[UPDATED] When singer Margie Perez moved to New Orleans in 2004, she struggled to break into the local music scene. She was aided by the Tipitina’s Foundation Musicians Co-Op, a statewide network of office facilities providing low-cost media tools and training to creative professionals. “I first joined just before the storm,” she says. “I found about it from an ad in OffBeat, actually.”

The Co-Op helped her to get on her professional feet. “I’d been in New Orleans less than a year. People were coming in to check email, designing CD covers, watching other bands do their thing and get press kits together. It was an immediate community.”

The Co-Op, now in its seventh year, recently released its 2010 economic impact study detailing the effect of the program on the state economy and the financial success of its members. In 2009, 69 percent of Co-Op members who had music/media income reported an increase in that income. Of those, 88 percent directly attributed the increase to their participation in the program.

The offices provide a space from which musicians and other creative types can coordinate their professional lives: booking performances, publishing their music, even making recordings. Training in business and job skills helps musicians to present themselves more professionally to club owners or potential investors. At the office, Perez was able to redesign and re-release a recording she’d made before moving to New Orleans. She’s since become such an advocate of the program that she traveled to the Capitol to lend her voice to a dispute over state funding. “Tipitina’s asked me to go to Baton Rouge and speak on their behalf, which I was happy to do,” she says.

During the early years, the economic impact of the Co-Op was difficult to assess. Confounding factors like Katrina/Rita in 2005 and the end of relief programs in 2007 sent impact estimates—and membership—on a rollercoaster ride. But In the last few years membership has grown steadily and rapidly; the Co-Op now claims 2,400 members statewide with offices in Lafayette, Shreveport, Baton Rouge, Alexandria and New Orleans. Putting it all together, the study estimates that the Co-Op contributed $11.6 million to the Louisiana economy in 2009 alone.

Todd Souvignier, the director of the Co-Op program, stresses its uniqueness. “There have always been places like Kinko’s where you can use computer or make copies. But there was no place where for little or no money you could use ProTools (a computer music production program) to complete a recording project. The Co-Op was an entirely new model.”

And it’s a model, he says, that’s being emulated around the country. “The Memphis Musicians Resource Center was the first to try and mimic our model. They came down here and studied and basically copied the way we do things. That’s the highest form of flattery.”

Expansion plans include new offices in West Monroe and Lake Charles. Tipitina’s Foundation also hopes to add rehearsal spaces like ones it built in Shreveport last year to more of its facilities.

The study includes all creative professionals that use the Co-Op facilities, not just musicians. Because the study doesn’t differentiate between musicians and other creative professionals, the Co-Op’s impact on the music community specifically isn’t as clear. “We very purposely don’t draw a lot of distinctions between musicians and musician/graphic designers,” says Souvignier. “It’s all part of the same media gestalt. The vast majority though are musicians.”

Souvignier is confident that the Co-Op will continue giving a boost to Louisiana artists for years to come. So is Perez. “I was at Tip’s after the storm, and a girl came in,” she says. “She’d had her guitar stolen, she came to see if there was anything they could do. That guitar was her livelihood; she couldn’t survive without it. They gave her a guitar and she burst into tears. Witnessing that, it was beautiful.”

Updated 12:18 p.m.

Here’s a link to the study.