From brewery-backed amphitheaters to award-winning cultural hubs, Memphis is leveraging its historic spaces and musical legacy to build a sustainable future beyond its industrial roots.
.On a muggy Memphis evening in early October, the Avett Brothers and Drive-By Truckers entertain an estimated 3,000+ people at Grind City Amphitheater. Fans clap and dance along to the Avett Brothers’ “Head Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promise.” The new venue feels like a festival campground tucked inside the city, with the Hernando de Soto Bridge in sight.
Behind the music is an older Memphis story. Grind City Brewing occupies the former Tri-State Plywood & Veneer Company property. Its 2,500-square-foot taproom opened to the public in 2020; repurposed wood and chair blueprints carry the site’s manufacturing history into its new life. The amphitheater adds a stage to that industrial reuse.
That combination offers a useful proposition for Memphis: buildings that once moved goods across America can now circulate the city’s culture. But the lasting opportunity depends on what happens between the big shows—who can afford to participate, where local musicians develop, and whether attention becomes paid work.
Grind City supplies the destination event. Crosstown Concourse supplies places to listen and create throughout the week. Stax Music Academy supplies a model for investing in the people who might eventually command those stages. Together, they suggest how Memphis could reinvent its musical inheritance to benefit the city's next chapters of its existence
A new stage, and the question of access
Grind City’s immediate ambition is practical: give touring acts a reason to stop in Memphis.
“One of our goals is to capture all these tours that are playing Little Rock, they’re playing Huntsville, they’re playing Birmingham, they’re playing New Orleans even, and they’re passing through Memphis,” former Austin City Limits-affiliated Grind City developer Nick Barbian told Action News 5 before the venue opened.
Wilco perform live at Memphis' Grind City Amphitheater, July 7, 2026 (Souled Outside Photography)
In that April 2026 interview, Barbian outlined six to eight notable shows in the first year, 12 to 15 the next, and 15 to 20 within five years.
The distinction matters in a city where a good night out and an accessible cultural life are different propositions. Census QuickFacts estimates Memphis’s 2025 population at about 610,000. Its 2020–2024 figures put median household income at $51,736 (2024 dollars) and the share of residents in poverty at 23.1 percent.
Tickets for an October date at the Grind City Amphitheater featuring Kentuckian folk-rock act Ole 60 as the headliner cost roughly $64, taxes and fees included. Add transportation, a Godhopper IPA or a marshmallow-infused Krispy Treat lager, and a food-truck dinner, and the ticket becomes only part of the cost.
Compare that to Pollstar's mid-year 2026 report, which puts the average ticket, alone, for the top 100 North American tours at $122.15.
“If we’re here, if we’re going, if we’re growing, and if we’re contributing to the Memphis music scene, that’s success for us,” Barbian said, regarding development plans.
Crosstown Concourse: A Blueprint for Everyday Musical Innovation and Adaptive Reuse
Regarding all things adaptive reuse in Memphis, it’s not staying just off of South Main Street at the boutique Hotel Pontotoc—where Elvis Presley was rumored to have lost his virginity when it was a bordello in the early 1950s—or eating corn mash with acorn squash set in a sumptuous bacon jus near the lobby of the 113-year-old Hotel Chisca at Michelin-star-contending restaurant The Lobbyist, which represents the best experience.
No, that's at Crosstown Concourse.
The former Sears retail and distribution building opened in 1927 and sat vacant until 1993; it reopened as Concourse in 2017. It now combines housing, offices, restaurants, retail, healthcare, and education with spaces to make and experience art.
Here, music can be part of an ordinary day. Crosstown Theater and the Green Room offer intimate performances. Freeform station WYXR broadcasts at 91.7 FM. At Southern Grooves, producer and engineer Matt Ross-Spang works in a recording studio built inside the former Sears cafeteria.
That last detail is Memphis-specific reuse in miniature: a room once organized around feeding a workforce now helps produce the city’s next recordings.
The Memphis Listening Lab extends the idea. Its published collection includes 35,000 45-rpm singles, 15,000 LPs, and 25,000 CDs, alongside books and musical art. The public can listen and learn for free. Its SoundRoom, designed by Jim Thompson of EgglestonWorks Audio, provides reference-quality playback across physical and digital formats.
“You can touch stuff, you can play it and enjoy it. It’s pretty incredible,” archivist Jim Cole said about the space in 2022.
The Lab also offers a production studio, free by appointment, with facilities for developing recorded music and recording podcasts. That adds a concrete bridge between appreciating a record and having tools to make something of your own.
Crosstown’s 2018 Richard H. Driehaus Foundation National Preservation Award recognizes the building’s transformation. The more useful lesson for music is what the restored building contains: opportunities for discovery, practice, production, and performance within a place people already use.
Can Blending Adaptive Reuse and Music Shape Memphis’ Future?
Across town in Soulsville, the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, Stax Music Academy, and Soulsville Charter School connect a celebrated musical past with education.
Founded in 2000, Stax Music Academy offers after-school and summer instruction rooted in the iconic funk and soul label’s legacy. Its curriculum includes music theory, performance, composition, and music business, as well as leadership, teamwork, and discipline.
The Academy says it has graduated more than 4,000 students since its founding. It also reports that every high school senior since 2008 has been accepted to a college or university, many with full scholarships.
The investment is concrete. Memphis is teaching young people how music works, how to make it, and how to imagine a future around it. The next question is whether more of those musicians can build careers locally.
Could homegrown Black acts increasingly occupy stages that draw national touring audiences? That possibility deserves attention. It requires paid bookings, professional relationships, and opportunities to progress from a classroom or small room to a larger stage.
What Memphis can build from here
Grind City and Crosstown represent complementary uses of Memphis’s built inheritance: one creates a gathering around a touring show; the other embeds music within daily life. Stax adds the investment in people that gives both models a future.
The strongest case for this approach is already visible in how these places are used. Fans have a new stage. Listeners have a free collection. Producers have working rooms. Young musicians have instruction. The next test is whether those opportunities connect—and who benefits when they do.
A crowd on a hill is a compelling scene. Memphis’s larger promise lives in the days between concerts, when somebody discovers a record, learns an arrangement, makes a recording, or gets a paid gig. That is where the remix can become a livelihood.