Meet the Twin Execs Leading the ‘Much Bigger Conversation’ Around LGBTQ+ Inclusivity In Nashville

Like any good Swifties, Emily and Jamie Dryburgh keep finding connections between themselves and the biggest pop star in the world. As the twin sisters chat with Billboard over Zoom from their Nashville office, they rattle off a list of things they have in common with Taylor Swift: They are the same age, they’re ­enterprising professionals in the music industry, and their office in Nashville’s Midtown happens to be right across the street from Swift’s apartment.

That literal proximity to Swift is fitting, the 34-year-olds say, considering how she helped inspire them to pursue their careers. “The first time I heard a Taylor Swift song — as obvious and cliché as it is — I realized that she was not only writing her own songs but that she was a businesswoman,” Jamie recalls. “We were like, ‘There’s this girl out there who is our age, who feels like someone [we] would hang out with, and she’s doing it.’ It feels like she opened all these doors and all these opportunities for us.”

As the co-founders and co-CEOs of Young Music City, the leading Nashville media and lifestyle LLC focused on the LGBTQ+ community, the Dryburghs, much like Swift herself, also believe in doing work with a centralized purpose. What started as a music blog in 2016 has blossomed into a coterie of entertainment brands — including the RNBW Queer Music Collective, Country Proud and Girlcrush — advocating for greater representation of and visibility for LGBTQ+ members of Nashville’s music scene by promoting events and curating stages exclusively by and for queer people.

The pair’s efforts have worked wonders for queer singer-songwriters like Adam Mac, who attended some of Young Music City’s earliest showcases as an aspiring country artist. “When I first moved here, the only visual I had of a path that a queer person could have in country music was Shane McAnally,” Mac says of the acclaimed songwriter. “I think Emily and Jamie really did lay the groundwork for feeding my confidence to say, ‘No, you can keep going.’ ”

Born and raised in the upstate New York city of Elmira, the Dryburgh sisters say they dreamed of moving out of the frigid Northeast to find their passion in the warmer Southern states. Applying to colleges in the South “behind our mom’s back,” they ended up moving to South Carolina to attend Coastal Carolina University in 2009. Once there, they started traveling all around the South, attending concerts and festivals across genres and falling even more in love with music.

Where other fans might try and meet the headliners before their festival sets, the Dryburghs instead chatted up tour managers and assistants, learning how the industry worked in the process. “We’d hang out with them and hear their stories, and they would be like, ‘Hey, you guys need to go be in the music industry,’ ” Emily recalls.

The duo took their advice, moving to Nashville and transferring to Belmont University’s music business program in 2011. Upon graduating in 2013 — “on Taylor Swift’s birthday,” Jamie points out — they began working in as many different sectors of the industry as they could. Whether interning at small, independent record labels, directing A&R for boutique publishing houses or managing artists nominated by the Country Music Association (CMA) like Joshua Scott Jones, the Dryburghs sought to learn as much as possible through hands-on experience.

Along with that experience came some big personal realizations. Shortly after graduating from Belmont, Emily and Jamie both came out — and, in short order, noticed they identified with few others in the Nashville music scene.

Emily remembers a conversation with her boss at the now-closed publishing house Anchor Down Entertainment, where she worked as an intern shortly after graduating from Belmont. “I was like, ‘I have to tell you something and you might fire me, but I just need to let you know that I’m gay,’ ” she says. “[My boss] was super supportive and just started naming people: Shane McAnally, Brandy Clark, all these high-level people that were queer. We had no clue because there were no spaces for us.”

The longer the Dryburghs spent in Nashville, the more they saw how few opportunities queer artists had. So they took action. In 2016, the two transformed their old blog, Twin Love (“It’s so embarrassing,” Jamie says with a laugh, “it was the sh-ttiest blog”), into Young Music City, a fledgling media organization complete with a YouTube channel and Spotify playlist intended to give bubbling-under artists — many of whom identified as queer — a platform to share their music with a wider audience. “We had newsletters, we had filmed performances, we had all this stuff. We were just covering these bases before things like TikTok happened,” Emily says.

But the Dryburghs found their biggest success with the first subsidiary they launched from Young Music City, the RNBW Queer Music Collective. When they saw a friend perform at an open-mic event titled Big Gay Showcase, they were surprised by the sheer number of people who attended. So Emily and Jamie decided to try their hand at creating communal spaces for queer artists, scheduling monthly RNBW showcases at Tribe, a well-known Nashville gay bar.

“We’d pack the house, but there were only about 15 active, out artists who would come and perform,” Jamie says. After three years of staging their events, the pandemic hit. The sisters figured that their monthly showcase was over for good.

