Miss Leslie’s Honky Tonk Happy Hour: High-Tech Redneck

I’m a honky tonk gal. I was raised on the sounds of Bill Monroe and Ray Price. But I’m a nerd. I graduated in the top 10% of my class. I read books for fun. I worked in the Information Technology Industry for 10 years. And I think it’s important that musicians today realize that we’re living in a different world from even 10 years ago–it’s time for all of us to embrace the tech geek within us.

In 2000, SoundScan reported that 785.1 million albums were sold. In 2007, that number dropped to 279 million. I know that this isn’t a revelation to you–selling CDs is NOT the future of the music business.

Then what is? Technology. Song downloads have gone from 143 million in 2004 to 844 million in 2007. And that’s just the ones that were paid for.

Forget the record labels and the old guard. What’s the business model for an artist today? Historically, what has made a musician successful? In any era, it has been connecting the fan with the music. The media changes from era to era. Whether it’s fees paid for performances, sheet music, vinyl records, cassette tapes, CDs, digital song file downloads, the principle is the same. Somehow the music of the artist has to connect with the fan.

Acts like Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails and Coldplay have been revolutionizing the music industry with their business model experiments. They’ve offered free music downloads, “name your own price” for music, “optional” pay for music, free DVDs of the performance to concertgoers and free downloads of live music performances.

You can call these experiments gimmicks, but I notice that the common thread is not about making money, but that the acts are focused on connecting with the fans.

What I find curious is that the same thing is not happening in Country music. I don’t see acts revolutionizing anything. Or are they? I decided to peruse some music websites to see how a random sample of us country folks are measuring up.

Nine Inch Nails
Since Trent Reznor is the “gold standard” I look at his website first. The homepage reveals a small window that says that this website is a beta, which doesn’t surprise me, considering that I would bet that this website is constantly changing. The new full-length album is available as a free download, and there’s a link to “click here and get it now.” If I want to utilize the full features of the site, it asks me to sign up, but I think I’m OK with not signing up and so I enter the website. I see a few of the members of the website (they all have pics uploaded) and there’s Photos and Videos sections where I can see live performance shots (most of them uploaded by fans). That is cool. There’s a Chat section where I could chat with other fans and a Forums section where fans discuss the band and meet each other. And Trent himself gets on often to address issues that come up. There’s a Listen section where I can hear sound clips or entire songs, and there’s a Feeds page where I can get notified anytime something from the website is updated. Smart.

Kevin Fowler
The homepage is decent. I like the tour pics–except it seems like there aren’t many of them. There’s a section that shows all of the social networking sites you can connect with Kevin on. I like the Video of the Week concept. I click to enter the website, and the song starts up (As I’ve mentioned before, this is a huge pet peeve of mine). Then there’s an RSS feed of www.mozes.com that displays Kevin’s text messages and shows how I can text Kevin. The text says that Kevin’s released 4 songs live from the Party Barn album that I can download for free. Cool. Hmmm. How do I get to that? I try the Store link. I try the CDs link. It’s not either of those place (and no sound clips on the CDs page? Huh?). I click on Fanatics and see Party Barn, but I’ll have to sign up as a fan in order to go there. Kevin’s MySpace shows that Live from the Party Barn is free–the whole CD? This might be worth giving my email addy away. I go for it and find a Fanatics message board where fans can interact. I click on Merch and that takes me to Front Gate Tickets. Hmmm. I think I just either got conned out of my email address or I’m not as high-tech of a redneck as I thought I was.

Holly Williams
I’ve already written about her site a little bit in one of my previous columns, and there’s no need to re-state that I hate music that automatically plays on a home page. However, I love Holly’s explanation of her songs–maybe it’s because I’m a songwriter, but that really created a connection for me with her music. There are no sound clips of any of her previous albums, however, so other than the spotlight of her new album and her songwriting explanation the site gives fans little to work with.

Keith Urban
Thank you for giving me the choice whether or not to launch the jukebox on the home page. If I join Monkeyville, I can have access to downloads, although I don’t know if any of them are free. I didn’t feel like becoming a monkey, but if I do I’ll have access to message boards, contests, videos, etc. I could also be part of a “street team.” I’m sorry, but street teams are for nerds and publicists (no offense to nerds). My biggest issue is that while the site is well-designed and appears to be fan-friendly, there’s an air of put-on publicity. If I want access to anything, I have to become a monkey. What if I don’t want to be a monkey? What if I’m new to the world of Keith Urban and don’t know if I want to make the monkey commitment? You just disconnected me, Keith.

Taylor Swift
It took me forever to find how to turn the auto-play off. I tried to have a different perspective when looking at Taylor’s website. I tried to retrieve the mindset of a 13 year old girl. I like that she has a journal–except that there’s no date on any of the entries. And there’s a guestbook. Really? I thought no one had those anymore. There are no sound clips on her website–although there’s a prominent link to iTunes. I have to say that this is a workaround that a lot of us use to avoid having sound clips on our websites, but if I was Taylor Swift, I’d have sound clips on my website–and a lot of other tech bells and whistles. 13-year olds are even more tech savvy than nerds from my generation. They have a different language and a different way of connecting. If Taylor can find a way to be on her iPhone constantly (or hire a 13 year old publicist to pretend like she’s Taylor texting her fans), she’ll be a megastar for forever.

Randy Rogers Band
I like that he has a blog, but it’ll be tough to keep people reading it when he only posts an entry every few months. Sound clips! Yes. I like that you don’t have to sign up for anything to read the message boards–although they seem to be visited pretty infrequently.

I remember when ATMs first came out and people predicted that banks would go away completely. They, of course, did not go away completely, but were forced to change how they did business. Instead of knowing their customers by sight and on a first-name basis, they had to find a way to connect with their customers online.

I’m not sure if physical media will ever go away. I’m still not sold on the idea that physical media (at this time, CDs) will be wiped out. But I am sure that musicians will always have to connect with their fans. And the days of people blindly trusting what they hear on the radio and what they see on TV are over. Fans want the connection. And today that means being able to text their favorite artist, download free songs, see concert footage from last night’s show and post photos from that same concert to their artist’s website.

Websites aren’t for publicists and talent agencies anymore. Websites are for the fans. It’s their first connection to the artist and should be a way for that connection to stay constant. And us rednecks would do well to go hi-tech.