Comments on: Caitlin & Will/Keith Anderson Dropped; Gretchen Wilson’s Redneck Records; Initial Lineup for CMA Awards

By: Lynnie

Lynnie — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 04:26:26 +0000

You all kill me. You parse and you pick. Do you not ever just listen? Good music is good music, whatever your genre. You pick and bicker about where a group is from. You grouse about lyric. You forget about feeling. I have listened to a song the first time and just fallen in love. What is it about that song as opposed to another? It just makes your skin react. I dont’ worry about why! Time before last, the hairs on my skin rose when I heard “Every breath you take”. Simple, and yet real.
You guys and gals on this site are so boxed in. Some of you post just so you can go back and tingle about how much you think you know! Who cares? I can see you, some of you, with your noses in the air. UGH. Come down and smell the roses. Accentuate the positive. There is so much negativity out there, this day and age. I wish for you that you could just enjoy. Then again……..

By: Lucas

Lucas — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 18:58:13 +0000

Radio does fail artists, I’ll give you that Matt, due to consolidation. Back when, radio DJs had the choice of who to play. It’s laughable that payola is illegal, considering its obvious presence.

What we need is truly independent labels, truly independent radio stations, and a umbrella organization to more closely regulate monopolization.

A monopoly is OBVIOUSLY illegal in America… you can’t own a radio station and only play your artists, run your theme park where your artists show up at parades which are broadcasted, and then put your artists on their own TV show – especially if your company uses a mouse as it’s mascot…

Even the “independent” labels aren’t truly independent. Big Machine, independent… true. Distribution, Universal, not so much.

By: Matt B.

Matt B. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 01:52:09 +0000

Lucas, plenty of artists have failed the labels just as much as labels have failed the artists. Also one could say that RADIO failed the artists by not coming through on the ‘promises’ they may have made one way or another with a band when they came by the station.

By: Lynnie

Lynnie — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 01:09:39 +0000

Lucas, I absolutely agree with you, especially in the case of Caitlin and Will. The label failed the artists. I had the pleasure of seeing C&W perform quite a few times. They were better live than on the EP, cause you could gage their personalities. They were never stale, cause they mixed it up, and they always added something extra to even the covers that they did. I went to see Kasey Chambers and Shane Nicholson when they came to Ramshead here in Annapolis. I love their music, but to be honest, I got a little bored with the concert. I was ready to go home in 45 minutes. Too much of the same stuff.
I had the pleasure of hearing some of the other cuts from C&W’s ‘never to be released album’ live and honestly, it is a cryin’ shame. The live performances were compelling. I never did like “Stupid Boy’, by either Urban or Buxton, but man, if you never got to see Caitlin and Will do the entire song live, you really missed something special. Wonder what it would have sounded like on my IPOD. I’ll never know. Yep, thanks Sony. It’s a crying shame.

By: sam

sam — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 23:42:46 +0000

But the person in charge of promotion is also as good as the artist: If someone in charge of promoting the artist, say, sets up a radio tour, and the artist is rude to the PDs on the tour or is uninteresting or offensive on the air on a morning show or or doesn’t bother to show up to do the interview or what not, then the person working the promotion is only as good as the artist.

People from all walks of life can mess up in their jobs, – even artists – and I don’t think a label’s inability or unwillingless to rescue such an artist from their own mistakes necessarily constitutes a failing on the label’s part.

By: Lucas

Lucas — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 23:30:48 +0000

Say what you will, an artist failing a label is as good as the person in charge of their promotion saying “I don’t have a clue what I’m doing.”

By: sam

sam — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 23:28:10 +0000

The fact that Jones continued to maintain a career despite all his problems hardly suggests that an artist cannot “fail” a label.

By: Lucas

Lucas — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 22:43:01 +0000

No such thing. Untalented acts would never see the light of day – yet somehow they cover most of the Billboard Top 20.

If there was such a thing as an artist failing a label, George Jones would have failed a long time ago. But for some reason, despite substance abuse and not showing up to shows coupled with every form of bad press you could imagine, a person my age still knows who he is, that he’s called “The Possum”, the songs Alan Jackson pays homage to Jones in, and that “He Stopped Loving Her Today” is a country classic. Why? Because his people knew how to make it that way.

By: Chris N.

Chris N. — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 21:11:03 +0000

Oh, I’ve seen artists fail labels before. That doesn’t apply here, but it happens on occasion.

By: Lucas

Lucas — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 20:41:02 +0000

Artists don’t fail labels, labels fail artists. Labels are supposed to be marketing powerhouses, if they can’t get somebody to the top, and they’re a label that gets airplay, it truly is their fault. They signed the person, made the person’s album, messed with their image, underpromoted them, and the artist didn’t sell… big surprise.

All those people should be the current award show performers.

It was a great year for country music I’m sure, I just missed it while listening to that station with Gloriana on it.