Right around the six-minute mark during the astonishing duet between Justin Timberlake and Chris Stapleton at the 2015 CMA Awards, you can see Nashville’s longtime tourism champion Butch Spyridon getting his groove on to the set that catapulted Stapleton’s career.

Spyridon, who is making his exit after three decades as head of the Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp., has been known to be in the right place at the right time.

“I’ve been to a lot of awards shows over the years, and don’t think I have ever jumped as enthusiastically as what I witnessed that night,” Spyridon says. “We had booked [Stapleton] to be part of our New Year’s Eve show, and we had gotten such a good price because not that many people knew who he was at the time. I knew his manager was in the audience, so I texted him and I upped the offer because I felt bad.”

After seemingly foisting Nashville barehanded onto the global stage as a travel and convention destination, Spyridon is handing the role of president and CEO of the NCVC at the end of June to Deana Ivey, who has been the NCVC’s chief marketing officer for 24 years and who was made president last year.

Spyridon grew up in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and graduated from Vanderbilt University. He’s also is a graduate of the Institute of Comparative Political and Economic Systems at Georgetown University. During his time with the NCVC, the city built the mega convention complex, Music City Center, as well as Nissan Stadium, Bridgestone Arena and the 30,000-seat soccer-specific stadium Geodis Park. He also helped snag the 2019 NFL Draft.

Good or bad, Spyridon has been great at selling Nashville. The NCVC tallied a record 9.5 million booked hotel rooms in 2022, the same year Spyridon was named to the global Top 100 Most Influential People in the Events Industry list. He knows he’s picked a plumb time to leave.

“I am thrilled that I was able to pick my own time to step back when we are still on a rise,” he says. “We got to have a role in some of the biggest and coolest things that have happened in this city, and every day I do not know what to expect. For my job and my personality, it is different every day.”

Spyridon is not going far. He’s agreed to consult for two years mainly on large projects the NCVC is developing. Not working at all, Spyridon says, is “not in his DNA.”

“We have mutually agreed that I will consult for at least two years,” Spyridon says. “The idea is that I would work on major events for the new stadium, international air service and then be a phone call away to help Deana through the transition.”

Ivey says the transition plan has been well thought out.

“One of the reasons the board offered the position to me, and the reason I accepted it, is that we wouldn’t lose momentum,” Ivey says. “We have so many great things on the horizon, so many projects in the works and with a fantastic team. We won’t miss a beat.”

Ivey adds that often people see the results of the but not the efforts. The NCVC is, of course, based in Nashville, but has satellite offices in Chicago, Atlanta, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver and Dallas.

“So, when we tell people what we do, they are always surprised,” Ivey says. “Almost everything we do is out of town because we are trying to reach our core market, so people in Nashville don’t see all of our advertising promotions, marketing, sales, everything is out of market.”

The showcase of the immortals

In April, the Metropolitan Nashville Council gave the Tennessee Titans final approval to move forward with plans to build an enclosed stadium on Nashville’s East Bank. Spyridon has been courting one of the largest sporting events in the world, contingent on the arrival of the stadium.

“We have an oral agreement with WrestleMania for 2027,” Spyridon says. But is Nashville prepared for the biggest event on the “sports entertainment” calendar?

World Wrestling Entertainment, which is merging with UFC to create a combat sports programming juggernaut, activates the largest venue within a city and takes over convention centers and arenas for multiple days. That kind of focus compels other promotions to run their own shows and events in the home market that week, drawing wrestling fans from all over the world.

“As a city, we absolutely are. My attitude is, if L.A., New Orleans and Tampa can do it, then we can do it,” Spyridon says. “We are ready for any event, the Super Bowl, the World Cup, Final Four. We have the capacity.”

And though there are now enough hotel rooms to accommodate large events, Spyridon notes Nashville hasn’t yet managed the kind of equity he knows the city needs.

“We have not been able to achieve the kind of balance where you can have the moderate, medium and the higher end,” Spyridon says. “Demand tilts everything higher. It’s good for our budget. It’s good for the city’s tax coffers. I mean, it does need to be slightly more balanced, but we are getting there.

“I have to be mindful of the kind of weekends like when Taylor Swift was here,” he continues. “There were some comments about the hotel prices, but you have to stop at some point and say, they are only charging what people are willing to pay, and we live in a free enterprise system.”

Spyridon has been credited with being the person behind getting bar owners on Broadway to not require cover fees. He wasn’t the originator of that idea long ago, but the NCVC championed the notion because it was seen as good for the city.

Nashville has undergone a remarkable transformation during Butch Spyridon’s tenure, including the addition of the Titans,  Predators and Music City Center.

