by Bruce Feiler
Since its inception, the popularity of country music and any claim it may have of being “America’s Music” has been based almost entirely on radio. Though Nashville in the nineties controlled a sixth of the album sales market, it held, for much of the decade, almost a third of the radio market. The 2,642 stations that programmed country music at middecade constituted 1,600 more than the next closest format, news/talk. According to the Simmons Study of Media and Markets, a whopping 70 million Americans listened to country radio in 1995. Though these numbers would trickle down in subsequent years, the fact remained: Country dominated radio airplay every year in this decade.
But while this muscle has bolstered Nashville’s clout, it has also led to an unfortunate situation on Music Row: Radio now holds most of the power. Because country labels have found few ways to inspire consumers other than radio and because country consumers have been content to buy almost entirely what they hear on the radio, what radio decides to play almost single-handedly decides what will succeed. As a matter of business, this transfer of power is probably unrivaled in American music (rock, for example, and rap are much less dependent on radio). As a matter of art, this abdication of power has been nothing less than disastrous.
Radio has always been central to the success of country music. Before World War II, records were still rare. “Radio was a livelihood,” historian Charles Wolfe noted in an essay in Country: The Music and the Musicians, “record making was an exotic novelty.” Bill Monroe and his brother were so busy playing live at radio stations in the early years of their career that they actually threw away requests from record companies to go into a recording studio. “We finally went up to their studio in Charlotte,” he said in an interview, “but we told ’em we didn’t have much time, that we had to get back in time to play a school that night.” There were several reasons for artists’ reluctance to make records: Record royalty rates were almost nonexistent, recording quality wasn’t very high, and records themselves weren’t played that much on the radio anyway. Indeed, many record companies actually fought to keep their records off the air, fearing nobody would buy them if they could hear them free. This began to change in the late 1940s when disc jockeys (the term was coined earlier that decade) began playing more country records. Len Ellis, a disc jockey in Chicago, one of the founding members of the CMA, told me he had to beg his station to give him an hour to play country records, which he then went out and bought himself. Eventually record labels, realizing this potential bonanza, started issuing so-called DJ copies of their records and mailing them to stations at no charge. A new era was dawning.
With the spread of records came the birth of the charts and the beginning of efforts to control those charts. In 1944, Billboard magazine began compiling its first weekly chart of the most popular country records, which it determined by polling honky-tonk owners and asking which songs on their jukeboxes were played most frequently. In 1948, it merged the country list into one called Folk. The following year Billboard started a separate chart to track radio airplay, which it termed Country & Western. Though the name changed in 1962 to Hot Country Singles, the methodology stayed the same: Chart position was determined by the combination of radio airplay and record sales. In 1987, sales were dropped from this equation and a new system introduced that electronically monitors all reporting stations to determine what songs they actually play, instead of ones they promise. (The album chart, by contrast, is still based on sales.)
Billboard’s decision to monitor actual spins had a curious effect on Nashville. On the one hand, the chart was now undeniably accurate; on the other hand, it could not be so easily manipulated. As a result, labels began putting more importance on Radio & Records magazine, which had been founded in 1973 as a rival to Billboard and which still had a chart that relied on stations reporting what they planned to play. I once asked Debi Fleischer why she bothered with R&R and its expensive reporting system when Billboard was so definitive. She grinned. “It gives us a chance to flex our muscle.”
That flex comes at considerable cost. In the early days of country radio, the relationship between the labels and the stations was much less formal. “We’d call up the disc jockeys and ask ’em to play the record,” Loretta Lynn wrote in her autobiography, “and most of ’em did. Those boys have always been on our side.” By contrast, before Wade Hayes even released his first album, Columbia Records spent close to $250,000 flying him, a manager, and an executive to dozens of cities around the country to kiss the rings of the programmers (and hug the receptionists) who would determine his fate. Even now, after Wade had four Top 10s, the effort spent courting radio was amazing. For the previous month, Wade woke up at dawn wherever he was on the road and telephoned radio stations, urging them to play his new record. “At first you think that once you leave the studio the record’s out of your hands,” he told me several days before the single went for adds. “Now you know that that is only the beginning. I spend more of my time talking to radio than I do writing songs.”
Not only time, but money. Wade and his team spent alarming sums hiring independent record promoters, or “indies,” on top of the dozen people on Debi’s staff who were already working the record full-time. For “On a Good Night,” this included eight indies, each at a cost of close to a thousand dollars, and each paid for by a different entity: Wade’s label, his management company, his publishing house, even Don Cook, out of a special budget he had for such expenditures. As of early May, the second week of the first single off Wade Hayes’s second album, there were probably two dozen people around the country whose primary purpose was cajoling the 183 stations that reported to Radio & Records to add “On a Good Night” to their playlists.
At first it worked.
