In July, Marcella Simien and her husband packed up their SUV and headed to New Orleans for a gig at Tipitina’s, a bucket-list performance for the Lafayette native.
The show was a homecoming of sorts for Marcella, the daughter of zydeco legend Terrance Simien. But for her return, she was repping Memphis, as a paid brand ambassador for the birthplace of rock and roll.
A Memphis-based nonprofit, Music Export Memphis, kicked in $750 to help her gas up the truck and hit five shows outside of the city.
“It’s not a lot, but for a tour it is,” says Simien. “The tour grant helps me with gas, or maybe lodging, if one of those shows doesn’t provide a hotel or something, so it does add up.”
Launched in 2018, Music Export has dished out hundreds of thousands of dollars to Memphis touring artists through its menu of programs, on the principle that putting more musicians on the road will pay off back at home. In 2024 alone, the nonprofit gave $170,000 to 95 Memphis area musicians.
Musicians across the country are struggling with higher cost and stifled or declining income. The problem has been acute for Lafayette-area musicians as stages that cater to Cajun, zydeco and other roots genres have disappeared. Median touring income for Lafayette musicians is $300 a gig, according to the 2025 Lafayette Music Census, squeezing the margins of one of Acadiana’s best cultural exports.
Memphis is a sister in the struggle. But it’s found some success in treating music as an export in earnest, a bedrock premise that drives Music Export’s strategy.
“It’s an export that you get to keep,” says Music Export founder and executive director Elizabeth Cawein. “You send it out, and it can drive dividends for your city or your area — your region. But that person, those people, they can still live in your community.”
Music Export grants and programs range from a hundred bucks to pay for t-shirts and other swag, to a $5,000 grant tied to a year-long business development intensive. Anyone who hits the road with a Mexport grant in their pocket is a brand ambassador.
The most basic stipulations are simple: Artists need to 1) be from the Memphis area and 2) be willing to promote Memphis through an Instagram post or some other public display of city pride. For touring stipends, artists need five or more dates booked at least 150 miles outside of Memphis. That’s it, as application requirements go. Music Export isn’t in the business of gatekeeping.
“If you have managed to get five venues to book you outside of this radius…I don’t need to make a creative judgment about where your music is,” says Cawein. “You have shown me that you have done the work and that you’re ready to do that.”
Beyond the cash, Music Export invests time and effort into professionalizing the region’s talent pool. Artists can sign up for workshops and get trained on basic business management practices. Music Export organizes showcases for industry professionals and books lineups at music festivals around the country. In short, they help artists get opportunities, get paid and learn to advance their entrepreneurial skillsets.
Business acumen doesn’t always come naturally for musicians, even artists like Simien, who grew up in a music industry family — her mother Cynthia is a longtime talent manager and was the first woman trustee elected to the Memphis chapter of the Recording Academy.
“It took me years to really get my head in the game as a business owner, to think of myself as a business owner,” she says. “It was totally the opposite from the creative thing that drew me to want to be an art maker and an artist — learning how to empower yourself as a business person.”
Access to Music Export’s programs has opened international doors for Simien, both as a performer and cultural educator. She performed at Folk Alliance International this year in Montréal, Canada, joined a 10-day cultural exchange program in Colombia, and has applied for a folk expo in London, England, next year.
Music Export has also put Marcella to work on behalf of other ambassadors in the program, coaching them on budgeting and tour management. That was a paid gig, too.
The broader philosophy underpinning Cawein’s work is the conviction that while the arts have commercial value, they nevertheless need community support to thrive. A basic benchmark for success is whether musicians in a community can keep their heads above water, even if they have to work other jobs. Sustainability is going to look different from artist to artist.
“It’s a financial thing, but are you killing yourself? Working seven days a week? Do you have a savings account? There’s other elements to sustainability that we have to think about to really create an environment that’s friendly to our musicians to whom we owe so much, particularly in a city like Memphis,” she says.
Cawein spent years as a music publicist before she landed on the Music Export concept. She watched artists toil on the road and realized how far a little bit of help could go.
