Is CMA Fest’s Nashville Future In Jeopardy?

I thought it was a refreshing, too, especially the part of having to listen to the radio and hearing DJs making fun of him. Another thing I found interesting was that they listened to over 4,200 songs and still chose songs from the top dog songwriters. I don’t know what exactly that means, but it’s interesting.

I use to go to the cma festival back in the 80s when it was called fan fair. It took place at the TN state fairgrounds.It was all in one area.

I remember waiting nearly 12 hours to see George Strait. When he came in he never said hello to anybody just quickly signed his name and pushed the photo back and turned to the next person in line.

Matt–

I don’t think the CMA Fest is saying it has problems. It’s an overwhelmingly successful venture, at least financially. But the artists would like to get paid, and the CMA might get even more big-name headliners from the deal if that can happen. And then it grows more, etc.

The CMA is saying it wants the city that benefits from the festival to contribute to its production and promotion. It’s basically considering (or threatening) to move to Atlanta or Dallas, where apparently they believe the city will kick in funds so that the artists can get paid without the CMA losing any of the money it raises for itself. Nashville gets a lot of revenue from the festival, and now the CMA is asking for a cut, but saying they’ll use that money to pay the artists.

Some artists, and their managers and agents, have always grumbled about playing the festival (or Fan Fair) for free because once they play the stadium, they can’t come back any time soon and stage a big arena or Ryman show. It essentially cuts a market out of their concert income base. Some artists skip the festival for that very reason.

Like you, I miss the old Fan Fair with the autographs and interaction between artists and fans. But the scale of the festival downtown and the numbers of fans who show up makes it impossible for the big artists like Faith and Time to do the kind of autograph sessions stars used to do. There’s just too many people, basically. It’s the same reason Loretta Lynn could walk off stage and sign autographs at a fair, but Kenny Chesney can’t walk off an arena stage with 20,000 fans there and expect to be able to sign autographs. The number of fans have made it impossible to do what country stars once did.

Some stars hold fan-club parties to provide a more intimate situation for those who sign up. But it’s mostly b-leve stars. The major stars are too popular to do it in a way that would satisfy people. Keith Urban used to do it as well as anyone, but now the number of fans who would show, and their fervor to interact with Keith, would make the old kind of fan-club situation impossible.

In the past, when I read interviews from Cagle, I just thought he was a guy with an attitude. This article, for some reason, gives him some more depth for me. I bought his new album yesterday, because I like “What Kind of Gone.” I’ll have to give the album a few more spins before I can say whether I like it entirely. I did notice that I liked the title track though.

One thing that I remember reading from one of CMT’s 20 questions feature is when someone asked who he would like to record a duet with and he stated that he didn’t want to do a duet with anybody. I wonder why that is. It just stuck with me, because it’s not the answer that people usually give for that question.