Country Music Is Looking for an Upswing

When the new Dixie Chicks album hits the sales chart Sept. 4, nobody in Nashville will be surprised if it enters at No. 1, not only in country but on the pop chart as well.

If so, the Chicks will be the fourth country music act this year to score the bestselling album in the nation, following Alan Jackson, Kenny Chesney and Toby Keith.

“When you look at what’s still coming, with new albums from Shania Twain, Tim McGraw and Faith Hill by the end of the year, country music will have a larger percentage of the marketplace this year than it’s had in a number of prior years,” says RCA Label Group chairman Joe Galante. “Does that mean everything’s coming up roses? No. We still have to take it one step at a time. But it certainly feels good.”

“Good” isn’t something Nashville has felt much since the country music boom of the early ‘90s went bust a few years later.

But 2002 is shaping up as the year the pendulum started swinging back. Just how far that swing will reach, or how long it will last, nobody knows. But “cautious optimism” is the new mantra on Music Row.

“I feel that if we could figure out how to keep people from stealing music on the Internet, Nashville will be on its way back to having another big boom,” says Tony Brown, senior partner in the new Universal South label and former president of MCA Nashville.

The quick explanations for the turnaround are Sept. 11 and the surprise success of the “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” soundtrack. The attacks last year put people in a mood to focus on fundamentals, the thinking goes, a shift that was already reflected musically in the commercial breakthrough for rootsy mountain music courtesy of “O Brother.”

“Toby and Alan’s records benefited from songs with a patriotic bent,” says Michael McCall, senior editor for Nashville-based Country Music magazine, referring to Jackson’s song “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)” and Keith’s current hit “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American).”

“Other genres aren’t dealing with it as directly,” McCall says of Sept. 11 and its aftermath. “So some part of country music is fulfilling a need among listeners right now.”

The appeal of “O Brother” is seen in some quarters as a rebuke to the polished, pop-sounding product that’s come out of Nashville in recent years, as well as to the prefab pop of such acts as ‘N Sync and the Backstreet Boys.

Nobody’s predicting that country’s popularity will return to the heights it hit in the early ‘90s, when Garth Brooks topped an influx of new superstars whose multimillion-selling albums helped the genre rack up nearly 19% of all music sales in 1993.

Responding to the musical gold rush, record companies expanded their Nashville operations dramatically, flooding record bins nationwide with country music, much of it mediocre.

That market share dipped to a recent low of 10.7% in 2001. According to Nielsen SoundScan figures, country music sales are up slightly (less than 1%) over the same period in 2001, but that happened while overall record sales have dropped nearly 10% from this time last year.

“Unfortunately, the situation now is a lot like the stock market,” says Lon Helton, country music editor for the trade publication Radio & Records. “Is this a real rally, is it a bear market rally, is it just a blip or what?

“But to carry on the analogy, when you do have a real sea change in the stock market, it’s because there are a lot of things happening in a row that give you a lot of momentum,” Helton says. “And in country today, we’re in a territory right now not unlike what was happening in 1987-88.”

Helton cites Top 40 radio’s increasing play of rhythmic and hip-hop records, which makes country radio more appealing to the segment of the audience that enjoys the boy bands and young female singers.

Then there is the issue of introducing new artists. Statistics compiled by Radio & Records indicate a correlation between country’s general popularity and the first successes of new acts.

The magazine found that in country’s most prosperous years, more acts placed their first single in the Top 15 than in succeeding years when country’s popularity ebbed.

“So it’s not just the strength of a Toby Keith, Alan Jackson or Kenny Chesney,” Helton says. “When you see Darryl Worley sell 42,000 copies of his new album in the first week, or Kellie Coffey at 150,000 sales with just one single, you do get the sense that maybe there is something bubbling under.”

The statistic that doesn’t benefit the new-boom theory is one showing that people are spending less time listening to the radio: In 1994, listeners averaged 11 1/2 hours a week tuned in, compared to 6 1/2 hours last year.

That, Helton says, translates into more restricted playlists, which is particularly sobering in country music, where another survey showed that 86% of listeners learn about new music from radio, compared to an average of 77% in other genres.

Other nonmusical issues come into play, most significantly the corporate mergers that resulted in a drastic reshuffling of labels, musicians and executives in recent years, and the media buying frenzy that put more radio stations into fewer and fewer hands.

Initially, the changes contributed to conservatism both at labels and in radio. Radio programmers and record companies tried to stick with the known rather than risk losing jobs on artists or songs that might fail.

Several years into the brave new world, those corporations are again consolidating operations, and some executives say they see a new willingness in radio to give newcomers a shot, though their generosity is expected to diminish as the various big-gun albums show up over the next several weeks. Hill’s album is due in mid-October, her husband McGraw’s on Nov. 26, and Twain’s at a date in the fall to be announced.

“We’ve all had to shrink,” says Paul Worley, barely a month into his job as chief creative officer for Warner Bros. Nashville. “There are natural things that happen that make everybody’s sensibilities sharper. Ultimately, the music is better when these things happen and there’s not quite as large a machine stamping out product.”

So what are the odds that the upswing will continue beyond the superstar albums that are expected to close out 2002 with a bang?

“I’m betting heavily that it will,” Worley says, echoing sentiments expressed by other top label executives. “Will it be anything like it was 10, 12 years ago? I doubt it. That was really phenomenal.... But I think country’s in the position to be really strong and popular and have another really good run, certainly for the next five or six years.”