An academic, she spent time researching how cultural export offices worked for international cities. And it clicked: Why not treat music as an export in its own right, especially for a storied music city like Memphis?
Despite being home to American musical landmarks like Graceland and Sun Records, Memphis has struggled in recent years, both in terms of the economic viability of its musicians and the city’s profile overall. Cawein says bittersweet departures of local musicians became a troubling routine about a decade ago, while she worked with another nonprofit targeting the city’s music economy.
And things remain touch and go, even as resources like Music Export have spun up.
Nearly 60% of the city’s musicians and related professionals told surveyors they may leave the city, according to a report commissioned by Memphis city government and the chamber of commerce. Full-time musicians were nearly unanimous in reporting that their incomes couldn’t cover their basic cost of living.
In contrast to Lafayette, publishing and the recording industry comprise a larger slice of the Memphis music economy. But musicians nevertheless rate poorly what Memphis provides in terms of access to professional services like management, talent buying, publicity and publishing.
And the economic impact of the industry writ large has been on the decline, dropping nearly 30% between 2017 and 2021, with Covid erasing small gains made ahead of 2019.
“Memphis is struggling, too,” says Simien, noting the demise of Railgarten, a popular venue that closed this spring among a handful of others.
Against that backdrop, Music Export is indeed swimming upstream. But Covid itself accelerated the program rapidly as Cawein’s outfit proved a capable vehicle for delivering financial aid to musicians during the lockdown.
Virtually overnight, the nonprofit capitalized from $68,000 in 2019 to $376,000 in 2020. And that level sustained and grew, even as the pandemic era and its froth of federal and philanthropic support subsided. Today, its operating budget is just under $500,000, and Cawein is able to run the program full-time with one employee.
Well over 60% of the funds raised are disbursed, Cawein says. The program draws dollars from corporate sponsors, private foundations and a healthy chunk (22%) from individual donors, a point of pride for Cawein.
The impact is not easy to measure quantitatively, apart from the dollars spent out of the merch fund. Since 2021, the fund has paid out $90,000 to musicians, who in turn spent their grants to buy t-shirts, bumper stickers, and press CDs and records. Local suppliers reported $235,000 in gross sales from those transactions.
For Cawein, the biggest indicator of success is the number of artists she’s got on the road and repping Memphis. Today, her program supports a bench of 80 or more artists on the road and a growing influx of applications for its services.
Fifteen years ago, when she worked for the now-defunct Memphis Music Foundation, the Memphis touring circuit was comparatively scarce, she says, and folks were transplanting to bigger markets like Nashville and Atlanta regularly. She says that’s changed.
“I mean, we are just not seeing the outflow that we saw. And instead we’re seeing more people moving to the city. I’m aware of more transplants,” she notes, stipulating to the anecdotal nature of her evidence. “So there are some things about that that I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to measure in a satisfying way.” Still, she feels confident that more musicians are staying in town because the funds make touring more accessible.
Ultimately, retention is what Music Export is all about. The fundamental logic of treating music as an export was foreign to the major supporters she pitched to, who wondered why they should spend money to send musicians out of the city.
“Part of it was just convincing people that, A, I’m not getting people to leave the city. This is a part of career development that is happening, that needs to happen. And B, if we can create these supports here, we can actually keep them,” she says.
For the time being, MEM is certainly making it a bit easier for Marcella Simien to stay in Memphis. It’s been her home for a decade now. She and her husband bought a house there and own a sound production company. Earlier this year, she dropped a new record and sold out a 400-seat theater in Memphis for its release.
But she’s still making her living on the road, hitting a regional circuit — a free outdoor concert in Carbondale, Illinois, a performing arts center in Paducah, Kentucky.
And when the tour days are up, she can head back to Memphis, to the sound business, to a piano gig around the corner, to the place where she’s built a career and made a home.
“I definitely feel supported and held by the community. I can go to the music writers and say: Hey, I’ve got this show coming up. Can you give me some ink? I have great relationships with the radio people there, and I just feel they welcomed me in such a meaningful way,” she says. “I had never felt that anywhere.”