Is something amiss in the major label world? Two of country music’s major entities are cutting staff, and no matter how they spin it, when you’re downsizing as opposed to growing, it’s usually not a good sign.
Alan Jackson was the inaugural recipient of the ACM Alan Jackson Lifetime Achievement Award at the 60th Annual ACM Awards in Dallas (Frisco), TX. Announced right before he took the stage.
It’s just the ACM Awards. And it’s just their “New Artist of the Year” categories that are split into three separate awards. But the good guys won, and it does perhaps portend positive things for the future.
The 2024 ACM Awards had many pondering the question, is it better for an awards show to be bad for the inadvertent entertainment value as opposed to being so boring you want to gouge your eyeballs out?
Instead of importing pop stars to fill out the performance roster, why not pick up on some of the fast-rising independent stars that are quickly outpacing the popularity of country’s 2nd-tier mainstream performers?
Every year as the nominations for country music awards come and go, it’s hard to not fall into a perfunctory attitude about them due to the cyclical and predictable nature of the nominees.
ACM Entertainer of the Year Chris Stapleton hadn’t headed to a bar in Dallas to celebrate, and didn’t immediately hop on a bus to head home.
Feel free to follow along as we razz performers for their bad music, poke fun of people for poor style decisions, and maybe give some praise for the good stuff that transpires as well.
Everybody calm down. It’s just the ACM Awards. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t celebrate that the good guys won.
After NBC Universal purchased a 30% stake in the Grand Ole Opry’s parent company Ryman Hospitality in 2022, you knew there would be an effort to cross-pollinate the two companies for better or worse. Lo and behold, come September we will now have the “People’s Choice Country Awards.”
Country music as a genre is unique in how it has its own dedicated award show organizations, and two of them as a matter of fact, and both of which that have been around for well over 50 years. But neither of them is the CMT Awards.
There was a pretty catastrophic oversight by both the ACM Awards and Amazon in their streaming awards show experiment, and one that alienated the most key demographic for a presentation such as the ACM Awards: country fans who live in the country.
Though the plan was to retire this particular annual live event commentary amid the rapid decline of popular award shows and the lack of interest they create, since this year the ACM’s are making a seismic shift to streaming online through Amazon Prime…
Shit! No, not necessarily these nominations. Well, kind of the nominations as well. But the fact that by some obligatory sense of duty by the powers vested in me as the owner/operator of a country music website, I must convey the nominees of the 2022 ACM Awards, which have fallen so far down in relevancy […]
So now the biggest radio personality in mainstream country—the grandiose and bespectacled Bobby Bones—who is always laboring to be the undivided center of attention, took to TikTok to say the quiet part out loud, and is now drawing the ire of many in the industry.
Look I get it. Worrying over country music awards shows is similar to worrying over country radio. It’s not that they don’t have an effect on the music at all. It’s just that as every year passes, they go on to serve a smaller and smaller niche of the country music market.
So often identity-based media coverage and awards are not about the artists themselves. These media members, outlets, and awards institutions use these artists as tokens and sometimes unwitting pawns to signal their virtue to the public and their peers in the industry.
Even if you weren’t particularly into country music or whatever the awards show was covering, you didn’t want to be the only person standing around the water cooler at work or in the lunchroom at school the next day who didn’t see the CMAs or the ACMs, even if it was just to hate on them.
It wasn’t just the arrangement, the cool special guests, the poignant setting, and the timing of it all, it’s how it all conspired to create a special moment and a rather spectacular performance that in the throes of the otherwise mediocre ACM Awards really shined out as something sincere.
Welcome ladies and gentlemen to the 2021 ACM Awards LIVE blog, where for the next three hours (gulp), we will follow along in real time, razzing rich and famous people for the way their dressed, praising the few real country music personalities that they actually let on the show.
Now let’s not get too ahead of ourselves here. But if you know anything about Alan Jackson and awards shows, you know he’s the ultimate wild card. He’s got no truck or patience for your pedantics, and dog and pony awards show nonsense.
Didn’t we just endure an installment of the ACM Awards just a few short months ago? Well yes we did. But thanks to COVID-19 the last cycle was protracted, and here it has come back around again. Whoopee. Get ready for (mostly) the same parade of names that get nominated every year.
The media landscape in music just got a lot more cloistered, oligarchical, and insular. Announced recently, Rolling Stone’s parent company Penske Media Corp. (or PMC) has entered into a joint venture with Billboard’s parent company called MRC to bring the two biggest music media companies together.
Mickey Guyton made one of the greatest impacts during this week’s ACM Awards. But as we have seen from the media on numerous occasions, important moments for black country artists in the past are being overlooked to score a buzzy headline or tweet.