MUSIC CITY MAKES PLAY

City targeting Atlanta, New Orleans, Orlando

With its sparkling new $623 million convention center, Nashville is ready to take on its peer cities for mid-size conference trade.

NASHVILLE — Reba McEntire serenades shoppers at the downtown Walgreens. Tim McGraw’s twang emanates from metal-covered speakers at busy intersections. Honky-tonk bar bands and sidewalk buskers compete for the attention of passers-by along Broadway.

Nashville is making a lot of noise these days, but nowhere is the buzz greater than at the Music City Center convention hall, which opened last month. Shaped, in part, like a guitar and with — you guessed it — country music wafting through the 1. 2 million- squarefoot building, the center aims to play against the big boys for convention business.

“As affectionately as I can say it, my intent is to kick their (expletive),” Butch Spyridon, CEO of the Nashville Convention and Visitors Corp., said of Atlanta, a popular convention site.

“Somebody is going to lose; somebody is going to get hurt. I would think we would be more competitive than they might want to acknowledge.”

The $623 million Music City Center is like the lat- est country music industry heartthrob who coyly promises fun. Nashville targets well- established Atlanta, New Orleans and Orlando, Fla. — the major Southeastern convention destinations — for the medium-sized conferences that increasingly are paying the bills.

Industry experts in Atlanta and beyond don’t expect the Music City Center to unduly harm Atlanta’s $11 billion convention and tourism business. Mark Vaughan, chief sales officer for the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau, said Nashville’s “shiny new penny” can’t make up for Atlanta’s advantages in hotel rooms, direct flights and recreational amenities.

But the entire convention industry is facing the music these days. Conven-

tion attendance has been basically flat since before the recession.

And, between 2000 and 2011, cities have added 35 percent more convention space. San Diego, Los Angeles, Seattle and Cleveland are either expanding or planning to expand their convention centers.

“You have all these cities doubling and tripling down on their convention center bets,” said Heywood Sanders, a Texas professor whose book “Convention Center Follies” will be published later this year. “And it all turns out to be an arms race where nobody wins.”

And the competition gets more heated every year. Cities dole out millions of dollars in incentives to lure conventions. Atlanta, for example, recently got legislative approval to boost its convention recruitment fund by $6 million.

Nashville has parlayed its country music cachet into a bustling tourism industry and New South prominence. The Grand Ole Opry, the Ryman Auditorium, the Country Music Hall of Fame and the honky-tonks draw hundreds of thousands of visitors annually.

The city has added professional football and hockey teams, new hotels, restaurants and condos to its downtown mix.

It even has a prime-time TV show named after it, something Charlotte, N.C., and other Atlanta wannabes can’t claim.

“Country music is great for Nashville and enormously popular, but I don’t think Nashville is just country music,” said the city’s mayor, Karl Dean, a collage of Neil Young photos on his office wall.

“The Kings of Leon, the Black Keys and Jack White live here. We’ve also got opera and huge ties to bluegrass and gospel. We’ve got everything.”

The Music City Center, undulating over six city blocks, is three times the size of the city’s old meeting hall. It offers 350,000 square feet of exhibit space — one third the amount in Atlanta. Conventions, though, attract fewer people these days and the Music center’s 60 breakout rooms serve as a potent lure.

A songwriter’s hall of fame, and the curvedwood main ballroom that evokes the innards of an acoustic guitar, add to the center’s music-themed allure.

“This is a pretty place to come to,” said D.B. Gwin, an Arkansas retiree visiting Nashville last week. “Traffic is not near as bad as Atlanta and anybody can find something to do. I’d rather come here than Atlanta.”

Gwin had just toured the Music Hall of Fame, which is undergoing a $100 million expansion, across the street from the convention center. The hall will soon connect to a $250 million, under-construction Omni hotel.

Spyridon, with the visitors’ association, touts Nashville’s “drivability,” or the proximity to Midwestern and Eastern convention-goers. The Music City Center allows Nashville to compete for three out of every four conventions, he adds. And, by par- laying the city’s renown as a health-care capital, the more lucrative medical association conventions have placed Nashville on their radar.

The American Heart Association, for example, will bring 5,000 conferees to town in early 2015. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics will bring 12,000 people to Nashville in 2015, a year after its Atlanta conference.

“We’re now playing in a league with Atlanta. We couldn’t before,” said Charles Starks, the music center’s CEO. “So for a show that wants to be in the Southeast every three years, they’ve got a new opportunity to explore.”