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Amidst the thousands of articles, videos, podcasts and other media about Taylor Swift this past year –  her boyfriend, her best friends, or whether she tips when she dines out – the nugget I’ve been thinking about most is her decision to move to Nashville when she was just 13. I’ve mulled this factoid not just because I’m impressed by Swift’s pre-teen self-confidence, but because this kind of move to a city of higher opportunity has fallen out of favor lately. 

Here’s how Swift describes it: 

I decided to move to Nashville when I was about 10 years old. I was obsessed with watching biography TV shows about Faith Hill and Shania Twain, and I noticed that both of them went to Nashville to start their careers. From that point on, I began relentlessly nagging, begging, and pleading with my parents to take me on a trip there. When I was 11, my mom took my brother and me to Nashville on spring break and we drove up and down Music Row. She would wait in the car as I scampered into record labels one by one, handing my demo CD to the receptionists. I remember thinking it was so odd and wonderful that all of these important record labels were all on one street, most of them in small buildings and old houses. I remember being charmed by how kind people were to strangers and newcomers like us. We took more and more trips to Nashville as time went by, and when at 13, I was offered a development deal by a major record label, my parents gave in and we moved from Pennsylvania.

It is worth noting that Swift already had a deal with RCA Records before she moved, so it’s not like Nashville entirely started her career. But if you go down a rabbit hole and read about that period after she moved, she became firmly embedded in the music industry in the Nashville music scene shortly after she moved. She worked with a handful of local veteran songwriters, which she never could have done in Pennsylvania. And then when she was 14 in 2004, she performed in a local industry showcase where she was spotted by a music executive who signed her as the first artist to his new music label. (That music executive had also moved to Nashville when he was just 16 at the time.) 

Indeed, 20 years ago if you wanted to make a career in country music, you moved to Nashville because of what we policy wonks call “agglomeration benefits.” These are the advantages that occur when an industry co-locates in a region and shares talent pools, which encourages innovation and healthy competition, which drives productivity and higher wages. This phenomenon has made Los Angeles the center of the entertainment industry, New York the center of finance, Silicon Valley the center of tech, and so on.

But the idea of moving to a city to further your career has lost its luster in recent years. While fully remote work remains quite rare (even rarer than we thought), many people’s side gigs are fully remote, whether writing a Substack at night from a home computer or using a home kitchen to launch a hot sauce company. Many people are now seeing you can launch your content or product online and skip the move to a bigger city to get attention for your work.

At the same time, many industries that once were centralized, are increasingly dispersed. Austin, Miami, Seattle, or Atlanta may not have the amount of venture capital of San Francisco, but these cities are increasingly where regular tech entrepreneurs live and are launching companies.

Finally, the cost of living in many cities that dominate industries (even Nashville) has become too much for many people trying to break through.

For these reasons, regular moves are near all-time lows. And moves, like Taylor Swift’s, to access more opportunity would have to be even rarer than that.

If the mantra of the 2010s was that there was a geography of jobs, is the mantra of the 2020s that location no longer matters? Is staying put now the sensible thing to do? Or are there enough benefits to moving to a higher opportunity city that it’s still worth the cost?

Below the paywall, I’ll explore these options, linking to new research, and give my own final analysis.

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