Music Biz Is Sticking With Atlanta After a Rip-Roaring Event — So Where Does That Leave Nashville?

Adaptive Music’s Tony Alexander chats with soul artist MAJOR on indie marketing and branding at Music Biz in Atlanta last week (Photo: Music Biz)

Music Biz switched cities and kept most of the music business crowd. Now, Atlanta is the chosen city for 2026 as well — leaving a potentially juicy opportunity for a Nashville industry event.

Despite excessive hand-wringing over Music Biz’s switch to Atlanta from Nashville, the music business crowd showed up in relative droves last week. Attendance appeared slightly down from last year’s Nashville shindig, it should be noted, though the conference announced its intention to remain in Atlanta in 2026.

Music Biz’s city-switch is vaguely reminiscent of the Grammys of yore, when ‘Music’s Biggest Night’ ping-ponged between New York and Los Angeles before largely being anchored in Tinseltown. For Music Biz, it looks like a ‘build it in a new city and they will come’ dynamic is at work: for those bumping elbows at Music Biz at the Renaissance Atlanta Waverly, crowds were solid and dealmaking brisk — all ingredients for a solid music industry fest.

We’re still not clear on the machinations surrounding Music Biz’s shift from Nashville after several years in Music City, though organizers said they’ve always been planning to shift cities periodically. Apparently COVID complicated plans to shift cities, though now the original game plan is being implemented.

That’s the official line and Music Biz is sticking to it, though some chatter suggests a political motivation for the shift — though that’s one hot potato we’ll politely pass along. Either way, the crowd’s showed up, and the event was chock full of core music industry companies and execs.

So how does this shift the deck on the music industry conference scene?

Music Biz continues to emerge as a marquee music industry event in the US, particularly given SXSW’s waning reputation for actual business and dealmaking. Nashville already has a smattering of good industry events — most notably CRS — but given the city’s density of music celebs, songwriters, and industry folk, is there suddenly a serious opportunity for someone to make a big industry conference run in Tennessee?

Separately, Nashville’s sudden importance in the music industry’s critical lobbying agenda can’t be overstated, particularly given the huge shakeup at the U.S. Copyright Office. Suddenly, the music industry is waffling in Washington against the tech bros — can Nashville and its more red-leaning artists potentially turn things around on the AI and copyright protection fronts?

Both were undoubtedly top topics at Music Biz, where a who’s who of ‘the biz’ was bumping around.

And with that, here just a quick canvass of the companies on deck this year:

Apple Music, Spotify, Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group, DiMA, ASCAP, A2IM, RIAA, SONA, The Orchard, OpenPlay, Empire Publishing, Rhymesayers Entertainment, Concord Music, CD Baby, Downtown Music Publishing, Downtown Music Publishing, Columbia College Chicago, DDEX, The MLC, AllTrack, Sound Credit, Encore Music Tech Solutions, MusicWatch, Luminate, New West Records, Music Canada, Criminal Records, Elektra Music Group, The Vinyl Alliance, Stem Disintermedia, Lark42, Sureel AI, University of North Texas, Drexel University, Music Business Toolbox, 24/7 Artists….

… and so forth.

See ya’ll next year! — in Atlanta, that is.

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