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SPOTLIGHT ON NASHVILLE

Story by Bud Scoppa
Let’s take a look at three heavyweights in what is referred to these days as the content-delivery business, aka giving the people what they want. With 120 Country stations, Clear Channel is the king of the heap at the presently vibrant format, and the iHeartRadio platform brings those stations considerable clout online to go with their terrestrial scale. SiriusXM, meanwhile, has north (you’ll pardon the expression) of 26 million subscribers, meaning it’s heard in millions of pickup trucks, whose occupants can choose among eight Country channels, from flagship The Highway to the more eclectic Outlaw Country, the old-school Willie’s Roadhouse and the party-down Red, White & Booze. Viacom’s CMT has the cable TV sector covered, reaching 88 million homes, while also offering shows and videos on demand via CMT.com.

Clear Channel’s Clay Hunnicutt, who bounces between New York and Nashville, and SiriusXM’s John Marks, who programs The Highway, grew up with country music and are both veterans of Country radio, Marks since he was 15 and Hunnicutt for the last 26 years. By contrast, CMT SVP of Music Strategy Leslie Fram was formerly known as "the First Lady of Modern Rock." Like her longtime colleague, CMT President Brian Philips, Fram made her name at Atlanta Modern Rock powerhouse 99X, and whereas Philips went on to oversee the transformation of groundbreaking, top-rated Country station KPLX The Wolf in Dallas before moving to CMT in 2001, Fram continued to work in Modern Rock until rejoining Philips in 2011. Hunnicutt also spent time in Atlanta, launching and programming Clear Channel Country station The Bull before taking a national post with the chain; he now wears two hats as Country Brand Manager and EVP/GM of National Programming Platforms, working side by side with NPP prexy Tom Poleman.

"I fell in love with Nashville before it was deemed the ‘It’ city," Fram enthuses. "This has been like coming home for me, since I’m from the South. I’m lucky that my bags were packed right around the time Nashville became the epicenter for everything cool. I got to take Cliff Burnstein and Peter Mensch to Mas Taco! You won’t found another town with a richer music scene and collaborative spirit, where you can see Vince Gill on a weekly basis playing with The Time Jumpers, to The Black Keys jumping on stage at the Cannery Ballroom. And Jack White curated a special CMT Crossroads birthday celebration for Willie Nelson at Third Man Records last year."

These three pros can accurately be described as friendly rivals, united by their love of the music while battling for listeners. That means satisfying the base by playing the hits, but it also involves stretching out stylistically in order to hook younger and more adventurous listeners.

"All of us are competing for ears and awareness," Marks acknowledges. "At SiriusXM, we regard terrestrial radio, as well as all of the digital music services that are out there today, as competitors. But we focus on our brand; we focus on developing what we do, and we let them do what they do. At the same time, we certainly are conscious of what they’re doing."
All three of our experts agree that Country broadcasting is a growth industry, just like the music itself. "Country ebbs and flows like any other format, but right now it’s especially hot, and there are a lot of people jumping into it again because it’s hot," says Hunnicutt. "But we were already there, because we’ve believed in the format for a long time in that it has a very broad-based-appeal, it’s family-friendly, advertiser-friendly—and ratings-wise it’s a consistent performer. You still get everything from Luke Bryan to George Strait on a country radio station these days. You get that broad-based appeal, and there are not many formats that can do that. A lot of the formats are niche-oriented, or they turn certain segments of the audience off just by what they play and what they do, but Country doesn’t do that."

"I’m focused on music across all platforms for CMT, and music will always be part of our DNA," says Fram. "We just celebrated the 50th anniversary of CMT Crossroads with Kacey Musgraves and Katy Perry, and saw solid growth on the 2014 CMT Music Awards, which was the most social show of the week on Twitter. The Music & Talent team collaborates closely with CMT’s EVP of Development, Jayson Dinsmore, who oversees original development, and Quinn Brown, who produces our premier music franchise, Hot 20 Countdown. We’re into the second season of our highest-rated show ever, Party Down South. The bolder and louder themes of our original shows coupled with growth on the younger end coincides with the current state of country music. Just look at the titles of what will ultimately be the biggest songs of the summer: ‘Day Drinking,’ ‘Hey Bartender’ and ‘Drunk on a Plane.’ The party has begun."

Like iHeartRadio and CMT, SiriusXM has a nationwide reach, but it’s fundamentally a different beast than its terrestrial competitors. "SiriusXM’s primary metric is subscriber satisfaction," says Marks. "So that’s the measure we use, which is different than ratings-driven methodologies that terrestrial uses. I think the reason people gravitate to satellite radio—at least the four years I’ve been here—is that they want to discover new music, which is what we provide in ample portions in a curated way. We’re able to play all of the hits and all of the songs that terrestrial country music is able to play, and we have the opportunity and the ability to seek out brand new, unfamiliar, unsigned and signed acts to play in addition to hit-based music. The people who come to SiriusXM consciously pay a monthly amount to listen to the radio that they can get free from many other sources. And the anecdotal information that we receive from our listeners is that one of the top reasons why they listen to The Highway, and SiriusXM in general, is to discover new music."

Country has become much more stylistically diverse, bringing in elements of rock and hip-hop. It’s hard to imagine this happening even a few years ago, but it goes to show that the conservative stereotype of the "average Country listener" no longer holds water.
"The new stars of country music were influenced by everything from hip-hop to metal," Fram points out, "and the younger audience grew up listening to everything, including Top 40, so this evolution isn’t surprising. The crossover of ‘Cruise’ with Florida Georgia Line and Nelly is a natural progression. I found this out quickly when going to one of my first country concerts, when the opening music for artists like Eric Church and Brantley Gilbert was System of a Down!"

