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Big-City Woes Hit Country
Album sales for country artists have held nearly steady. Until now

The signal stat for the music industry right now is not the one you've already heard. That one shows total album sales down about 15% this year. (You may recall the music biz was not exactly going gangbusters last year, either. Or the year before.) The signal stat shows country music album sales down almost 30% so far this year.

Because, until now, of all the major pop music genres, country has held steadiest amid the ongoing digitization of the music biz. As a percentage of total sales, country artists sell fewer downloads than all other top genres, which suggests that their fans are more apt to buy CDs than steal downloads. Country partisans point out that the last few months of this year bulge with big upcoming releases—new CDs from chart-toppers Rascal Flatts and Wynonna Judd, among many others—and that means '07 can't be counted out yet. A lot of people must be hoping that's so, because if country falters, the biz has lost the one genre of popular music still showing some signs of commercial health.

There is a danger in letting coastal-city assumptions skew the analysis, which is why this column will now make its first and final reference to pickup trucks. One music executive who is based south of the Mason-Dixon line couldn't resist pulling the leg of a Yankee reporter asking questions about the country biz from his desk in Manhattan. This gent's deadpan explanation for country's staying power: "The South is still suffering the effects of a Civil War that destroyed its infrastructure and left it economically 100 years behind the industrialized North. Therefore, fewer people living in Tennessee can afford computers and iPods."

SERIOUSLY, THOUGH, COUNTRY MUSIC continues to be buttressed by the traditional pillars of the music biz. Country album sales in 2005 and '06 eroded far less than other top genres. In 2006 total sales were off just 0.5%, while R&B sales sank 18.4%, and alternative rock sales fell almost 10%. (All sales data provided by Nielsen SoundScan.) Many executives I contacted cited country fans' "loyalty" to favored artists, and while this doesn't mean the tonnage shifted by long-running acts stays absolutely equal from album to album, it does describe how country devotées are less fickle than most pop music fans. The country radio format remains the most popular in the nation. Perhaps more important, fewer fissures affect it. The radio genre that ate the FM dial in the 1970s and '80s—album-oriented rock—ended up splintering into so many formats that three of them begin with the letter "A." (Active rock, alternative, and adult album alternative, for those keeping track at home.)

"The country-music community has always been determined not to fragment," says Sean Ross, a vice-president at Edison Media Research. Commercially, this has exasperated less traditional performers, as Steve Earle and Townes Van Zandt would attest. (If Van Zandt were still alive, that is.) But it also has ensured that the schism that struck rock radio in the early 1990s—when stations were faced with the binary choice of not playing the likes of Nirvana and alienating younger listeners or playing Nirvana and losing their traditional constituency—hasn't hit the country mainstream yet.

And country fans are not rushing toward digital. A study conducted by Edison Media Research and Arbitron (ARB ) in January found that respondents who cite country as their favorite radio format are significantly less likely than the average consumer to listen to online radio. This is reflected in digital album sales for the first half of '07. Country sold under 5% of its albums that way. Rock-related genres sold nearly twice that percentage; even iPod-unfriendly classical did better with downloads. It may well end up country fans were only waiting for late-year hits to open their wallets. Or it may end up that country, like other genres that have undergone commercial renaissances, has a bum year and then recovers. But if neither scenario occurs, the outlook for the music industry just got grimmer. If such a thing is still possible.

I guess rednecks have learnt to use computers too by now. I mean all they had to do before was to fire up WinXP and set the desktop background to some countryside themed image (in most cases the XP default of the computerized meadow would do), but just give them a couple of years and they're ready to get into p2p networking.

novabrkr said:

Its not that the quality of country music has sunk too,
People have gotten hip to the game that the industry releases way too many fillers on an album
because country albums that are good still sell
IE Ryan Adams Easy Tiger which went to number 5 on the charts
and he never sells like that

if it's only sales we're talking about...

+ the new kenny chesney album drops in less than two weeks.
+ expect a peak after the cma awards
+ new Dwight yoakam album still scheduled for 2007
+ New Hank III album scheduled for 2007

- no new carrie underwood album scheduled for 2007
- no george strait album this year
- no alan jackson album this year
- country as a whole comes of an incredible peak...some decline is only natural

kev1n said:

Not even those handful of albums can revive that industry
thats a pretty big decline...
the vast majority of the country released is swill
for every "If You're reading this"
theres 20 horrid songs like Online, by 5th gear
and other crap

the quality of the music is another issue...if you're talking sales a couple of albums did carry the hype.

Toby Keith / Kenny Chesney : that's half the total sales of the past five years right there between the two of them.

the toby hype is over, Kenny still going strong. Unless something unexpected will happen he'll sell about 10 mils of the next cd and everything will be fine as far as the industry exec's are concerned.

and another factor: NOTHING HAS BEEN RESLEASED YET!, only brad paisley's '5th gear' is out, that's the only album by one of the major players so far this year. No kenny, no rascals, no carrie, no strait, no brooks&dunn, no alan, no nothing...
[Edited 8/31/07 13:41pm]

Carrie Underwood, Rascal Flatts, Reba (Duets album) are all dropping in the next few months....expect those numbers to be among the biggest of all releases this fall....

Blimey.

novabrkr said:

What these articles also faile to ALWAYS put in is the fact that there are NO STORES LEFT that carry music anymore, and as much as they HOPE people go Digital and download from iTunes, alot of people are not making that transition, i really feel the indsutry is in for a rude awakening. It was one thing to go from Reocrds and tapes to CD's but to go from CD's to digital downloads AINT GONNA WORK. Also since the end of 2005 when ON Cue stores all closed, since that time in just under two years over 2000 other stores have closed. Now do the math with the amount of music that the stores carried, those are all UNITS to be sold that wont be sold now, an people wonder why sales of music are down, come on now.