-- Photo By Michelle Morrow |The Ledger

“We said when the Opryland theme park closed, literally our saying was that downtown needed to become a museum by day and a theme park at night, free music 365 days a year,” Spyridon says. “And what is critical is that the bars have stuck to that. I wish I could take credit for convincing them, but that is a differentiator across the entire world in terms of getting free entertainment in Nashville.”

NFL Draft almost didn’t happen

If the NFL had chosen Nashville one year later than it did, the spotlight-grabbing 2019 NFL Draft that brought so much attention to the city wouldn’t have happened at all because of the pandemic.

Spyridon says he was a little taken aback at the luck of nabbing the NFL Draft for that year.

“They were not moving the draft back then. We just went and pitched the idea,” he notes. “And, as I have often said, they patted us on the head and said ‘Y’all are cute, but we don’t move the draft.’”

A few years later, he says, the league had a date conflict in New York and had to take the event on the road.

“As soon as that opened up, they heard from us, and they heard from us every year after,” Spyridon says. “I said we want to bid, and they said we are only going to go to places like LA or Chicago. I told them I still wanted to bid.

“I said, ‘Use our proposal against us to leverage other cities. I’m fine with that. I want you to remember us.’

“We went and asked for it when they weren’t moving it. We went and bid when we were not invited to bid and then, when the opportunity came along, we submitted it a third time and stayed after it.”

Butch Spyridon and Deana Ivey as Spyridon is inducted into Walk of Fame.

-- Photograph Provided

Staying after it is what Spyridon does. He is competitive but also genuinely affable, which may be his secret sauce. His friend Tod Roadarmel, area director of sales marketing at Omni Hotels & Resorts, says Spyridon leaves his ego at the door.

“I worked with Butch probably 22 of my 30 years in the hospitality industry,” Roadarmel says. “I think the thing with Butch is that he treats everybody with dignity and respect no matter who you are. No matter how big your idea is, Butch always gives you his time, and some people in his position throughout the country aren’t like that.”

There are several things Spyridon is proud of during his time leading the NCVC, but he says “without hesitation” that his staff is No. 1. Then there is the city’s massive convention complex, Music City Center, which, he recalls, was a “battle from the first conversation to the ribbon-cutting.”

“Then I would say, of course, working on helping restore the Elks lodge on Jefferson Street – the former Club Baron where Jimi Hendrix, Etta James and others performed. That was very special.”

Of the successes that required buy-in from the community, Spyridon points to the NCVC’s long standing efforts to brand Nashville as Music City.

“It was almost intrinsic. It wasn’t a tangible thing, but watching it evolve and watching the out-of-town perception of Nashville change was remarkable. We are the only Music City in the world, not Music City USA, not just the Home of Country Music. Probably the art to that was getting the country music industry to embrace the idea so we weren’t diminishing them; we were trying to raise the awareness of the others.”

When asked about the genesis of Nashville’s transformation as a prime draw for tourism nationally and internationally, Spyridon says it was a likely combination of a few major elements coupled with being persistent over time, including top-level sports and a prime-time network drama.

“I’d say becoming an NFL town was part of it. We were also deeply involved in the show ‘Nashville,’ financially and working with their site and location people and the conversations about how to treat the city …. That made a big difference in the show.”

During his period consulting, Spyridon says he will court airlines to get more direct flights out of BNA to other countries. Spyridon traveled to London several times early on to meet with British Airways executives to land the British Airways flight from Nashville to London that started in 2018.

“I would love to see a flight between here and Paris, No. 1 to Charles de Gaulle Airport because it feeds to so much of the world,” he says. “Then I would say either Germany or Iceland. I would shift later to Asia, but we would need longer runways because those flights are so big they need a longer stopping distance.”

No hard feelings

Spyridon can be a polarizing figure. Not everyone is happy about his successes, and he’s been blamed for the fever dream that any night on lower Broadway has become – and traffic.

“I mean, I catch a lot of abuse, and I know, whatever, but I care about this town as much as anybody,” he says. “Nashville gave me my Vanderbilt education, my wife (he and his wife, Sunny, have four children and five grandchildren) and the career of a lifetime.

“The plan was for me to only stay five or six years, but for one city to have provided all of that is pretty special to me. I personally would say we have never done anything that wasn’t with Nashville’s best interest at heart. The city deserves this. Cities are either growing or dying.

“People will say, you know, ‘I miss the old Nashville’” Spyridon says. “I miss some of the old things too, but I love what we have acquired in terms of dining, attractions, museums, variety of genres and global stature. I think the good outweighs the reminiscing.”

For now, Spyridon says he’ll slow down; water will certainly be involved.

“I have every intention of doing a little more boating and a little more fishing. And then I can pick and choose where I want to stay busy while I still have some miles left, some tread still on my tires,” he says. “But I don’t want to work 24/7 365 days a year.”