How country music’s rise fuels Nashville’s $10B downtown tourism industry
These days it's become a rite of passage for rising country music stars to make their mark with a new bar on Nashville's Lower Broadway.
The thriving entertainment district — anchored by Lower Broadway but including the avenues adjacent to the iconic thoroughfare — is jam-packed with celebrity-branded bars and live music venues.
Some of the most popular new country music mega-stars have staked claims on the historic boulevard, from Morgan Wallen to Lainey Wilson and Luke Combs.
Tenured country stars Eric Church, Garth Brooks and Hank Williams Jr. have also joined the party.
So, when did it become essential for Nashville celebrities to put their name in lights on Broadway?
Roughly 2018. That year John Rich, Kid Rock, Jason Aldean, Dierks Bentley, Blake Shelton and Luke Bryan opened their bar-and-restaurant complexes.
The stars typically don't do it alone, though. Most are backed by powerhouse hospitality and entertainment companies and real-estate investment firms like Ryman Hospitality Partners.
"What we have to do is make sure the community, the industry, the elected officials understand the relevance of what’s going on here," said Colin Reed of Ryman Hospitality Properties. "Do the things that will help maintain the growth over time."
A $10 billion-a-year industry
Lower Broadway is at the heart of Nashville's thriving, lucrative tourism and hospitality industries. Tourists spent nearly $10 billion in Davidson County in 2022, with 27% or almost $3 billion spent on food and beverages, according to an estimate from the Tennessee Department of Tourist Development.
These big returns illustrate the rising values of downtown entertainment properties.
The cost of opening a bar on Lower Broadway has skyrocketed in recent years.
Big Plan Hospitality, the company behind the Hank Williams Jr. Boogie Bar and Jon Bon Jovi's forthcoming JBJ's, has made a significant investment. The firm paid $9.4 million in 2020 for one of the last empty lots in the area and secured a $61 million construction loan to build JBJ's, which is now under construction. The 37,000-square-foot venue at 405 Broadway will include five stories and two rooftop areas and is expected to open sometime this year.
"We wanted to shake things up in a good way," said Sydni Joseph, cofounder of Big Plan Hospitality. "It will be an ode to everything Jon Bon Jovi has done during his career."
Between the Hank Williams Jr. bar, the new-build and another restaurant concept recently opened on 12 South, Big Plan Hospitality will employ more than 300 Nashville-based service industry professionals.
The hospitality company is a subsidiary of Big Plan Holdings, a real estate development company with several other business ventures, including in music publishing and the cannabis industry. The real estate firm officially launched the hospitality subsidiary in 2023.
BPH Hospitality is rooted in a real estate strategy, as the firm owns two out of the three buildings housing their hospitality concepts.
"If we can participate in the real estate side, that's of interest to us," Joseph said.
Huge investments by major hospitality and real estate companies have resulted in the opening of several other celebrity bars.
Ben Weprin, founder of AJ Capital Partners, a Nashville-based real estate company that controls $5 billion in global real estate assets, partnered with Eric Church to open Chief's on Broadway. The pair purchased the building at 200 Broadway for $24.5 million in 2021.
The six-story bar, restaurant and live music venue opened in April.
Strategic Hospitality, led by brothers Max and Ben Goldberg, partnered with Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood to bring Friends in Low Places Bar to life on Lower Broadway. The Goldbergs star alongside the famous couple in Prime Video's "Friends in Low Places" docuseries about the bar's opening.
The hospitality company, which also owns Nashville culinary hotspots Bastion, The Catbird Seat, Locust, Henrietta Red and Kisser, previously operated Merchants, a multi-level restaurant on Broadway that is currently closed.
The Friends in Low Places property at 411 Broadway last changed hands in late 2021 for $47.9 million, according to Metro records.
TC Restaurant Group among most influential on Broadway
Among the most influential hospitality companies on the strip is TC Restaurant Group, owner of Jason Aldean's Kitchen + Rooftop Bar, Luke’s 32 Bridge Food + Drink and Miranda Lambert's Casa Rosa.
Morgan Wallen and TC Restaurant Group announced in February they would open "This Bar and Tennessee Kitchen," which is located in a new building at 107 4th Ave. N. The bar marks a huge investment for both Wallen and the restaurant group. An LLC affiliated with TC Restaurant Group paid $10.2 million for the .11-acre property in 2022, according to Metro records.
"He's been a great partner so far," vice president of operations Grant Burlingame said of Wallen. "There's no bigger celebrated artist in our mind right now and we're really excited about that."
The hospitality company is also the owner of the former FGL House, which this year will take on the brand of Lainey Wilson with a new name: Bell Bottoms Up.
When approaching the development of the new bars, Burlingame said TC takes seriously its track record of working with some of the biggest names in country music.
"I think that's really where we take a lot of responsibility in maintaining that trust with the artist," he said. "We know that our team is going to deliver a fantastic venue that appropriately involves the artist to the degree they want to be involved and make sure it's something that they are proud of."
The specific nature of the individual business relationships between TC and their country music partners is unclear. Burlingame said artists are typically involved in areas of the business they feel most passionately about, but he declined to provide further details.
"They're all a little bit different in their own right," he said.
As country music's global audience expands, can Nashville tourism keep growing with it?
For those most invested in Lower Broadway's long-term success, public support for the entertainment district and tourism industry is crucial.
Colin Reed, former CEO of Ryman Hospitality Properties and current executive chairman of the company's board of directors, said the growth of country music's popularity around the world is buoying Nashville's tourism industry.
As Lower Broadway grows, the conversation about country music in Nashville gets louder, which in turn elevates the genre's global platform, he said.
"It's like a fly wheel," Reed said. "Nashville is the epicenter of music."
Ryman Hospitality Properties owns the Ryman, the Grand Ole Opry and several locations of Blake Shelton's Ole Red.
The company has also partnered with Luke Combs to open his bar Category 10 in the former Wildhorse Saloon space off Broadway on 2nd Avenue. Reed said that Combs, much like Shelton, has a strong enough global platform and social media following to establish his own brand of country music bars.
Reed said the company's strategy to open several locations of Ole Red — in Las Vegas, Gatlinburg, Orlando and at the Nashville airport — has worked to draw more visitors into Nashville.
"From my perspective, we now have 20 bars of real relevance. This is, I think, really good for Nashville," he said. "My personal view is this will continue to attract new customers from all over the planet."
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Nashville bars: Lower Broadway, celebrity bars drive tourism growth
