‘O Brother’ CD Puts Lost Highway Records on Map

Radio programmers pride themselves on their skill in reading listeners’ musical tastes.

So it’s easy to understand why some country music radio executives tense up at mention of Luke Lewis. The soundtrack from “O Brother, Where Art Thou?,” released by Lewis’ Lost Highway Records label, won the Grammy Award for album of the year last week, punctuating the success of a release that has racked up estimated sales of 4 million copies--even though most radio stations chose not to air it.

“A lot of programmers are risk-averse, and they’re more worried about people tuning out than they are interested in drawing people in,” Lewis said. “In their minds, ‘O Brother’ is at best a novelty record. To them it doesn’t [fit their format], but maybe that’s because everything else they’re playing sounds the same. They’ve got to pay attention now.”

Barely a year after opening its doors, Lost Highway is emerging as a source of cutting-edge country music and proving that record labels can thrive without lavishing millions on radio promotion. The label was launched as a joint venture of two of Vivendi Universal’s music divisions: Mercury Nashville and Island Def Jam. Country is by far the most popular radio format in the nation, accounting for about 20% of all commercial stations.

Lewis, 55, who has been in the music business since the mid- 1970s, has been running Mercury Nashville for a decade. And he is credited with developing country-pop star Shania Twain, who has the best-selling album of the last decade.

Lost Highway, which Lewis launched with Island Def Jam President Lyor Cohen, became the first new Nashville label in a decade and set out to nurture alternative country artists who had received little airplay. Lewis’ business plan is to sign artists who already bring a cult following, then build sales by investing in retail advertising and street marketing. Owing primarily to the success of “O Brother,” the label earned more than $20 million on estimated sales of $50 million, Universal sources said.

The film “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” is set in Depression-era Mississippi and follows three escaped convicts in a retelling of Homer’s “Odyssey.” The soundtrack draws on folk, bluegrass and Appalachian music performed by such acts as Emmylou Harris and Alison Krauss.

To promote the “O Brother” soundtrack, Lost Highway distributed thousands of free copies of the album at bluegrass festivals, packaged in a “Dapper Dan” pomade container inspired by the film, and made available free downloads of at least three songs from the album on Web sites such as Amazon.com. Lewis also credits the heavy rotation received for the music video for the lead single, “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow,” on the Country Music Television cable channel.

Lost Highway’s success is likely to stoke the already heated tension between country music’s label chiefs and radio executives. Lewis and other record executives say country music has become boring and is losing its identity.

Broadcasters say the genre is healthy but the distinctions among radio formats are too rigid to allow them to experiment with more traditional sounds, including the rootsy songs of the “O Brother” soundtrack.

Lewis contends that the time is right for programmers at country stations to broaden their playlists. On average, ratings at country stations have dropped about 33% since 1995, according to radio representation firm Interep. And even with the crossover success of Faith Hill and other acts, country albums accounted for just 9% of the U.S. music market last year, down from about 12% in 1995, according to data from SoundScan.

But several radio station programmers said they are not about to start embracing more traditional country music.

“We don’t drill down into other genres of country. We are just [playing] the hits,” said Michael Cruise, program director for country music giant KKBQ-FM, a Houston station that plays the same songs by top acts as many as 100 times a week.

“We knew going in there was no reason to even test this thing” with listeners, he said. “We’re not very willing to play records just willy-nilly without the benefit of [listener] research.”

Radio stations’ primary tool for examining listeners’ tastes is “call-out research,” phone polling in which listeners rate a song after hearing a snippet played over the phone. Joe Lenski, vice president of Edison Media Research, said such polling tends to favor music that sounds familiar but “doesn’t do a good job of picking the next new trend.”

Edison data released last week are spurring more debate about “O Brother.” A survey conducted last month found that among country music fans who knew of the film or owned the album, 50% said radio stations should play more such music--five times the number of respondents who said programmers should play less.

“There’s a disconnect when a phenomenon like ‘O Brother’ isn’t even talked about on the radio station,” Lenski said. “Here, programmers are saying, ‘We know better than you.’ That’s a mistake. They all missed this, and they’ll probably miss the next big thing.”

Moreover, an analysis of Internet file-swapping services suggests that contrary to some programmers’ contentions, the music of “O Brother” gained a following among fans of more contemporary country. Data from Los Angeles research firm BigChampagne shows that among fans who downloaded songs from the soundtrack, the acts most frequently downloaded are mainstream country stars, including Alan Jackson, George Strait and Toby Keith--the same artists who top the playlists of many country stations.

Lewis, a former Army journalist, broke into the record business when he landed a job as a sales rep for CBS Records in 1976. He spent more than a decade with the company, then became MCA’s vice president of sales and marketing in 1988. Four years later, he was lured to Tennessee by Mercury’s Nashville division, where he was named president.

He describes Lost Highway’s success as “Music Business 101.”

“You just try to get as many people as you can to hear the music,” he said. “Get it exposed and get it in a store where somebody can buy it.”