MEM at 10

Way back in 2017 when J.D. Reager first reported on Music Export Memphis (MEM) for the Flyer, the little nonprofit bent on taking Memphis music to the world was only a year old. Yet even then, a sense of momentum was building. Founder and executive director Elizabeth Cawein told Reager, “My vision was to build a system that benefits musicians and also drives results for the business and tourism communities,” and the simplicity and focus of what she imagined was making people nod in agreement from the start. It was almost as if, amid a jumble of bands, studio owners, promoters, and city initiatives that had puzzled for decades over how to make Memphis “the next Seattle” or “the next Austin,” Cawein had simply held up a lens, gathering the light onto what mattered most: the bands. “I’m passionate about this city and our musicians,” she told Reager. “I’m passionate about telling their story.”

Now, 10 years into the MEM journey, that sentiment still drives both Cawein and the nonprofit. As she puts it today, “We’re definitely incredibly artist-focused, that’s for sure.”

That’s one reason the Birthday Bash that MEM’s throwing — all afternoon at W.C. Handy Park on Saturday, July 25th — will likely draw a sprawling community of well-wishers, from bands and artists who have benefited from MEM’s assistance to grateful fans on the other side of the coin. As a nonprofit known for putting bands first, MEM will certainly walk the walk with this free concert of some of the city’s finest musos: Black Cream, Keia Johnson, Deonna Sirod, Nick Black, Raneem Imam, Optic Sink, and Hi Rhythm featuring Jerome Chism and Lina Beach. And they will in turn draw their various loyal followings, which are growing with MEM’s help, and so goes the self-reinforcing cycle that has built a palpable updraft for the local music scene in recent years. 

MEM has been part of that every step of the way, having paid out, by Cawein’s reckoning, over $1 million to Memphis bands and artists over its first decade, with $272,050 awarded in tour grants, and $115,960 awarded in merch grants; the latter, requiring artists to share merch costs and use local vendors, led to $286,901 spent with Memphis-based businesses on grant-funded merch projects. That’s quite a hefty impact for the city at large and the many bands who have benefited.

What MEM Gets Right

It hasn’t always been thus when agencies and authorities have tried to boost the local music economy. Preston Lauterbach, writing for the Flyer in 2007, revealed the degree to which such efforts were mired in a malaise at the time. Funding had just diminished as “the Shelby County Board of Commissioners voted down a resolution to transfer $50,000 to the music commission for the purpose — in classic music-commission-style vagueness — of ‘enhancing the music industry,’” he wrote. “With government support waning and a suspicious public looking on, the embattled Memphis and Shelby County Music Commission is at a crossroads.”

Not long after Lauterbach’s story, Cawein, after graduate studies in clarinet and voice, had decided that she “enjoyed making music with people, but it was clear to me I wasn’t ever going to be a professional musician. I’m not a star, and that’s fine. I wanted to write about it.” That in turn led her back home. “I moved back and got the job at the Memphis Music Foundation [the Memphis Music Commission’s fundraising arm], which was this immediate introduction to all these people that were making music then, like Star and Micey. I remember seeing them at the Hi-Tone, and tons of other bands too. It was really cool.”

It’s significant that the story of MEM begins with her immersion in the music scene. John Doyle, executive director of the Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum and the Memphis Music Hall of Fame, says, “I first knew Elizabeth through her marketing firm at the time, Signal Flow PR, and she was doing a lot of pro bono work for musicians and things like that, so she was very in tune with the music community.”

As Cawein mulled over the then-current state of music in Memphis, and her newfound love of local bands, an idea began to germinate. “I crystallized on the idea of Music Export Memphis, and actually wrote the name out for the first time, during a panel on international export offices at AmericanaFest in 2014,” she recalls. “I was listening to these people from the U.K., Canada, Germany, wherever else, talk about their work, and it was just like this light bulb went off. I was just like, ‘Okay, so this is scalable, you are just helping artists who live where you live do what they do in other places, understanding that that has a benefit for where you live.’ I was like, this is simple math, we can do this, and I felt like I could really see clearly at the center of that Venn diagram, right, where this benefits the artist and it benefits the city, you know?”

