here in Miami.
In March, we’re going to go see Joan Jett close out the Strawberry Festival in Plant City. She and the Runaways created the women-led hard rock category. And then from there, Hanabie in Orlando at the House of Blues.
And Lacuna Coil at the Culture Room in April. And hopefully we get to have some nice conversations with those bands.
In May, Kreator at Revolution Live.
And in the summer, hoping to go to the Milwaukee Metal Fest. And then really hoping for, finally, the pilgrimage to Wacken to see it in person.
But through all of this, the Women in Metal arc runs through. From Joan Jett to Lovebites to Hanabie to Lacuna Coil to Arch Enemy at Wacken with whoever they bring in as their new singer. That’s the lineage. And it’s the infrastructure.
CLOSE
So here we are.
We’ve staked our claim. We’re building our tribe.
We built this out of BusinessFlare. Street Economics runs alongside of it. But The Music Cities is our flagship and our funnel.
The gatekeepers have credentials. But we have an audience.
27,000 in 135 days.
The economic development lesson: Winners create their own categories. They don’t compete in existing ones.
#LetsDoIt