After the original DGS/UPS debacle, “On a Good Night” built up a substantial momentum and looked, for the time being, like it would be a hit—solidly making it into the Top 10, and possibly even getting a shot at number one. The song got fifty-one adds the second week among R&R stations and moved from forty-five to forty bullet (“bullet” is the term the charts use to designate that a record has more spins one week than the week before). Now that he was on a total of 121 stations (or above 60 percent), Wade also achieved “breaker” status the second week. His record was being spun a total of 1,457 times among R&R’s 183 stations. “It was a very good week,” Debi announced at the end of the day into her automated telephone that would relay her weekly message to her field representatives. “Wade had more adds than LeRoy Parnell. Ha, ha, ha! But there are still tons of stations he doesn’t have. A ton of stations. I want forty adds next week.”
She got thirty of those adds (plus six more for her Ricochet song, “Daddy’s Money”) and all in all was feeling bullish. “Not too bad,” she told her staff. “Ricochet we will move from thirty-two to twenty-seven bullet. We still have eleven stations not playing our record. Each of you needs to do everything you can to change that by next Monday. Wade Hayes, with thirty adds and forty-four upward moves, will take a nice move from forty to thirty-three bullet, jumping Linda Davis, Trace Adkins, and Kenny Chesney. While we did have a good week there, I know there are way too many stations that should be on this record that aren’t. I expect you to be getting tough. I expect you to be getting mean. I expect you to be getting adds. We’re looking good. Don’t let this momentum in any way slow down. We have two hit records. These are both on their way to being number ones. Only people who are idiots can stop us. Remember, ‘Columbia Proud!’”
By week four, though, she began detecting trouble. “There are clearly some stations that are not getting Wade Hayes,” she told me. “Meaning they’re never going to play it?” I asked. With Debi’s permission, I had gotten into the habit of dropping by her office late on Monday afternoons to experience the last hour or so of this weekly race. Sometimes it was cheery in her office, sometimes gloomy. Either way, by seven there were usually a dozen or so people crowded around her conference table drinking beer and nibbling on chips with her beloved salsa.
“It doesn’t mean they’re never going to play it,” she said. “With a rising star like Wade, they’ll have to.” “What does that mean?” I asked. “If they don’t like it, why play it?” “Because I’ll kill them,” she said. “If they have a competitor in the marketplace, I’ll start giving them promotions. If they want my artists to drop by their stations, I won’t let them. They may not think they need me, but they’ll learn.” And learn they did. Wade had fifteen new adds that week, leaving seventeen stations still not on the record. He moved from thirty-three to twenty-nine bullet. The number of weekly spins now totaled 2,674.
In week five, she began to run out of steam. “It’s a brutal day,” she said when I arrived. “A wasteland. I can’t wait to get out of here. All things considered, we didn’t get killed. All our records at least moved up. But there are a lot of labels I’d rather not be right now.” And why the sudden blizzard? “It’s the competition,” she said. “The game. All these labels competing—there are as many labels as there are slots, for God’s sake—and all these favors needing to be returned. Reba got dropped. Vince got dropped. Wynonna got dropped. And all were fixed a few minutes later. That’s the power of MCA. There are stations that decided they weren’t going to play those records—that their audience didn’t like them—but still they kept them. No one wants to be the station that kills the record that ruins the star’s career.” At the end of the day, Ricochet moved from twenty-one to eighteen bullet, and Wade hobbled from twenty-nine to twenty-seven bullet.
Finally, in week six, she hit a wall. It was early summer by now, just weeks away from the album’s release. The buildup around the office was increasing, and nobody wanted to launch Wade’s album on the back of a floundering single. Debi, with Don’s backing, decided to take action. She took out radio advertisements in several cities, rewarding stations that were on the record and penalizing ones that weren’t. She told her regionals to let the stations know that they weren’t getting ad money because they weren’t playing Wade Hayes. One station, KBQQ in Houston, announced they would add the record the following week. But that seemed as if it would be too late. For much of the day, Debi feared she would lose her bullet, an act paramount to taking out a billboard on Music Row announcing, WE LOST THE RECORD! In the end, though, she was saved—barely. “Okay, gang, a miserable week,” Debi declared at day’s end. “But not as bad as it might have been. Ricochet moves from eighteen to seventeen bullet, and Wade will go from twenty-seven to twenty-six bullet. We picked up two of our holdouts, but we have eight to go. No small task, but we’re no small people. Go out and get me what we need.”
That would prove to be even harder in the weeks to come because now, six weeks into its life, “On a Good Night” would be subjected to a new, more potent external force, one that Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers could never have anticipated, but one that was rapidly changing the course of country music.
Beginning in week five of Wade’s single, Debi began getting underground faxes from friends at radio stations around the country indicating that “On a Good Night” was not popular with their listeners. What they sent were reports with names like “Power Fax” and “Radio Heat” that listed every song in circulation at the moment with statistically averaged, demographically balanced information that claimed to reveal exactly how many times fans wanted to hear these songs on the radio in any given week. It was, as I would discover, the most important trend in country music—market research—and perhaps the clearest indication that Nashville had joined the headlong rush in America to relinquish control of pop culture to social science.