From there, Cawein found allies in Amy Daniels and the late Phil Trenary at the Greater Memphis Chamber, and soon set her sights on the 2016 AmericanaFest. “In 2014, I came up with the idea at AmericanaFest, then started having meetings in 2015, and then in 2016 we did our very first event there, the Memphis Picnic, which was like a day-long party, and we had a transportation sponsorship that year too, so there was a bus that drove up from Memphis with a bunch of the artists. It was really fun.”

And, as Cawein told Reager in 2017, “We got some phenomenal earned media at AmericanaFest … Our artists were covered in No Depression, Paste, American Songwriter, and more.” MEM was making waves.

Dollars and Sense

As it turned out, Cawein’s personal epiphanies in 2014 anticipated a whole new way of thinking about the ties between music and place gaining popularity at the time, loosely constituting the “music cities” movement, often involving the London-based Sound Diplomacy consultancy, which has led to conferences on that theme being sponsored across the country (including one in 2017 that Cawein helped to bring to Memphis). This new perspective also helped her narrow her focus more specifically on living, working musicians of Memphis, in spite of the sometimes overwhelming, if venerable, musical legacy of Memphis’ past. 

“I went to the Music Cities Convention in Washington, D.C., in 2015 — the very first one in the U.S. — and it was this space for me to just sit and hear from all these different people in different communities who were working on cool music-related projects,” Cawein recalls. “Now, the conversation that we were always up against when I was at the Music Foundation was ‘the legacy versus contemporary music.’ And I was like, okay, I’ve been at this two-day conference with all these people from across the world talking about music in their cities, and no one’s talking about that, and it doesn’t seem like that’s real. I think it’s a red herring. I think it’s a thing that we’re stuck on, and it’s keeping us from actually coming up with solutions to what the challenges are. I really felt like we had to move away from that.”

And part of that, she imagined, was thinking on the scale of how bands finance themselves, rather than being fixated on huge swaths of the music market sector at a time. That also conveniently dovetailed with MEM’s paltry coffers in the early years. “When you know that we started with $10,000 in seed money from Memphis Brands, that was it, and now we are well into the six figures awarded just since 2018, I think that speaks volumes, just knowing that we started with such a small amount,” says Cawein.

“To me, that tells a story. It’s what I have said from the beginning, and I still say it to people: We can move mountains with a small amount of money. Please don’t get me wrong, it would be really great if we were more resourced and could do more. Any arts organization in our city would say that, but what’s also true is, I think that we have built some really smart ways to think about grants as subsidies to working musicians, understanding that what we do is never going to cover 100 percent of your costs, but we are going to give you 40 percent of the money you’re going to spend on merch, and it makes it more possible for you to buy the merch in the first place, and then you’re going to make more money per item when you actually sell them, right? And all that money is then going into a Memphis business, so then we also have that number, here’s how much our artists have actually spent with Memphis-based businesses.”

Beyond that, MEM has helped along the city’s “night economy,” that bustling stew of clubs, concerts, bands, and buskers that serves to create our local “nightlife,” even as it helps bands promote themselves elsewhere. It’s a paradox that MEM seems to embrace: As you support touring bands “exporting” their sound, you also support the economy in which they’re embedded back at home.

That’s been recognized by Mayor Paul Young’s administration more than any city government before, and Cawein is here for it. “I’m encouraged by everything that has happened with DeMarcus Suggs and the Office of Creative and Cultural Economy since Mayor Young took office. It’s a massive, massive step forward to have that kind of voice and leadership and strategy happening at the highest level,” she says. “I mean, something that I definitely have learned through years of getting to work with other cities and seeing how other communities are doing music ecosystem-related work is that there is always going to be a ceiling to what you can accomplish if there isn’t support from City Hall. Maybe the Chamber is involved, and that’s great, that’s essential, and maybe tourism is involved, and that’s also great and essential, but until city government says this is important, there’s just a limit to what you can accomplish.”

