Radio Interference

Some say the theme of death has been wrung out of country music, but the first week of March was shaping up to be a bloody business. As country radio industry leaders gathered in Nashville for their biggest annual event, the Country Radio Seminar (CRS), George Strait and Alan Jackson’s duet ”Murder on Music Row“ made its debut on Billboard’s country radio chart. At the same time, Country Music Association executive director Ed Benson, by some people’s reckoning, was publicly sanctioning the killing.

The song, written by local bluegrasser Larry Cordle, mourns the passing of real country music from the airwaves in a quest for ”the almighty dollar and the lust for worldwide fame.“ Benson sang his own tune in the pages of Country Airplay Monitor, a weekly trade paper for country radio published by the same people who produce Billboard magazine. ”Nashville, to be a healthy global music community as we go into the next five to 10 years, [has] got to make music that appeals to more than just the country music format,“ he was quoted as saying, ”and we have got to promote and market that appropriate music to stations beyond the country music format.“

For a lot of country music fans, Benson’s remarks read like a white flag of surrender. True, adult contemporary and pop radio have helped turn certain records by Shania Twain, Faith Hill, and others into some of Nashville’s biggest sellers in recent years. But critics say that catering to AC and Top 40 tastes is dumbing down country radio without helping the format to overcome a six-year ratings slide.

”We need the captain of the ship to say, ‘There’s land ahead,’ instead of saying, ‘I lost my compass,’ “ said Larry Wiater, a CRS trade show exhibitor and a professed fan of traditional country music. Wiater and his partner Tommy Thompson were at the Country Radio Seminar representing Tennecom Tomorrow, a Gallatin-based company that designs marketing programs for radio stations. But like many country fans, who’ve been calling radio stations and hollering ”Amen“ to Strait and Jackson’s version of ”Murder on Music Row,“ the two men are distressed by a format grown formulaic, slick, and beholden in its choice of music to a shrinking handful of industry consultants and gigantic music corporations.

In 1994, at its peak, country radio captured about 14 percent of the American radio audience. By 1997, that share was down to 10 percent, and today it stands at about 8. More significantly, perhaps, country radio was for decades a vital force in popular culture, introducing America to Hank Williams, Bill Monroe, Patsy Cline, and other artists who helped shape pop music as we know it. Now, like the rest of the media, country radio has been almost entirely consumed by a rapidly consolidating communications industry that, for all its emphasis on audience research, may be losing touch with its traditional working-class fan base and with country music’s remarkable legacy.

This decline feels particularly bitter to fans and producers of alternative-country or Americana music, who believe that they’re sitting on a talent pool that could precipitate country music’s revitalization, if radio would only treat independent labels and their often strikingly individual artists as a sort of farm team.

Granted, this debate is years old and sometimes gets overworked in the local media and over beers at Robert’s Western World and Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, but this year’s CRS offered a good opportunity to take a deeper look at the questions that plague the format:

How exactly have corporate consolidation and the ubiquity of industry consultants affected the format? What do country programmers think about the music they’re spinning and the pressure they’re under from their increasingly corporate owners? Why have adult contemporary and teen pop sounds diluted or vanquished the bluesy pathos that used to be at the heart of country music? And why, with listenership languishing, hasn’t radio looked to the Americana scene for some bold new sounds and artists?

The Country Radio Seminar, which took place Mar. 1-4 at the Nashville Convention Center, was the picture of a modern corporate confab, dominated by trade-show schmoozing, consultant-driven seminars, and obscure statistics, but it wasn’t hard to find discontent with the music. At one open-forum meeting, Pat Geary, programmer for a satellite-based country music service in Europe, got up to denounce American country radio’s ”monochrome“ quality. By contrast, on pop radio, he said, ”there’s a mixture of influences and a variety that makes you feel like you’re getting a full diet. As much as I love country music, I don’t think what we’re getting right now is more than a small portion of what’s available and what the listeners would respond to if we’d let them.“