Twenty-four months or so after The Nashville Network (TNN) and Country Music Television (CMT) launched their cable operations 10 years ago last week, country record sales began rising toward the multimillion levels that now have become old hat.
It was no coincidence.
“I don’t think the value of TNN and CMT to our industry can be overestimated,” observes executive Bruce Hinton of MCA Records, in the vanguard of Nashville’s sales phenomenon. “It’s hard to measure the impact of putting country music into people’s homes every night on a visual basis, but we would not be the same industry today without it.”
“TNN and CMT have been major vehicles for exposing country music to a whole new, much younger audience that has transformed it,” says Tony Conway, Nashville boss of the busy Buddy Lee International talent-booking agency. “It now takes six months to get an artist to the level of stardom it used to take two and a half to three years to build. It’s unbelievable.”
“A week after the video of `Don’t Tell Me What to Do’ began playing, people started coming up asking for autographs everywhere we went,” says Mike Robertson, manager of hot country star Pam Tillis, discussing Tillis’ first video-accompanied record. “In seven days-it happened that quick.”
“I can’t think of another variable that has changed on the national scene (since before country music’s dramatic jump into the national sales forefront) besides television,” says Paul Corbin, boss of programming at TNN. “The number of country radio stations hasn’t increased that much. The only variable is TNN-and, certainly, CMT.”
Much credit for the current national country boom has gone to Soundscan, a new, computerized sales measurement system that has disclosed country music to be dramatically more popular with mainstream record buyers than anybody previously imagined.
Most such credit given to Soundscan appears misplaced, however; it seemingly should go to country music television. Soundscan only identified what TNN and CMT already had galvanized: a national multitude of hardcore country consumers old and new.
When the two cable systems, now watched by a combined 55 million homes, entered the marketplace in 1983 the country marketplace presented a radically different scene:
– Nashville was mired in a deepening recession that had followed the bursting of the Urban Cowboy bubble.
– Sales had thudded to alarming depths as consumers shunned a watered-down “crossover country” sound.
– Star rosters were mildewing with age as financially nervous radio stations refused to play records by new artists.
– Radio could not provide a vehicle to put performer’s faces on their sounds.
When TNN was launched on March 7, 1983-one day behind CMT, the country video channel-the industry response wasn’t even lukewarm.
Record executives were leery of country additions to a medium that had shown little concern for the longterm livelihood of performers, to say nothing of artistic integrity. Paul Corbin recalls that at the time of TNN’s debut, no more than 50 country music videos had even been filmed by record companies.
“A lot of record people were very skeptical about us,” Corbin says, recalling nights when TNN talent bookers were unable to get stars to appear on their flagship “Nashville Now” talk-and-music show. “It took a while to get their confidence. It took years.”
What brought record executives around was illustrated most powerfully by Randy Travis, a 25-year-old part-time short order cook at a Nashville nightclub who began selling traditional-sounding records in the multimillions in the mid-1980s, soon after he began being showcased on “Nashville Now” in 1985.
To record people, the realization began to dawn that TNN and CMT offered an avenue by which record companies could circumvent the stagnant country radio scene and revitalize their industry.
“It was like having another radio station in each major market,” comments MCA’s Hinton.
“Although it’s changing now, historically we’ve had only one country station per market, and if that station chose not to play a new artist, we had no way to reach the consumer there other than touring. And when you’re a young act starting out, you’re either in a small club or you’ve got 25 minutes as an opening act for a superstar. Either way is a really small window for getting to a consumer.
“TNN and CMT in effect created another station in the market. As we watched TNN getting wired into more cable systems, whenever we ran into a major station in a major market that wouldn’t play one of our records, the question heard in the office over and over was: `How soon is TNN going to be wired into that market?’ “
Conway found the new medium an overnight means of selling impressive unknown acts to local promoters.
“We can call up TNN or CMT and say, `Look, we need such-and-such an artist on one of the musical shows’ when we’re putting together a tour, and then we can call promoters all over the country a week or two in advance and tell them to watch this new act we just signed,” he says.
“They call us up the day after they’ve seen them and buy dates.”
Robertson-whose Mike Robertson Management represents Pam Tillis, Lee Roy Parnell and Marty Brown-says Brown’s videos on TNN and CMT enabled him to sell more than 100,000 copies of his debut album without a radio hit.
“In Pam’s autograph lines now,” Robertson adds, “you probably hear as many people say `We saw your song on TV’ as `We heard your song on the radio.’ “
TNN and CMT (which TNN purchased in 1991) thus dramatically refurbished the country scene with new stars, thereby bringing on the sales revolution that is in full swing today.
Supersellers such as Garth Brooks, Billy Ray Cyrus, Reba McEntire and Brooks & Dunn-following the path pioneered in the mid-1980s by Randy Travis, George Strait and Alabama-are acclimating Nashville to more money than it ever saw before.
In the process, the old doomsayers of Nashville’s past-who predicted that if country music ever attained the scale of pop or rock music it would lose its roots-have been proven wrong; it is, in fact, the rootsy “neo-traditional” sound that has led America’s country revolution.
So is there no downside to all this upward thrust? Hardly. Although Corbin says TNN tries diligently to present only an artist’s personality and the fringes of his/her stock in trade-instead of his/her entire act-careers have been shortened to fractions of their former lengths, consumed in the white heat of the very exposure that keeps creating new stars.
“They disappear just as fast (as they rise),” Tony Conway says. “I think it’s the result of two things: TV and this younger audience (which TV attracted). The 18-25 age group is always looking for something new; it’s always ready to move on to the next thing. If they like it, boom, fine, goodbye.”
“There’s not a lot of room for mistakes,” Bruce Hinton agrees. “Now every record is a new day. They had better come back with a killer record every time or somebody else will take that spot.”
Mike Robertson sees the need for a continual string of “killer records” as a strength that will keep Nashville in the forefront of the national consciousness, rather than a weakness that will cause it eventually to nosedive the way it did after Urban Cowboy.
“I don’t see it slipping way back,” says Hinton. “It may flatten out, but even if it does, look at what a major peak we’ll be flattening out at. That ain’t bad.”
