I’m Chris Jackson, and I’ve been putting on events in Nashville since 1995. I was born here. I grew up here. And through Nashville Audio Visual, I’ve loaded gear into just about every ballroom, rooftop, barn, honky-tonk, garden, and hotel this city has — from downtown high-rises to estates out in Williamson County. After thirty years, I don’t need a map of Music City. I’ve got one in my head.
The Question I Kept Getting Asked
It happened over and over. The show would wrap, the lights would come down, and someone would pull me aside — a bride, a corporate planner, a buddy of a buddy throwing a 50th birthday — and ask me the same thing: “Chris, where should I have my next event?”
I could always rattle off ten spots from memory, because I’d worked them all. I knew which ballroom had the low ceilings, which rooftop fit a stage, which room downtown looked incredible but was a nightmare to load into, and which hidden gem in East Nashville nobody had heard of yet. So I’d give them my list — and then, to be helpful, I’d tell them to “just Google it” for photos and details.
And Every Time, I Cringed
Because I knew what they’d find. The top ten results were always the same: faceless national directory sites run by companies that have never set foot in Nashville. Thin listings. Stale photos from a decade ago. Venues that closed years back still sitting there live. Rooms that have been booked solid every weekend since I can remember — nowhere to be found. These sites didn’t know The Gulch from Germantown, Music Row from Midtown. They were getting my city wrong, and charging venue owners to be listed wrong.
It drove me nuts. Nashville is a one-of-a-kind event town, and it was being represented online like just another zip code on a copy-paste template built for forty other cities.
My Not-So-Secret Second Skill
Here’s the part most people who know me from a show call don’t know: when I’m not behind the console, I write code. It started years ago as a way to build little tools for the shop, and somewhere along the line it turned into a genuine second craft — a quiet little secret life behind the front-of-house desk. I’m an AV guy who also happens to build software.
So one night, staring at yet another garbage venue listing for a room I’d personally worked a dozen times, it hit me: I know this city better than any of these national sites ever will. Why am I waiting around for someone else to fix this? So I stopped waiting. I built it myself.
What I Built
Months of nights and weekends later, NashvilleVenueRentals.com went live: a directory of 665+ curated venues across five Middle Tennessee counties — Davidson, Williamson, Rutherford, Sumner, and Wilson. That’s 419 in Nashville, 81 in Franklin, 64 in Hendersonville, 53 in Lebanon, 48 in Murfreesboro, and more. You can filter by neighborhood, event type, and capacity — organized the way a local actually thinks about this town, not the way an algorithm in another state guesses at it.
And it’s a living directory, not a graveyard of stale listings. Venue owners can claim their space — upload current photos, add floor plans, list their preferred vendors, and keep everything accurate themselves. Planners and guests just search by what matters to them and discover rooms they’d never have found buried on some national list. Real Nashville venues, the way a local would lay them out.
The Response Has Been Tremendous
Honestly, I figured it’d be a nice little resource — something I could point people to instead of telling them to “just Google it.” Instead, it took off. Venue owners have been reaching out to claim their listings. Planners keep telling me they found the perfect room they never knew existed. And more than a few fellow locals have said the same thing: “Finally — somebody who actually gets Nashville.”
That means more to me than any analytics dashboard. I didn’t build this to compete with anybody. I built it because my city deserved better than what was out there, and I happened to have the two skill sets — three decades inside these rooms, and the coding chops to put them online — to do something about it.
Find the Room. We’ll Handle the Rest.
So if you’re hunting for the perfect Nashville venue, go explore NashvilleVenueRentals.com and find your space. Own a venue? Claim your listing and show it off the way it really looks today. And once you’ve got the room locked in, let Nashville Audio Visual handle the production that turns it into something people remember — the same crew that’s been doing it in these rooms since 1995.
Want a head start on choosing? Read our Nashville Venue Rental Guide — everything to look for before you sign.
— Chris Jackson, Owner, Nashville Audio Visual