Music Spurring Uban Economies

Written by: 
Ellen Rossetti

Michael Seman ('07 M.S.) (Photo by Danny Fulgencio)A guitarist and singer, Michael Seman (’07 M.S.) has merged his love of music with an interest in urban planning.

As a musician, Seman performs in a Denton band, Shiny Around the Edges. As a research associate at UNT’s Center for Economic Development and Research, Seman has studied music scenes and the urban economy — including Denton’s. His interest in the topic was spurred while touring with a band through various cities.

“I found that the topic had rarely been studied in any meaningful or intense way in academic literature,” says Seman, who started studying music scenes and the urban economy while earning a master’s degree at UNT in applied geography with a minor in applied economics. “And now, as we are seeing in Denton and Omaha and places like Seattle and Austin, there is a lot of development that you can pinpoint to music scenes.”

In a 2010 study commissioned by the city of Denton, Seman took a deeper look at the economic and fiscal impacts of eight Denton cultural events. Among those was 35 Denton, a music festival founded with the help of alumnus Chris Flemmons. The events bring in more than 400,000 attendees and generate more than $25 million in economic activity and about $287,000 in new tax revenues, according to Seman’s research.

These events attract out-of-town visitors and help encourage highly educated and skilled young people to put down stakes in the city, he says. In addition, the events provide volunteer opportunities that offer hands-on training in sometimes stressful, “real-world” situations. The resulting skilled labor pool is attractive to businesses, says Seman, who is further studying the Denton music scene as a tool for economic development while working on his doctoral dissertation at the University of Texas at Arlington.

Events such as 35 Denton have helped put the city on the national radar, he says.

“It is branding the city as a place that’s kind of hip with a great music scene,” Seman says. “It has now become a gigantic postcard for the city.”

 

 

 

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