Does Asking, "Is That Country?" Matter?

I got in a discussion this week about Carrie Underwood’s “Blown Away” and was asked if I thought the song was “country” (my answer is at the bottom).

“What’s the definition of a country song?” is an interesting question.

Recently I watched the Garage Boys – a pretty good cover band by anyone’s definition – get a demo-diverse crowd into their music.  At one point they answered a request saying, “Here’s a country song for you” and played “Mama Tried.”

No argument. “Mama Tried” is a country song. But so is “Dirt Road Anthem.”

We might argue over a couple of songs or descriptions, but I broke out this week’s top 40 country songs as follows:

·         12 mainstream titles (Drunk on You)
·         12 twangers (6 ‘new twangers,’ 6 'traditional twangers')
·         8 rock leaning titles (You Don’t Know Her Like I Do)
·         8 pop-leaning titles ((Kissed You) Goodnight).

Given how demographically broad the cuming of the format is, it’s totally logical that we see multiple genres having appeal and getting airplay. And interestingly, these 40 songs were evenly distributed across the classifications that I drew up before hand (again, granted, my definitions and my interpretations).

Studying the format’s audience composition over the years I've seen, anecdotally and in the last two years in particular, a good number of markets where 18-24 and/or 25-34 are the leading cume cells for the format. In some markets head-to-head country competitors share a similar audience composition while in other markets each station has it's own relatively well-defined, younger or older cume profile.

With country’s cume and music each as wide as they are today, spending time making sure your station is reflecting listeners' tastes and, importantly, presenting them with a balanced music ‘diet’ to me seems more valuable and have more relevance to than debating, “Is this a country song?”

Play to the heart of your audience; if they say it’s a country song then it is.  Know the center point of your music and deliver on those expectations, but also know how far you can stretch.

So do I think “Blown Away” is a country song? Yes, including the fact that “country” is a core component of Carrie’s brand to the majority of our cume.

But again I think that’s the wrong question.  

A more actionable question is, “Is my music an appropriately balanced reflection of my audiences’ varied music passions?”

Alpha Boomers: What Their Country Station Might Sound Like

With “Alpha Boomer” now one of Arbitron’s standard Tapscan demos, I revisited Albright & O’Malley’s Roadmap 2011 (our annual online perceptual of 10,000+ country listeners) to see how the appeal of the various Music Clusters broke out across 25-54 and the 55-64 leading edge Alpha Boomer demo.

The bars below represent the percent of ‘Like a Lot” (highest score) for eight music clusters. The blue bars are the responses from 25-54s, the tan bars 55-64s (for display purposes I selected one of the songs in each cluster to represent the entire segment).
                               

55-64s give the Early Millennial cluster the highest passion score. Alpha Boomers also have a long “era tail” with the Boom and Late 90s music clusters outscoring some more recent millennial clusters.

Still, Roadmap 2011 revealed that the majority of 55-64s are extremely positive about how country music is sounding over the past 12 months.  86% feel country music is as good as or better than it’s been over the past 12 months with 94% listening either the same or more to their local country stations compared to a year ago.   

Your mileage of course may vary. Hopefully this inspires you to check into how different segments of your audience respond to your individual music clusters.