As they tell it, the opposite turned out to be true. During the course of the pandemic, as the Dryburghs scheduled livestreamed showcases for queer artists, they watched their online following grow as more talent started submitting themselves to be featured on the platform. The community that they had been seeking finally materialized. Once public-gathering restrictions were lifted in May 2021, the Dryburghs started booking weekly RNBW showcases at The Lipstick Lounge in Nashville’s East End with smashing success.

“Post-pandemic, a lot of people found themselves, came to Nashville, and there is now this huge world there that was not there before. We [are] easily booking six different artists for every show,” Emily says. “At this point, we’ve had almost 3,000 queer artists come through. It’s been amazing.”

Mac, who befriended the Dryburghs when he first moved to Nashville in 2012, says he has witnessed a shift in the city’s queer music scene — one he attributes, at least in part, to the work that the sisters put into creating a welcoming space. “Before RNBW, there was no place [in Nashville] for creative queers to come together and have a space to share,” he says. “It was so crucial for all of us.”

Having created their own community, the Dryburghs then set out to enlarge that space. As they built relationships around town with LGBTQ+ organizations like Nashville Pride and set up bigger stages for holding their events, they saw an opportunity. When the now-closed entertainment site Nash News approached them about putting on a country-focused concert in summer 2022, they realized that the proposed dates fell during the four days of CMA Fest. The festival was already announced and only two weeks away, but the Dryburghs took their shot, emailing their CMA and CMT contacts to see what was possible.

“We heard back from both of them within the day,” Jamie recalls. Soon, the Dryburghs were hopping on Zoom calls with executives from both organizations, pitching them on CMA Fest’s first Pride-themed stage. When asked whom they could feature there with such little lead time, they pointed to the now-vast catalog of artists they’d worked with through RNBW.

Within a few meetings, they had successfully created Country Proud, the first-ever queer-focused event at a U.S. country music festival. “The audience response was massive — a lot of people who didn’t know what [Country Proud] was still came through because we were able to bring in such great talent,” Emily says.

The show’s debut in 2022 was such a success that, in subsequent years, CMA Fest promoted Country Proud from a sponsored activation to its own main stages, bringing in artists like Brooke Eden, Angie K, Shelly Fairchild and Mac, who remembers going from local showcases to his first crowd of thousands thanks to Emily and Jamie’s advocacy. “They got me my first major stage at CMA Fest,” he says. “To see where all of this started to where it’s at now has been a privilege.”

But 2025 marks the first year since the Dryburghs helped make history with Country Proud that CMA Fest won’t feature the event they created — a fact that they attribute, in part, to political pressures to reduce inclusive programming like Country Proud. “We anticipated it might be weird this year,” Emily says with a sigh.

But the sisters are taking this difficult news in stride. After all, they point out, Young Music City started with grassroots organizing. “When these partners can’t come in and when there’s things that are against their control, that’s where our work comes back in,” Emily says. “If no one else is going to do it, then it has to be us. We can put on a show with our eyes closed at this point, so when organizations back out, it’s important to say, ‘OK, we’re stepping in.’ ”

Jamie also says the music industry should take note of what has happened when major businesses have cut their diversity programs. As an example, she cites Target: After the retailer faced heavy criticism from right-wing activists over its 2023 Pride collection, the store rolled back many of its products supporting LGBTQ+ inclusivity for Pride Month 2024. Four days after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, the company announced it was ending its diversity, equity and inclusion programs; in the following months, its foot traffic and sales plummeted.

“It’s a losing strategy,” Jamie says of anti-­DEI efforts. “A large part of the population is somewhere in the queer community, and leaving them out doesn’t serve your business.” What might the music industry learn from these cautionary tales? “Think bigger than just today or tomorrow. Think about years down the road,” she suggests. “This is a much bigger conversation than just your bottom line.”

After growing Young Music City from a small online blog into one of the most active LGBTQ+ music organizations in Nashville, the Dryburghs are now looking at how to take their talents national. Emily lists just a few of their long-term goals, like opening an inclusive venue in Nashville or organizing a RNBW Queer Music Collective national tour.

And all the while, they will remain committed to creating connections for queer artists in need of support. “We’ve had artists like Kelsea Ballerini and JoJo and Julien Baker in the audience at RNBW shows,” Emily says. “Our artists have met co-writers through these shows, met their spouses through these shows, and they keep coming because they know that this is a place where they can come and it’s safe.”

The sisters smile at each other. “That’s the ultimate goal,” Jamie says. “Just making our home a safer place.”

This story appears in the June 21, 2025, issue of Billboard.