January 22, 2005
salieri in blue jeans
Earlier I was listening to a radio show on the BBC about the less palatable realities of the Nashville music business.
Of course, it was depressing stuff. Stories about big media always are.
The show in brief: If you are an original (in the sense that say, Willie Nelson or Johnnie Cash are originals), forget Nashville. They don’t like your kind.
However if you’re kind of bland and corporate and like playing the game (say, Garth Brooks), well, that’s what the guys are looking for. Salieri in blue jeans.
Radio. It’s all about radio. People who listen to country music drive pickup trucks. People who have pickup trucks also listen to radio a lot when driving. So the way American radio works, if the very conservative, Texas-based Clear Channel doesn’t like you, you’re not wanted. Nothing personal, just business etc.
The interviewer was talking to one guy from the country radio business.
“We’re in the business of selling advertising, not in the business of selling records,” he said.
In the end, the advertisers are picking the records, not the DJs or the musicians.
Dolly Parton was on the program (Who is cooler than Dolly? That’s right. Nobody). She was saying how since they don’t play records from anybody over 30 – 35, she had to re-align her career without the support of radio.
This meant re-building a relationship with a smaller, but more intensely loyal audience.
Welcome to the Long Tail, Dolly.
I’m not a country person, but this still resonates with me. Most of my rock heroes … hell, I doubt if even John Lennon would be touched with a ten foot pole by the industry had he been born 40 (or even 20) years later.
I was a music industry student in the early 90’s and this was the way things worked even then. It was amazing, sad, and funny how much of a machine the country music business is.
Have you seen This Is Spinal Tap? One of the gags is how the guitarist has come up with a music notation system so you don’t actually need to be able to read music, just numbers. That system has actually existed for decades; it is called the Nashville Numbers System and works exactly the way he said it. That makes it easier for the handful of session musicians that play on the majority of country records. They walk in, look at the numbers, are told a key, and run through a few times. Maybe do it in another key. The leave. Once the music is finished, the singer is brought in.
We should also note that this is by no means foreign to rock/pop music. Those labels just don’t have it down to a science like Nashville does.
Listening to Clear Channel — the beacon of monoculture — is what I imagine Soviet era radio might have sounded like, where property is now standing in for the proletariat.
You can wrap up the monoculturists in one bag and call it Hollywood, and you can make all the tedious legal, moral and enterprise arguments against the DRM cult, but wouldn’t Dolly Parton make a great poster babe for the new way workarounds, the brand for microbranding.
Not just microbranding, Brian, but “global microsbranding”! Heh.