Local craft brewer Blackstone will this week begin selling its goods in the Memphis market, where it has teamed with the Budweiser of Memphis distributorship. Among the locations that will have Blackstone on offer are Kroger and Whole Foods stores and the Flying Saucer's two Memphis-area outposts.

Davidson County’s unemployment rate in January was 7.1 percent, up from 7 percent in December 2011, according to figures the Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce Development released Thursday.

By comparison, Knox County had the state’s lowest major metropolitan rate of 6.2 percent, up from 5.9 percent in December. Hamilton County (Chattanooga) was 7.9 percent, an increase from 7.4 percent, while Shelby County (Memphis) was 9.4 percent, up from the December unemployment rate of 8.9 percent.

Williamson County offered Tennessee’ s lowest jobless rate for January at 5.6 percent. Forty state counties had unemployment rates in the 5 percent to 9.99 percent range. None has a rate of less than 5 percent.

Mississippi-based Yates Construction Company Inc. has opened a Nashville office, located at Century City near the Nashville International Airport.

The office is the company’s second in Tennessee, joining the Memphis locale.

Yates handled work on the $84 million Nissan electric vehicle battery plant in Smyrna and the $95 million Electrolux project in Memphis,

Rocky Wooten, vice president of Yates, will oversee the Nashville office. Wooten formerly led the local Balfour Beatty office, known previously as Centex Construction. Barry Scearce, who will be in charge of business development and strategy, also came from Balfour Beatty.

Yates focuses on large-scale construction projects primarily in the South.

With the results of a recently released study showing the Memphis nonprofit community suffering a “postrecession recession,” Nashville’s nonprofits, by comparison, are challenged yet stable.

“We haven’t done a study here and don’t have comparables, but if we did, we would find [the situation] would be very different here,” said Lewis Lavine, president of the Rolling Mill Hill-based Center for Nonprofit Management. “We have a very solid philanthropic base in Nashville.”

The Memphis Commercial Appeal reported Sunday the Memphis-based Alliance for Nonprofit Excellence study revealed 72 percent of the Bluff City’s nonprofit organizations saw higher service demands in 2011, and 42 percent said revenues were down. Also, 60 percent of survey respondents last year lost a major funding source, and half saw their federal funding reduced.

Rebecca Finley, communications director with the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee, said the Alliance for Nonprofit Excellence study findings are “surprising” to an extent.

“I wouldn’t have thought it’s as dramatic a loss of funding as the Commercial Appeal reported,” she said.

Finley said CFMT is considering conducting a similar survey for Nashville-area nonprofits.

“We have discussed creating an annual survey,” she said. “We’d like to get more concrete numbers.”

A quick scan of the HVS Convention, Sports & Entertainment Facilities Consulting study —conducted to determine the economic impact of the proposed National Museum of African American Music — reveals some interesting information.

HVS, based in Chicago, determined the museum projects to annually produce $9.1 million in new revenue, 133,000 visitors per year and about 117 permanent jobs, information Nashville Post reported previously.

Of note, the study compares the planned NMAAM with existing museums of all genres, including six in Nashville, and with eight of the nation’s major African-American-themed museums. But it is the study comparing NMAAM to 10 music-themed museums that is most interesting. These include the following (with approximate annual attendance listed in parentheses; revenues per facility are not listed as ticket prices vary):

• the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville (420,000 visitors)
• the American Jazz Museum, Kansas City (300,000)
• the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland (477,000)
• the Rock n Soul Museum, Memphis (50,000)
• the Experience Music Project, Seattle (511,000)
• the Musical Instrument Museum, Phoenix (200,000)
• the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, Memphis (42,500)
• the Grammy Museum, Los Angeles (64,900)
• the B.B. King Museum and the Delta Interpretive Center, Indianola, Miss. (25,000)
• the International Bluegrass Music Museum, Owensboro, Ky. (24,500)

The 10 aforementioned civic attractions average about 212,000 visitors per year. So the projected 133,000 visitors the NMAAM is expected to draw would seem reasonable.

Other key study findings include the following:

• The size of the proposed NMAAM would be well below the average size of the 10 comparable facilities.

• NMAAM is expected to charge an adult admission ticket price below those of industry-leading music museums.

• Most of the comparable African American-themed museums are located in densely populated areas. On average, eight million residents live within two hours of these comparable venues, as compared to approximately 3.4 million living within a two-hour drive of downtown Nashville. However, with the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles removed from the calculation, the average population within a two-hour drive time to the comparable music-themed museums is approximately 3.2 million.

• Many visitors to the $47.5 million NMAAM will include tourists, both national and foreign. The study notes that in recent years, foreign tourists have increasingly attended music-themed museums, particularly those in the southeastern United States.

• Music-themed museums offer a significantly greater number of weekly hours of operation than those with a focus on African American culture and history (which the NMAAM was to have been in its original iteration). 

HVS conducted a similar study, submitted in January 2010, regarding the then-planned Music City Center convention facility.