A study released on 20 February 2026 found that Tennessee’s five primary commercial service airports produced a total economic impact of US$28.3 billion in 2024. Runways. Terminals. Baggage handling, freight forwarding, the rental car counter. That figure has since been travelling around Calgary as the size of Nashville’s music industry, which it is not, and the distance between an airport and a guitar is the first thing anybody proposing to build Nashville North ought to measure.
Key facts
- A Tennessee statewide airport economic impact study released on 20 February 2026 puts the 2024 total economic impact of the state’s five primary commercial service airports at US$28.3 billion.
- The Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce Research Center study published in 2013 on 2012 data puts music industry output in the Nashville metropolitan area at US$9.7 billion, with US$5.5 billion in value added and 56,520 jobs.
- The West Anthem music study, published October 2020 on 2017 data, puts Calgary music output at $1.6 billion, gross domestic product at $821 million and employment at 8,435 jobs.
- The Alberta Music Action Plan, published by the Government of Alberta in April 2026, reports Alberta music output averaging $4.4 billion a year and provincial gross domestic product of $2.5 billion, on a Statistics Canada average for 2021 to 2023, supporting more than 23,000 jobs.
- The Calgary Stampede and Calgary Municipal Land Corporation published an updated 20-year Stampede Park master plan on 18 March 2026 that includes a multipurpose venue to replace the Big Four Building and a live events zone beside Scotia Place.
The comparison fails on four counts at once
Set aside the airport problem for a moment, generous as that is, and the celebrated comparison still collapses. Nashville’s genuine music figure is US$9.7 billion of output, drawn from 2012 data, published in 2013, in American dollars. The best Calgary music figure anybody has produced is $1.6 billion of output on 2017 data, in Canadian dollars. One is fourteen years old, the other is nine, they are in different currencies, they cover different geographies, and the various numbers being thrown around measure output in one case, direct revenue in another and gross domestic product in a third, three quantities that differ from one another by roughly a factor of two before anybody starts multiplying.
Nobody in this chain did anything dishonest. Somebody read a large Tennessee number, somebody else put it beside a Calgary number of unclear parentage, and a comparison was born that nobody has since had a reason to check. This is how civic ambition usually works. An aspiration arrives fully formed, a statistic is recruited to support it, and the statistic turns out to have been doing an entirely different job before it was drafted.
Alberta already publishes a better number than the one being quoted
The genuinely absurd part is that the province released a real figure five months ago and almost nobody has used it. The Alberta Music Action Plan, out in April 2026, puts provincial music output at an average of $4.4 billion a year and provincial gross domestic product at $2.5 billion, on Statistics Canada data covering 2021 to 2023, with more than 23,000 jobs attached. That is a more recent number, a more defensible number and a larger number than the one circulating, and it has the additional distinction of being about music.
An institution that reaches for a borrowed statistic while its own government has published a better one is telling you something about which document it has actually read. The plan also commits to an Alberta Music Commission, a venue directory and improved data collection, that last item being the most quietly damning entry on any list of priorities, since it concedes that the sector has been arguing its case for years without a current count of itself.
The buildings are real even where the arithmetic is not
None of this means the ambition is silly. It means the case for it has been made badly. Roughly $2 billion of city-building work is completed or under way around Stampede Park. The master plan published on 18 March 2026 contemplates a new multipurpose venue in place of the Big Four Building and a live events zone next to a $1.2 billion arena opening in 2027 with capacity up to 20,000 for concerts. Those are not slogans. They are concrete, and concrete is the part of a cultural strategy that survives a change of enthusiasm.
What Nashville actually did was less glamorous than the number implies and more useful as a model. It spent twenty-five years finishing things, counted itself honestly enough to publish a study, and then kept the study current enough that people still cite it fourteen years later, which is more than Alberta artists can currently say about the data underpinning their own industry.
So by all means build the venues, extend the Calgary film festival logic to music, and let the songwriters who are already here fill the rooms. Just retire the comparison. Calgary does not need to be measured against a Tennessee airport to be worth the money, and a city that keeps quoting somebody else’s number has not yet decided to believe its own.
