It’s the beginning of a new year, and it’s time to reflect on what’s happened in the past: our accomplishments, our failures, and what we can do to improve in the upcoming year.

It’s been over two decades since OffBeat started its crusade to promote and market music, not only to locals, but to people all over the world. We took on a higher mission as well: to create recognition and appreciation for the importance of local music and musicians as an economic force, and a renewable resource that continues to enhance the economy of New Orleans and Louisiana.

I think we’ve succeeded rather well in some areas, but we have a long way to go.

I believe that the music and the musicians who create it are now a lot more familiar to us as a city and a state. Rarely a day goes by when local media doesn’t cover some story related to music (other than OffBeat, that is!).

There are a lot more media outlets than there were in 1988 when OffBeat was born, and now all of them feature something on music or musicians on a pretty regular basis. While music has always been an integral part of our culture, it’s only been within the past 20 years or so that we’re seeing more regular attention paid to it.

OffBeat can’t take complete credit for this phenomenon, but I certainly believe OffBeat had a lot to do with it. We’ve focused consistent attention on local music, and other media has followed. The continuing success of the Jazz Fest and the emergence of other festivals as musical icons has done much to draw attention to local music and musicians. Ironically, the Internet—while pretty much turning the music business on its head—has also given consumers access to so much more music from this area as well as information on the music from sources such as ours, OffBeat.com.

Frenchmen Street as a music mecca didn’t exist 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago. There was no Crescent City Blues & BBQ Fest, no Satchmo SummerFest, no Sync Up! Conference, no Basin Street Records or Piety Street Recording Studio, New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic, or Tipitina’s Foundation 20 years ago. And certainly no HBO Treme. WWOZ had yet to become the powerhouse it is today.

Music as a mainstay has grown, developed, and become iconic in the city. But what we’re still lacking is a real understanding and concerted effort by the business community to tap into our potential as a music city. We have to brand New Orleans as a music city, make sure that it’s easy to do business here, and promote it to other business leaders and visitors. If Memphis can do this, we can. If Mississippi can do it, we can. I’m looking forward to being involved in the next millennium that takes our music to another plateau in world consciousness.