Says Marks: "SiriusXM and The Highway have played a large role in pushing the envelope, because we championed Florida Georgia Line early on, as well as Cole Swindell, Colt Ford and Brantley Gilbert, and all of them are staples in terrestrial radio today. I think they’re slower to adopt a lot of diverse music, especially in the hip-hop and rock genres, and there’s still some resistance to playing that music because it’s so dramatically different than what mainstream radio currently plays. They continue to debate the merits of the music and its lasting power. But as I look at our audience on The Highway, the listeners love it and they respond to it with their pocketbooks, and that says to me that it belongs on Country music radio. So what we try to do is reflect the current musical tastes, and I feel confident in saying it does not take listeners six months to figure out whether or not they like a song. We play a more adventurous role musically; we play it more actively and aggressively, and we move into and out of a song based on listeners’ tastes. That’s how we work our playlists. If somebody on Outlaw Country has something that works across our platforms, we work to exercise the power of that to drive listening to that programming."

Hunnicutt concurs: "What it says about the audience is they listen to everything. They may be country fans, but they’re also listening to T.I., Lil Jon, Pitbull, Enrique and J.Lo. You go to a Luke Bryan show, and he works in Metallica’s ‘Enter Sandman,’ and the roof comes off the place. And sometimes he’ll do Macklemore’s ‘Can’t Let Go,’ and everybody is singing along. If it’s a good song and they like it, that’s enough. It doesn’t matter if it’s country or pop, hip-hop or rock. The world is changing, and so many people are finding music in so many different areas that they are exposed to things that we may not have even seen yet."

In another example of the spread of country music, CMT, MTV and VH1 teamed up on a cross-brand exclusive video premiere of Miranda Lambert & Carrie Underwood’s "Somethin’ Bad" video, which turned out to generate the highest traffic ever on Viacom’s artist platform. "We just launched the CMT Artist App for country music fans that has tons of exclusive content," adds Fram. "How many executives do you hear talking about music discovery these days? Van Toffler [President of Viacom’s Music & Logo Group] mentions this on a weekly basis."

Clear Channel Country stations have their own On the Verge program, as well as Artist Integration programs, "where we’re basically telling the story of the artist and building the brand, rather than just playing the songs," Hunnicutt explains. "Our iHeartRadio Theater shows in L.A. and New York are really important for that as well. Beyond that, if there’s a local program director who believes in a song enough to get behind it, that’s great too. If they blaze the trail on a song, we’ll see what’s going on and potentially do something broader with it, because we just want great music on the air, no matter where it comes from. So there are multiple layers."
This year marked the inaugural iHeartRadio Country Festival, held in another musical mecca, Austin. "Country is the largest segment of our radio stations, and this is by far one of the most passionate fan bases you will ever see," Hunnicutt says of the thinking behind the fest. "And it’s one thing for a country artist to go into the iHeart Festival in Vegas and play alongside Bon Jovi and P!nk and all these other unbelievable acts, and it’s quite another thing to have a dedicated event where all the acts are mostly friends; they’ve toured together. You get that kind of electricity in a room with passionate fans, and it makes perfect sense. I mean, why wouldn’t we do that?"

Clear Channel and CMT have emphasized the "friendly" in their friendly rivalry by collaborating on a number of initiatives. "In less than a year we’ve partnered on everything from exclusive video premieres with superstar artists to streaming the iHeartRadio Country Festival," Fram notes. "The partnership doubled our radio affiliates for CMT’s radio extension with Cody Alan, who’s hands down one of the best talents in the country and now co-host of Hot 20 Countdown. It’s fun at the end of the day when Cody, Brian and I can sit around and talk about old radio war stories."

"There’s nobody else doing the kind of partnership we have with CMT," says Hunnicutt. "You’ve got two unbelievable brands in iHeartRadio and CMT, and they’ve come together with Cody Allen as our host for After Midnight. Cody does multiple TV shows for CMT and is a big host for them. He’s a wonderful talent. And Bobby Bones was a presenter on the CMT Awards recently. So we cross-pollinate a lot. They’ll hear a record and say, ‘Hey, we’re gonna get behind this; would you all like to join us?’ And we do the same. Brian, Leslie and the team at CMT have been great partners, because we all love music. That’s why we got into this business—to define great music and get it on the air for the listeners. So that is a unique relationship."

CMT, Clear Channel and SiriusXM are also united in the belief that female artists should be a bigger part of Country programming. "There is a definite lack of exposure on terrestrial radio for female artists at this time," says Fram, "and that is why we created the Next Women of Country franchise. If you look at the year-end lists of best country artists from 2013, you’ll see some of our most-played artists including Kacey Musgraves, Brandy Clark, Ashley Monroe and Holly Williams. Our viewers love and relate to these artists. One of the underlying themes of this year’s CMT Music Awards was a celebration of female artists with performances from new artists like Danielle Bradbery, superstars Miranda Lambert and Carrie Underwood to legends like Lee Ann Womack. We will grow the Next Women movement with more performances and hopefully a tour."

"New music comes from all angles," says Hunnicutt. "The key is just for us to have our eyes and ears open looking for it, from a local-market level and from a national level, to be able to see that and seize the day and really try to make a difference. I say all the time, ‘We need hits like artists need hits, like labels need hits, like listeners need hits. We all need hits.’ We’re in very different businesses, but that is the one common denominator—that’s what we’ve all gotta have."

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