Basically the system works like this. Several dozen companies around the country are hired by radio stations to tell them what to play. “What we bring to the party is the radio audience,” according to Joe Heslet, the president of Marketing/Research Associates in Seattle. “Our clients are radio stations who want to make sure that they’re playing songs their audience thinks are hits. Before that, it was pretty much a dartboard. The programming director picked the songs and if he liked the record it made it on the air.” “And how is what you do any different?” I asked. “We let the audience throw the darts.” Working out of a phone center in Fresno, California, the company polls one hundred country music fans every week in various markets and asks them to rate anywhere from thirty to forty songs. In order to get one hundred people (the calls are made between 5 and 9 P.M.), they must usually call around five hundred people, whom they screen by playing a tape that includes Alan Jackson, Reba McEntire, and Garth Brooks. If the person says that’s their favorite kind of music or that they listen to it often (“It’s much easier to find country fans than, say, alternative rock fans,” Joe said), they are designated as “P1’s” and move to the next step.
The caller then plays the listener six seconds of each song, usually the title and a hint of the chorus—“I’ve got friends in low places…” or “On a good night, I can hop in my truck…”—and asks the listener to rate that song on a scale of one to five: five meaning they like it a lot; one meaning they dislike it a lot. (The six seconds is meant merely to “remind” listeners of a song they already know.) These answers are then averaged, converted into a number from one to one hundred, and ranked according to popularity. The company then faxes this ranking to all its clients. I can think of no better example of the change in country music from a regional to a national form than the fact that a company in Seattle, making calls from Fresno to listeners in, say, Shreveport, decides whether fans in New Haven will hear the new song by an artist from Bethel Acres. Ultimately, going country to such a degree may have cost country music its sense of place.
Why such reliance on pseudo-science? First, competition. With the number of labels in Nashville ballooning from six in 1990 to thirty-one in 1996 and with the number of radio slots holding steady at between thirty and forty, more songs were competing for each slot. Second, with more stations being sucked up by corporate mergers, the importance of getting immediate return on investment has only increased. “Unfortunately, art and business conflict,” Joe Heslet explained. “When you’ve invested $235 million in a radio station and you have investors, they don’t necessarily care about the artistry of the music. The goal of keeping a radio listener tuned to your station another five minutes is entirely different than a label’s need to get that song played one more spin a week.” In this battle for the soul of country music, the research won. Label executives not only release songs they expect will get past the research (instead of the ones they like artistically), they even have started researching songs before they put them on the albums. After Reba McEntire released an album of cover songs (recut versions of old hits) that bombed, she sent all her material to Marketing/Research Associates to have them decide what songs she should cut. “We’ve picked a lot of number one songs this way,” Joe explained. And wasn’t he at least a little bit concerned that this might undermine any integrity remaining in the genre? Couldn’t some songs, like those by a superstar, Garth Brooks, or a rising star, like LeAnn Rimes, be good for a station to play even if they didn’t test perfectly? His answer: “Nothing ever helps the record industry, the artist, or the station by playing a bad song.”
In reality, though, the research has only increased the number of bad songs: not because the research is done, but because the industry has so completely capitulated to the research that it now creates songs it knows will pass its need for blandness. As one poster in a Music Row publisher advised high-minded songwriters: BUY ART. DON’T WRITE IT. “Pop music manipulates pop radio,” Tony Brown complained to me. “Country radio manipulates country music.” Sadly, one of the best examples I know of this dumbing down of country music involved “On a Good Night.” For weeks leading up to the release of the song, what most on Wade’s team were saying privately, but what none had the conviction to say publicly, was that “On a Good Night” was not a very good song. It was catchy, with a “screaming up-tempo” beat to it, as Wade described it to me. But lyrically, it’s astoundingly banal:
“On a good night,” it says on a list of serial male fantasies, “I could put on my hat / Head down to the honky-tonk and dance”; but on a real good night, it adds, “I meet a woman like you.”
On an album full of mature, thoughtful songs (including “Hurts, Don’t It” and “The Room,” which had all the feel of a Song of the Year contender), “On a Good Night” was clearly the most insubstantial cut. Even sadder, everyone knew it. “Well, I know what you mean,” Don said when he first played it for me in his office and I failed to jump out of my chair (Don was one of the song’s writers, along with Paul Nelson and Larry Boone). “But its whole purpose in life is to set up ‘The Room’ on radio.” “Frankly, it’s not a number one record,” Debi confided to me at the beginning of its run. Even Wade, when I asked him what he thought of the album, said he didn’t much care for “On a Good Night.” “I do think it’s going to be a hit on radio, though,” he said. “It’s a real summertime song. Generally there will be a bunch of those that come out, but we’re coming out with one first.”
So why did all these people, people with good artistic sensibilities and with a profound belief that Wade, more than most of his contemporaries, could establish himself as a serious artist, agree not only to release “On a Good Night,” but also to make it the first single, the name of the album, and the linchpin of its entire marketing strategy? Because they were scared. Because they knew, from research, that radio likes up-tempo songs more than ballads. Because they knew, from listener surveys, that Wade’s last song had been slow and that they needed to establish him as a “fun” artist to inspire people to purchase the album. Because they knew, from reading the charts, that everyone else got away with releasing fluff, so why shouldn’t they? “I read the research,” Wade told me. “I know that people are just now beginning to associate my name with my face. So what we do now, at the start of this album, will have a long-term impact on my career.” On this, sure enough, he was right.
