BUILDING A STRONGER NEW ORLEANS MUSIC ECONOMY
Big Easy Entertainment: Building a Stronger Music Economy Through Entrepreneurship
Essay
Building Opportunity Through Culture
Every year, New Orleans generates billions of dollars in economic activity because of its culture. Music fills hotel rooms. It attracts conventions. It powers festivals. It gives visitors a reason to choose New Orleans over anywhere else in the world. Yet one question rarely gets asked outside of the cultural community: How do the people creating that culture participate in the value it generates?
For decades, many of the proposed answers have centered on grants, nonprofits, public funding, or charitable support. Those efforts matter, and they serve an important purpose. At Big Easy Entertainment, we believe they are only part of the answer and that our culture is strongest when it creates opportunity.
That means more jobs. More direct relationships between musicians and clients. More transparency. More trust. More businesses rooted locally in New Orleans and Louisiana that compete nationally while investing locally.
That belief is the foundation for Big Easy Entertainment.
From One Band to a Larger Framework
After spending years performing at festivals, appearing on national television, playing weddings, corporate events, and clubs throughout New Orleans, one pattern became impossible to ignore for founder James Martin. New Orleans culture was creating extraordinary value for everyone around it, yet too often the musicians creating those experiences were living gig to gig, paycheck to paycheck.
What began as Big Easy Band, a single group focused on creating authentic New Orleans experiences for weddings, corporate events, and conventions, quickly revealed a larger opportunity. Clients weren’t simply looking for one great band. They were looking for trusted guidance through the city’s music community: the right artist, the right sound, the right experience, and someone who could deliver it professionally.
As Big Easy Entertainment’s work expanded beyond one band, we realized that booking entertainment was only a small part of the job. The real work lies in creating relationships that benefit everyone involved; the artist, the client, the venue, and ultimately the audience.
Local musicians should benefit when New Orleans culture is monetized. Corporate planners deserve local experts who know the city’s artists beyond an online directory. Venues deserve programming that is intentional and exciting rather than convenient. Audiences deserve memorable experiences; not background noise. The best venue programming doesn’t just fill a calendar; it builds a scene around the community.
Trust, Experience, and Infrastructure
Founder James Martin has spent twenty-five years performing, hiring musicians, leading bands, and building relationships throughout the New Orleans music community. Those years created something far more valuable than a database of performers. They built trust.
That trust allows Big Easy Entertainment to advocate for musicians while understanding the expectations of clients investing in live entertainment. It also creates opportunities that might never exist through a traditional agency relationship.
Equally important is the operational side of the business. Lead Booking Sales Associate Joel Jackson brings decades of experience in hospitality, production, programming, and event management, including work with Superfly Presents, Bonnaroo, Outside Lands, and the Contemporary Arts Center where he was formerly named Director of Performing Arts and developed a grant-supported jazz concert series in collaboration with renowned trumpeter and film composer Terence Blanchard. Together, those backgrounds allow us to understand both the artistic and operational sides of every project.
For generations, New Orleans and south Louisiana have stood at the center of American music, influencing artists around the world. What has been less consistent is the infrastructure capable of transforming that artistic influence into long-term economic opportunity. Great cultural cities don’t thrive on talent and tourism alone. They thrive because entrepreneurs, producers, venues, recording studios, promoters, programmers, and investors build ecosystems where artists can sustain careers, audiences can discover new work, and local culture becomes a lasting economic engine.
Allen Toussaint and Cosimo Matassa built internationally influential recording studios. Tipitina’s and the Maple Leaf built rooms people wanted to be in. The Jazz and Heritage Festival built an event the world travels to. Each created something audiences couldn’t wait to hear, and the economic opportunity followed artistic excellence, investment, and entrepreneurship.
That’s the kind of infrastructure we believe New Orleans needs more of today.
Every successful performance requires thoughtful artist selection, clear communication and expectations, production planning, logistics, contracts, hospitality, budgeting, and follow-through. Done well, those systems create confidence for clients while allowing musicians to focus on what they do best.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Those systems have allowed Big Easy Entertainment to grow beyond booking individual performances into programming entire venues, coordinating large-scale activations, and developing long-term partnerships with Fortune 500 companies and culture bearers alike.
During Super Bowl week, Big Easy Entertainment produced six brand activations for Nike, Coca-Cola, Verizon, Popeyes, Don Julio, and SeatGeek across five venues in three days. The project employed forty-seven Louisiana musicians, dancers, and production professionals, with every dollar of payroll remaining in the state.
We’re proud to have worked with some of the largest companies in the world but the client list isn’t what makes us excited. The fact that those projects created meaningful work for forty-seven Louisiana musicians and production professionals is.
It represents what can happen when national investment connects directly with local talent.
Intentional Venue Programming
More recently, that same philosophy has been applied through Big Easy Entertainment’s partnership with the Good Measure venue at The Barnett Hotel.
Rather than simply filling a calendar, our goal has been to build a room with its own identity; a place where audiences discover artists, musicians are excited to perform, and hospitality and culture strengthen one another. Every booking contributes to a larger picture—a mosaic of established artists, emerging talent, rich local traditions, and musical styles that reflects New Orleans itself. The objective isn’t to create another hotel bar with functional live music. It’s to help create one of the city’s most compelling listening rooms while introducing audiences to both established artists and emerging voices.
A Stronger Music Economy
When venues invest intentionally in local programming, musicians gain meaningful opportunities. When corporate clients work directly with people rooted in the city’s music community, more of that investment stays in Louisiana. When venues become “a scene” instead of simply places to grab a drink, audiences return more often and artists develop new fans. Those successes reinforce one another. Big Easy Entertainment exists to help make those connections stronger.
New Orleans has never had a shortage of talent. The challenge has always been building systems that allow that talent to flourish; not just artistically, but economically.
If we can contribute to a city where musicians earn more, venues thrive, visitors experience more authentic performances, and the economic value of our culture remains closer to home, then we’ll have accomplished something far more meaningful than building another entertainment company.
Big Easy Entertainment is one example of what happens when entrepreneurial thinking, intentional programming, and investment in local talent work together. We hope many more locally rooted businesses choose to build alongside us.
A stronger music economy doesn’t just benefit musicians.
It strengthens the entire city.