The city signaled its commitment to the music ecosystem early on, when it revealed its Comprehensive Music Strategy and Economic Impact Study in 2025, outlining a $721.6 million industry and a path for it to grow even more. Things are now in place for some serious synergy in the local music scene. And now, a decade later, how does Memphis look to those Music City Conventions?

“Music Export Memphis is, in fact, one of their case study examples,” Cawein says, “of how you can support artists directly in a community. Plenty of the cities that they work with are interested in helping their artists export, and so we’re a case study that they’re pointing to all the time.”

Send Them Out Into the World

And yet, while Cawein and MEM have always had one eye on the city’s big picture, they’ve nonetheless taken their original focus on the experiences of bands to heart. Their goal: Send them out into the world. And MEM’s reach has come a long way since that first Memphis Picnic three hours down the road at AmericanaFest. A decade later, they’ve sent Memphis artists to international destinations, as with their songwriters’ exchange program with the city of Liverpool (U.K.) called “Memphis to the Mersey,” or the Cali Blues & Folk Festival in Cali, Colombia, or Toronto’s NXNE conference, or the upcoming English Folk Expo next March in Manchester, U.K. Then there are the regular Memphis Picnics at SXSW in Austin and what’s now the Pure Memphis Happy Hour at AmericanaFest, not to mention showcases at the A3C Festival and Conference in Atlanta and the Folk Alliance International conferences in Kansas City, New Orleans, and beyond. 

The impact on local artists making these trips has been profound. In one MEM annual report, Talibah Safiya writes of her trip to Colombia, “Thank you so much Music Export Memphis for helping to facilitate this trip. I had the time of my life taking South Memphis to South America!”

The artists who have been assisted through MEM are legion, partly because the organization presents its most comprehensive awards to three artists at a time. The Ambassador Access program, launched in 2022, over-invests in artists who’ve traditionally been under-resourced to create pathways to sustainable touring careers. Every year, a group of three ambassadors takes part in group workshops on topics from audience development to tour management to personal finances, receives one-on-one coaching in marketing and booking, tours in multiple states, and is matched with mentors aligned with their career goals. Then, they walk away from the program having built a proposal for their $5,000 unrestricted grant.

Others receive the aforementioned merch grants, which have grown to include short-run vinyl releases by Memphis Record Pressing. Or, as I know from my time with James & the Ultrasounds, a simple tour subsidy from MEM can facilitate staying in cheap hostels instead of sleeping on the floors of generous fans during, say, those particularly cold winters in Northern Europe. At the scale of a band or a solo artist, the smallest subsidy makes all the difference. 

There’s plenty more available at MEM, and the nonprofit’s offerings are always evolving. What was called the Tambourine Bash for years, wherein Cawein threw together impromptu hybrid bands by mixing and matching MEM artists, all performing at the Overton Park Shell, has now evolved into the Co-Lab, a similar fundraising concert that, come October 16th, will carry on the tradition of “bring[ing] together diverse groups of Memphis musicians in genre-bending collaborative sets, creating a one-of-a-kind night of live music that raises the creative ceiling in our music scene and sparks new artistic partnerships.”

MEM has grown over the years, and by now Cawein has a team assisting her (as well as a board that, full disclosure, includes the CEO of Contemporary Media, Anna Traverse), but it’s striking how much of the organization’s success comes down to her drive and passion for music. John Doyle may put it best when he says Cawein is chasing “her vision of a city where musicians can earn a living, where musicians can progress in a career and promote the city in doing so. And to do that, she hustles. It’s interesting, because a lot of people talk about hustling, but I’ve never heard Elizabeth brag about it.” 

Visit musicexportmemphis.org for more information.