The flood of new traditionalists that has done so much to revitalize country music during the mid- and late-1980s may be about to be dammed.
Only a trickle of new acts of any description is apt to make it into the country mainstream in the next year or so, and the ones who do aren`t likely to follow in the boot prints of Randy Travis and Dwight Yoakam, Ricky Van Shelton and Clint Black.
Instead, newcomers will be playing ”contemporary,” urban-oriented country music, and the country mainstream will drift back toward the pop-ish
”crossover” sound that floundered a decade ago in the late, unlamented
”Urban Cowboy” era.
That uninviting scenario, a variety of Nashville experts believe, is suggested by a controversial change in the hit-charting system used by Billboard magazine, long the industry`s most-accepted bible.
The new Billboard system, installed last month, radically changes the rules for achieving a top country hit, concentrating-for the moment, anyhow-on the largest cities while generally ignoring the small ones that always have been most receptive to new records, new performers and ”pure” country sounds.
Billboard`s expensive new chart procedure, based on information gathered by Broadcast Data Systems Inc. (BDS), does the following:
– It scraps Billboard`s practice of making weekly calls to 160 or so country radio stations, getting their playlists, then compiling national hit singles charts from them. Instead, the magazine is relying on BDS electronic monitors programmed to listen to some 80 stations in 58 cities and log the records they`re playing.
– It combines these logs with Arbitron estimates of each station`s listenership at the time of day a recording is played, thereby computing the number of listeners a recording attracts each week in each market. It then determines chart positions from this data.
– It also dispels a longstanding, objectionable atmosphere in which record companies routinely wheedled stations into reporting they were playing songs they weren`t actually playing, thus gaining unrealistically high chart positions for individual records.
According to Billboard, the process ”starts with each piece of recorded product being played into the main computer, which automatically creates a unique electronic pattern for the record and enables the system to recognize it.”
Other computers in each market monitor selected stations around the clock. Their data is combined with the Arbitron figures to determine how many listeners have heard each record on each market`s local chart. For instance, the No. 1 record at WYNY-New York in a recent week, according to Billboard, had 1.56 million listeners, while the No. 1 record at WSIX-Nashville had 310,000.
The old way of doing things created a revolving-door parade of No. 1 country singles, but the new system has changed that abruptly. In one recent period, Clint Black`s ”Nobody`s Home” held the No. 1 spot four weeks in a row, and multiple-week occupancies of the top position are becoming the rule . ”This (new system) reflects more of what`s really happening out there,” says Marie Ratliff, Billboard`s country charts manager.
But four respected industry figures-bosses Roy Wunsch of CBS-Nashville, Tony Brown of MCA-Nashville and Tim DuBois of Arista-Nashville, along with ex- CBS marketing executive Mary Ann McCready, now a performers` financial-planner-all dispute whether the new system really reflects the national country taste.
”This system concentrates on real country hot spots like New York, Chicago and Milwaukee,” Brown wryly quips.
”I think it will help clean up the industry a little, since people won`t be able to shade the truth anymore,” Wunsch says, ”but for the next six months or a year, it`s not going to help new artists much.”
”It`s skewed in favor of already established acts,” DuBois contends,
”because it concentrates on large urban stations with very short playlists.”
”I have this fear we could see a real change in the direction of country music, depending on how quickly Billboard is able to address its system to a broader range of markets,” McCready adds.
Billboard appears to be sensitive to the issue. Ratliff says the BDS system, which Billboard executives have said eventually will become the basis of all its other singles charts, will bring in four new country stations this week: two in medium-sized Greenville, S.C., one in medium-sized Charleston, S.C., and one in the District of Columbia suburb of Fredericksburg, Va.
”And we`re going to be getting into others like Wichita, Mobile, Omaha, El Paso and Little Rock that do big country business,” she adds, saying Billboard expects to be monitoring more than 100 stations ”by midyear” and that it doesn`t ”intend to shut out” the smaller markets.
Brown says his latest new act, traditional-tinged Mark Collie, currently holds only a No. 71 on the Billboard chart while simultaneously occupying a No. 36 on the chart of Radio & Records Magazine, which surveys stations of all sizes.
Wunsch says CBS-Nashville and Nashville in general must adopt a new record-launching strategy that could take twice as long as the 13-15 weeks it used to average under the old Billboard system.
Such a strategy, he says, will start a record out in the small, so-called ”tertiary” markets charted by yet another industry publication, the Gavin Report. It then must be moved up into stations charted by Radio & Records-where, if is successful, it should ”begin to pick up stations being monitored by Billboard.
”We used to be primarily concerned with (Billboard`s) 159 stations,” he says. ”Now we`re concerned with 400-the figure you get if you add up all the Gavin stations and the R & Rs and the Billboards. That raises the cost of doing business somewhat.”
Billboard`s Ratliff says she doesn`t see the BDS system as one that will
”kill new acts,” and she offers Arista`s new, young traditionalist Alan Jackson as an example.
The four executives, however, all contend new acts will be devastated until Billboard widens its monitors to include a significant number of smaller stations receptive to new faces.
And apparently even established acts can face possible problems. Wunsch notes that Ricky Van Shelton`s hugely popular ”Statue Of A Fool” reached only the No. 2 position on the Billboard chart-seemingly denied the top position by one or two large urban stations that didn`t begin playing it until it had peaked in other markets.
McCready feels the system at the moment is more open to pop-style newcomers than pure-country ones. This, she says, is because the smaller markets are more open-minded and likelier to be influenced by urban stations` handling of records; the reverse, by contrast, will not be true, she believes. Wunsch says he isn`t so sure either kind of newcomer will prove welcome.
”If you have something that`s on the (pop-leaning) cutting edge, you may have a leg up with some of the urban markets,” he says, ”but at the same time you`re going to be hurting with cutting-edge acts in a lot of traditional markets that live for Vern (Gosdin) and George (Jones) and Merle (Haggard).” Brown-whose MCA office is proud of having developed cutting-edge acts in rocker Steve Earle, jazzy Lyle Lovett and folkish Nanci Griffith-says he believes the BDS system, with its longer odds of success and increased costs of doing business, will cause Nashville to be ”scared to sign those acts now: you`ve got to concentrate on being turntable-friendly.
”If you get an act and spend 100 grand in the (recording) studio and get up to No. 30 or 20 in R & R and Gavin on the first single and then do the same thing on the second one-and meanwhile only get up to No. 60 in Billboard-you`re gonna think, `This is too scary. I`m moving on.`
”That`s because the retail racks and everybody are watching Billboard;
they`ve got it pasted up in their stores. They`re not gonna be convinced by your No. 30 or No. 20 in R & R and Gavin.”
McCready, who points out she`s no longer in record marketing and thus hasn`t steeped herself in the BDS problem, says she nevertheless wonders how new country acts can be launched, since they`ll have to be sold to regional record distributors in Atlanta and Dallas-and TV executives in Los Angeles-before their records ever get played on country stations in any of those cities.
”I`m not saying it can`t be done,” she says. ”But until the system is rectified, it`s going to take longer.”
