THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

The part of town where so much great music was written and recorded is now being sold off and demolished to make way for condominiums.

Today, booming Nashville is trying to decide whether the tone is appropriate for the crusade that Mr. Kopp and others are waging to save Studio A, a recording room that is steeped in music history and that is scheduled for demolition to make way for a luxury condominium project.

The potential loss of the 49-year-old studio has sparked a broader conversation here about whether the city’s sizzling real estate market is squeezing the music business out of Music Row, even as country has overtaken Top 40 as the nation’s most popular radio format.

The cluster of streets southwest of downtown Nashville has long been the spiritual and commercial center of the nation’s country music business — a concentration of record companies, small-time showbiz strivers and studios that Christine Kreyling, a local writer, once called “the Vatican City of country music.”

“If we let certain musical touchstones go, these centerpieces of collaboration between artists and engineers, then what’s left that makes Nashville’s music scene unique?” said Mr. Kopp, a manager of Ben Folds, the rock musician who is the studio’s current lessee.

In recent years, Nashville has leveraged its diverse economy and honky-tonk mystique to become one of the nation’s fastest growing cities. The 10-county metropolitan region of 1.7 million people is expected to grow to three million by 2040, and in the last fiscal year, the city bested its record for the total value of building permits issued.

But the growth has generated an undertone of worry among some in the music industry, particularly those who work on Music Row. Larry Sheridan, a real estate agent who runs a small studio on the Row, has counted five other studios that have been torn down in the area in the last year or so.

Music Row denizens point out that Fireside, a studio once owned by Porter Wagoner, Ms. Parton’s frequent duet partner, was torn down recently to make room for the Artisan, a 153-unit apartment complex with a yoga studio. This year, a number of buildings on a prominent Music Row corner, including a well-known 1836 Queen Anne home, were torn down to make way for a planned luxury hotel.

The project will reportedly include a recording studio. But for now, it is an empty lot.

What better way to cherish the musical history at the heart of Nashville's tourist trade than to tear it down and replace it with overpriced housing.