Berry Hill’s music scene is almost entirely invisible to the public, and that is exactly how the people who work there prefer it. This is not a performance neighborhood. There are no music venues worth visiting on a Saturday night. The music happening in Berry Hill is happening behind studio doors, in mixing rooms, in producer sessions that might run until 2 a.m., but none of it surfaces as live entertainment.
The working studio ecosystem
With roughly 40 recording studios and music publishers operating in under a square mile, Berry Hill functions as a production hub rather than a performance destination. East Iris Studios, operated by Universal Music Group on East Iris Drive, runs six commercially bookable rooms on a campus that previously housed the Nashville House of Blues studios. Kesha recorded her GRAMMY-nominated album Rainbow here. Alison Krauss and Union Station recorded Paper Airplane here, which won Best Bluegrass Album at the 54th Grammy Awards. These are not stories that happen at a honky-tonk.
The smaller studios handle the day-to-day volume: demo sessions, album tracks, vocal overdubs, mixing work, publishing demos. A songwriter who has a co-writing session in the morning might move to a nearby studio for an afternoon tracking session and never leave the half-mile radius that is Berry Hill.
What is changing
The $250 million Universal Music Group campus planned for Berry Hill includes the first scoring stage in the central United States, a room designed specifically for recording orchestral scores to films and television. This infrastructure does not currently exist in Nashville, which means that any large-scale film scoring project requiring live orchestra travels to Los Angeles or New York. When (and if) the Berry Hill scoring stage opens, it will attract a category of work that Nashville has historically lost.
The broader campus also includes education facilities designed to connect university-level music programs, potentially including Middle Tennessee State University, with working industry professionals on-site. This model, common in Los Angeles, is new territory for Nashville.
What Berry Hill is not
There is no live music circuit in Berry Hill. No songwriter round, no open mic, no venue worth adding to your weekend itinerary. Gold Pacific Studios, which opened in late 2024, has announced plans for a music venue component, but that project is still developing. For now, Berry Hill’s relationship with music is entirely professional rather than experiential.
If you want to hear Nashville’s music, go to the Station Inn in The Gulch, the Bluebird Cafe in Green Hills, or Robert’s Western World on Broadway. Berry Hill is where the music gets made before it gets to those places.
Sources
- Grammy.com, Nashville House of Blues Studios acquired by Universal
- Nashville Post, Berry Hill $250M campus, December 2023
- Billboard, UMG Nashville music studio education complex, December 2023
- American Songwriter, UMG entertainment education campus announcement, December 2023
- East Iris Studios, eastirisstudios.com