The name Jim Asker probably doesn’t ring a bell to you. But as Billboard’s senior manager of the country music charts, some of his decisions over the last decade have been the most titanic, and historically significant.
Where you’d never hear many of the artists you read about on Saving Country Music on your local country radio station, you very well might on the local NPR affiliate.
Beloved and long-time DJ Jeff Hoag is out at radio station WSM in Nashville. As the weeknight host of “WSM At Night” as well as the Opry warm up show, Jeff Hoag became a familiar and beloved voice to many fans.
The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other publications have received fair criticism here for missing the moment in country and roots. But a new New York Times article gets it right.
The idea that print journalism and music media can just trundle forward with business as usual acting like the entire industry isn’t in many ways imploding underneath us doesn’t make sense for anyone.
Like Zach Top’s meteoric success, it symbolizes the resurgence of neotraditional country in the mainstream, and is opening up doors for other traditional country artists.
The massive Boys From Oklahoma extravaganza is happening in Stillwater, Oklahoma this weekend. This is where Cross Canadian Ragweed will officially reunify.
If you want a perfect example of why some of these gross inequities pervade the music industry, one great example is the way the return of Jessica Simpson to music has been so slavishly lauded by the press.
What is “authenticity” in country music, and why is it so important? And should it be? This is a question many love to ask, but the answer isn’t simple. The authenticity question is intertwined with the history of country music.
If you’re to believe the worst of the doomsday predictions about the recent striking down of “Net Neutrality” regulations, we’re headed for a completely divided internet. But in truth, we’re already there.
A massive company is punching down on a upstart outlet, setting a bad precedent that could lock out new voices and fresh perspectives in an ever-crowded, and increasingly difficult media space to survive in.
Crunching election data, a plan was hatched under the premise that if the institution of country music could be assuaged to become a political tool, it could help persuade the rural slice of the American electorate from red to blue.
This is one of the problems with modern popular country radio: the pervasive sameness and predictability. You can seen the next turn-of-phrase coming from a mile away because you’ve heard the same basic song.
At this point, it’s hard to see how CMT continues forward as even a semblance of what it once was after the latest round of layoffs from parent company Paramount gut the country music cable network of top-tier talent.
Though this feature-length article is found in a music publication, this really is more of a lifestyle piece meant to indulge the superiority complex of the interviewer, the interviewee, and the audience.
Whiskey Riff’s unscrupulous journalistic practices are disturbing, and they’re now being exacerbated by deciding that political coverage also needs to be part of the Whiskey Riff diet.
There is a positive sign that perhaps Randall King is finally getting his due. It only took half a decade and two album releases, but Warner Music is finally promoting a proper single to country radio.
The singer, songwriter, and performer originally from Texas is no stranger to the SiriusXM format. In 2022, Sweeney launched “Sunny Side Up” as the 6 am to 12 pm show on the Outlaw’s sister station, Willie’s Roadhouse.
You’re about a week too late yesterday to try and make clickbait hay off the “Hawk Tuah Girl,” but that didn’t stop Rolling Stone from publishing an embarrassing piece of journalistic fellatio late last week
It’s not just that the company has laid off all its journalists and editors. It’s that the work of scores of writers over many years—tens of thousands of articles in total—are now gone, and unlikely to return.
The country music radio landscape in the “Live Music Capital of the World” has just gone through a major shakeup, with the legendary KOKE going fully online, and a new radio station launching catering specifically to Texas country.
Once again, AI as replacement for actual journalism spectacularly fails. This time the culprit is X/Twitter’s “Grok” tool, which the social media giant recently started using to generate news stories native to the application.
Just like many of the other details in the reporting on Beyoncé and country music, the proclamations that country radio initially rejected Beyoncé’s singles are verifiably false. On the contrary, country radio embraced “Texas Hold “Em.”
Allowing an easy way for podcasts to promote tracks, albums, and performers while fairly compensating them for their art seems completely intuitive and well past due. Yet here in 2024, we’re still waiting.