Excellent question, and I'll give it my best shot to answer.Macarthur said:
But this is what seems odd to me.
Maybe rbtexan has answered this before somewhere in this long thread, but it would seem to me that $ and quality are not mutually exclusive. Sturgill and Isbell both debuted at #1, right? Stapleton has done very well. I do think, for the most part, people will like quality music.
So with where country music is, what is the egg and what is the chicken? Have the execs followed the dumbing down of the consumer or is it the other way around? Did the industry see a way to make better margins by cutting out the artistic element and making it more manufactured and thus more repeatable. Then we will spend lots of $ to convince the consumer that this is what is good.
In principle, quality and $$ are not mutually exclusive. And yes, Isbell, Stapleton and Simpson have all had albums on the top of the charts. I also agree that if you put the right music, of high quality, in front of the right audience, they will respond favorably and love it.
The problem is, that nobody is really selling that much anymore - just a handful of artists. Isbell et al debuted and/or went #1 because they have a very loyal, built-in fan base who rush out and buy their product immediately when it comes out. That creates an artificial bump in their sales and it usually takes a huge drop after a week or two. Long term they sell steady, but not huge. Labels have started making up the difference in declining music sales by signing artists to what are called "360" deals, where they participate in all of the artists' income (live shows, concessions, etc.). They also get money from streaming services, and the stuff that gets streamed the most is what's on the radio. So they swing for the fences for the big money, big venue type artists rather than the ones like the guys we mentioned, because rather than looking at the big picture, they've got corporate big brother breathing down their necks and they're living quarter to quarter just trying to keep their jobs. Artists, true artists, take longer to be successful generally speaking. Stapleton has been knocking around for well over a decade for example. Labels would rather have a one-hit wonder that sells/streams a boatload and then disappears than to make the $$ and time investment into developing acts that push the envelope.
The other problem is that radio formats continue to get tighter and tighter...less music, more commercials. The power pendulum has swung from the labels to the radio stations, especially the corporate ones like ClearChannel. To a VERY large degree, radio is dictating to labels what they will or will not play. They demand a lot of the exact crap you're hearing...uptempo, party, nothing to heavy or negative...because that's what their ****ty marketing people say their listeners want (what they listened to last week is CLEARLY what they want every week...morons, marketing people are effing morons). So since labels believe that without radio they're hosed, they cave in and give them what they want. Cart leading the horse.
That's a very Readers Digest version, but it pretty much covers what is going on.
