The country music industry’s most financially important annual event is facing a new challenge.
This year’s Country Music Association awards show, a three-hour live CBS production that generates revenue for the Tennessee-based CMA, takes to the air Oct. 4 boasting new and unprecedented viewer research with which it hopes to combat a drop in its 1994 ratings.
“I hope nobody draws the conclusion that because the 1994 CMA Awards didn’t do as well as they did in 1993 that that has anything to do with country music,” says Ed Benson, executive director of the 7,000-member trade association.
The ’94 ratings slip, he says, had “everything to do with the dynamics of television right now and nothing to do with country music.”
To combat those TV “dynamics,” the CMA last fall hired respected ASI Market Research Inc. to conduct the first “post-telecast viewer research” to be commissioned by any major awards show, the aim being to determine what viewers liked and didn’t like about the ’94 production.
They found that viewers:
– Like the fact that, with just 12 awards dispensed in three hours, they get to hear a lot more music performed than on, say, the Grammys, where more awards must be handed out.
– Are so fond of Vince Gill as the show’s host that the CMA quickly re-signed him for ’95.
– Don’t like long acceptance speeches.
– Would like, in the case of older viewers, to see a few more of the classic country stars.
“While there was a huge awareness of the CMA awards as an event among television viewers–82 percent of those surveyed knew about the CMA awards–only about half of them knew when and where to find it,” Benson says. “So we’ve really upped our pre-telecast promotion, publicity and awareness element this year.”
The push includes special efforts to hype the show in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, where it tends not to attract as large a percentage of viewers as in the rest of the nation.
“Our primary objective is to have the CMA awards firmly established as a major entertainment event,” he says. “We want to be thought of as one of the top four entertainment awards ceremonies in America, the four being the Oscars, the Emmys, the Grammys and the CMA Awards.”
The CMA is viewing the 1994 ratings, the show’s lowest since 1982, as more of a blip than an upheaval.
Although the drop was from 1993’s 16.9 rating and 26 share to 15.2 and 24 in ’94 (a national Nielsen rating point represents 954,000 TV households; shares are a percentage of sets in use), the ’94 telecast still won its timeslot.
The CMA boss attributes the ratings decrease to the launch of Fox as a major network a few weeks before the CMA’s ’94 broadcast and the immediate switching of several key CBS affiliates to Fox. Cities where those departures occurred included Atlanta and Dallas, two important country music markets.
Benson also suggests that 1994 may have been something of an aberration because of other factors. For example, CBS started the 1994 fall season in “dead last place” in the ratings wars; the CMA show’s ratings triumph was the network’s first Wednesday night win of the season. Also, CBS had been able to significantly promote the CMA show during its professional football games in 1993, and in 1994 it had just lost its professional football contract to Fox. Also, fewer people that night turned on any TV channel, CBS or otherwise, because the baseball strike had deprived the viewing populace of the option of watching the usual popular fall playoffs.
Why is this all so important?
The CMA Awards Show is the principal source of revenue via which the non-profit CMA amasses funds for a war chest financing year-round activities promoting the industry. It is even more directly important to the record companies, song publishers, booking agents and stars whose wallets are fattened by on-screen appearances during one of American television’s most-watched evenings.
“This is the biggest shot on television each year that a country artist can have,” Benson notes, adding that the only bigger such shot would be on the movie awards, where country artists have never received nominations or invitations to perform.
She points out that “several of the artists who appeared on the show had significant increases in record sales.
“Most notable was Mary Chapin Carpenter, whose new album was released the week of the show and debuted at No. 10 in the Top 200 chart –which was her highest position ever in the Top 200–and at No. 1 in the country chart. She’s only the third female ever to debut at No. 1 in the country chart.”
Another blast of momentum was given to the Tractors, a grizzled group of great but severely under-recognized musicians from Oklahoma who did their first public performance together on the stage of the CMA show.
Within a couple of weeks following the telecast, they had sold 500,000 copies of their first album, and a very few weeks after that they had sold 1,000,000 copies of it. The Record Industry Association of America, which certifies gold and platinum sellers, called it the “fastest debut release to go platinum by a country group” in history, and it now has topped 2,000,000.
Today, the Tractors’ “Baby Likes to Rock It” is nominated for the CMA’s Single of the Year and Video of the Year awards.
“The awards show appearance had impact on trade and industry awareness, so I would assume that helped bring in the extra votes that resulted in the nominations,” says the Tractors’ manager, Allen Brown.
Benson, cognizant of grousing from somewhat better-known acts who believed they deserved the shot the Tractors got, notes that the group had won Billboard’s “pacesetter” designation for fastest-climbing album the week before the CMA show, “so they were already on the move before the CMA telecast hit.
“What was curious about their performance on the CMA Awards was that it was their first public performance as a group,” he goes on. “It’s not the first time the CMA has come early to the table with a group, but I can’t remember our coming that early before. Mary Chapin Carpenter came out of nowhere presenting the male vocalist award with her `Opening Act’ song that really put her on the map five years ago, and four years ago Trisha Yearwood performed on the show early in her career.
“Both Mary Chapin’s and Trisha’s first performances came at a time when they weren’t nominees. It’s the kind of thing we’ll continue to do from time to time if there’s something unique and something we can showcase that we feel will eventually prove beneficial to the growth of our industry overall.”
One of the unusual aspects of the CMA Awards Show in general is that it was the first network awards show to be produced by the organization handing out the awards, meaning that the viewer seems likelier to get a more balanced picture of the country scene than if the show were in the hands of a Hollywood or even a Nashville production company.
There is also the fact that the CMA is a non-profit organization, so the show’s proceeds go not into the deep pockets of a TV production firm (as do those of the awards show of the Los Angeles-based Academy of Country Music, which dispenses its annual awards every spring in a show produced by TV mogul Dick Clark).
In addition to annually showcasing the industry’s most popular talent (“we were able to put 53 artists on the ’94 show in one capacity or another,” Benson notes), the CMA show’s profits are plowed back into the industry by financing events such as Fan Fair.
Asked for a ballpark figure of the yearly income from the awards show, Benson says he “can’t tell you that, but I can tell you that the show and its related activities account for around three-quarters of our annual income.
“So it’s a critical event.”
For everybody in country music.
