Every fan of real country music agrees, country music is just not the music it once was. Those of us who are fans of the traditional country music sound know how hard it is to find authentic country music anywhere anymore, but it’s especially hard, if not impossible to find it on the radio. Earthy songs, simple arrangements, less production, a dance beat, a steel guitar, a fiddle, twin fiddles, less mixing, less overdubs, lyrics from someone’s heart (not from the work-for-hire room); these are country music characteristics missing from today’s coma inducing corporate country radio. This disappearance is not about old music versus new music. This is about sound and substance and character and yes, genre.  Authentic country music has a heart that feels real and is real. It rings true. It’s about real life, the good and the bad. The overproduced formula stuff the radio plays over and over these days about perfect love, earthly angels, and phony sweetness is boring, flat and colorless. These saccharine stories of I love you, you love me and we’re all “The Cleavers” get old after the first 2 bars (if you can even stand them for that long). If you think about what is being played on today’s corporate radio and ask, “Can there ever be another rabble rouser like Waylon?” I’d say, not in the current environment, which is not only choking the spontaneity out of country music but is threatening its very existence.

For the longest time I foolishly believed that big traditional artists like AJ or George Strait would finally get fed up with what was happening and take a stand to stop this idiotic injustice, but now I know that won’t happen. The artists are busy fighting the battle on their own turf. Then I thought well maybe the songwriters would stop writing the stuff, just refuse to formulate. But there are songwriters who still write real stuff, they simply don’t get played on the air. So writers can’t effect the change either. The labels themselves can’t even do much because the radio stations dictate what will be played and how often it will be played in their stingy 20-song rotation.

The truth is, we the fans are the only ones who can change or even effect this sorry situation.

The heart of the problem is of course that more and more country stations are owned by fewer and fewer corporations. Corporations don’t care about the music. These corporate country radio stations have a standard 20 song rotation. Yes, this means they play the same 20 songs over and over and over. They add 2 songs per month into the mix and take two songs out. Further, they don’t take requests because they don’t care what anyone wants to hear. You don’t have many choices because a disinterested few own all the stations. That’s bad enough, but think about what that is doing to the apprentice level of the business (the roots of country music). Why would anyone try to be a songwriter as the odds get longer and longer that you will ever have even a moderate hit? Less rotation means fewer hits for everyone, the writers, the artists, the musicians and the labels. When was the last time you heard a radio station mention “the top 40?” Noticed lately that there are seldom more than @20 total different nominees on the CMA and ACM awards? It’s no coincidence that number corresponds to a 20 song rotation.

A business story in The Tennessean last spring lamented this sorry state of the content of country music and folks attending the Country Radio Seminars agreed the music had become pathetic. Then however, they blamed the lack of quality on women over 35 by saying women in that demographic prefer the limp, colorless, sappy stuff they’re playing on the radio. Then producers say they’re producing it because that’s all radio will play. Great songwriters and artists say no one will buy the real thing because if they make the real thing no one will play it on corporate radio. All of this finger pointing looks a lot like the proverbial vicious circle. I however, am a woman over 35, as are many of my friends. We spend lots and lots of money on CD’s and concerts, and we do not listen to country music radio to find what we like because we know it’s not there! We read Country Music Magazine reviews, we check websites like RockabillyHall and TakeCountryBack, we share CD’s, and we look for music that claims to be real country music. If it’s from Texas we buy it, but we do not listen to corporate country radio. Nevertheless, the bottom line is that corporate radio is still dictating what music most people will hear and buy. And, although people who do listen have nothing to say about the programming, neither do the songwriters, artists or even the labels. Everybody loses under this formula because in bottlenecking the product and the industry, corporate country radio stations are literally killing the music that once paid their bills.

Logically of course, simply turning off the radio is only adding to the demise of this genre of music I love so much and I don’t want to be a party to that either. So what is the answer to loosening the chokehold corporate radio has on the industry, since radio is still the key to keeping it going and getting it back to life? The standard response to this dilemma is to lament that there is nothing we can do because corporate radio is only interested in MONEY. This statement is made so often by so many people, that I began to think it must be an important key to changing the situation. If money is what makes it work, then don’t we have to find a way to affect their revenue? That’s important for us to think about and I’ve thought about it a great deal for a number of years. Then one day I remembered my DJ son complaining about how he hated “sweeps” week at the radio station. For those who don’t know, the sweeps are usually conducted by a company called Arbitron. Arbitron audits the listening audience of major radio stations at certain times each year. Then they compile reports on the listener base numbers and demographics. It’s kind of like a circulation audit for a magazine or newspaper. The station’s listening audience percentage claims are verified this way and stations and magazines use those numbers to set their advertising rate base – i.e. this is the place where they make their real money; this is their pocket book. It’s a simple proposition, if they can prove they have a big audience, they can charge higher advertising rates and sell more ads!

This is why I’m proposing a national boycott of corporate country radio for the month of February, a month when many of the sweeps usually happen. I realize a national boycott may not be the total solution but it will make me feel like I’m doing something to get my opinion heard by somebody who pays the bills. Stations don’t advertise when the sweeps are occurring, but you can be fairly certain that a station’s audience numbers are being checked out when the station is having lots of contests and giving away buckets of money or really great prizes. They have more of these contests during the sweeps to try and attract a larger audience while their listener statistics are being verified. Regardless of when they may be audited however, I think a nationwide boycott during one time period will be more effective than scattered boycotts throughout the year.

Affecting this dictatorship will however, take a little more work than just turning the station off for a month. It will also mean a commitment to sending at least 3 postcards to the advertisers on those corporate country stations. Write and tell the advertisers and the stations that you are turning the station completely off for all of February 2003 because:

1. The station doesn’t play enough songs in the rotation (you want at least 40).

2. The station plays generic/rock/pop music and you don’t want to hear it anymore.

3. You want to hear country music on a country station (don’t get sucked into the “yea, but what is the definition of country music argument.” They know the answer as well as you do).

4. You want to hear traditional country music, old and new.

5. You want the station to accept and play requests.

Also, you must tell everyone you know about this boycott and ask them to participate and to spread the word and to post information about it on every website country music fans may visit. Now is the perfect time to promote a boycott and get support for it because country stations have recently reported that their revenues are continually declining. Even though it’s a BFO (blinding flash of the obvious) why they are losing money, trust me, they ain’t gonna ask us. That’s why we’re going to tell them, “It’s the insipid music you insist on playing over and over and over.”  Either stop playing this phony contrived garbage and play what we want to hear, or we’ll continue to organize and promote radio boycotts. While the end result of a boycott may actually be that we put these corporate country radio stations out of business, that could be a good thing. After all, it would mean less competition for the few real country stations struggling to exist against the corporate money machine. And, who knows, maybe with less “country” stations the generic-rock/pop music would have to move to pop/rock stations. Now wouldn’t that be refreshing!

Finally, let me say there is a well known so-called country station in Arizona whose slogan is, “We don’t play any of that tired old country music. We only play hot new country.” To them and every other corporate clone I say, “If I wanted to listen to pop-rock music I’d tune into a rock station in the first place. I want to listen to country music on country stations.” This is not complicated!