The 2025 Saving Country Music State of the Union Address


Welcome, please be seated.

Let’s start this off by saying something that I don’t say enough, which is how much I appreciate each and every one of you who stops by Saving Country music on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. It is you who’ve allowed me to do something that I love, and it’s your presence that has allowed this website to wield positive influence upon country music, however grand or small. We’ve all turned each other onto some of the most meaningful music of our lives, while also hopefully shining a collective spotlight onto important music to help support it and have it be there for future generations to enjoy as well.

Despite the rather large distractions of pop and hip-hop stars like Post Malone and Beyoncé releasing projects pushed to the country market in 2024—and the ever-present drag of radio-oriented pop country tunes—the genre continues to improve in the aftermath of the Bro-Country country era. This includes the mainstream overall, along with the independent side of country music that continues to gain market share, and support artists all the way up to the arena level.

The health of country music is strong, though there is still much to do, with artists worthy of greater recognition still being left behind, women still not receiving their fair share of attention, and the ever-present concern of country music backsliding towards the next potentially dubious era when the bean counters on Music Row attempt to recapture control of the genre from the artists and their fans.

One of the greatest challenges we face moving forward is how to meet the rising volume of songs and albums that make it increasingly difficult find what might most appeal to you. Where a website like Saving Country Music might seem woefully obsolete in the age of streaming to some, even Spotify’s recommendations regularly overlook up-and-coming artists, and have become increasingly anti-democratic in how songs get playlisted and pushed to listeners, making musical Sherpas even more useful than before, at least in certain cases.

It’s not just the amount of artists and albums, it’s the amount of music overall that is increasing on a yearly basis. 20 and 30-song albums are now common, if not the norm, as is a single artist releasing two or three EPS a year, or a full-length album and an EP, along with random singles. This in itself makes for an awesome responsibility simply trying to keep up with everything and present it to the public in some sort of organized fashion, let alone offering thoughtful and valuable review material and curation.

Saving Country Music published 122 individual album reviews for 2024 albums. That doesn’t include song reviews, song features via the Top 25 Current Playlist, and scores of live reviews from festivals and local shows. The sheer volume of reviews is enough to overwhelm even advanced listeners. Add on top of this the release radar posts published three times a year and updated in real time that at least mention most all relevant albums, and you have an insane amount of opportunities to find your next favorite song, album, or artist.

Ironically though, what continues to be the most common and fruitful vector of attack against Saving Country Music is how so and so’s record didn’t get reviewed or featured, and how this is assumed to be a purposeful slight or outright rebuke of the title or artist as opposed to people understanding the impossibility of featuring every single album in review form when upwards of 30 albums can be released to the country and roots market every single week. Exacerbating the issue is how some believe it’s the media’s obligation to affirm their already-established opinions on music as opposed to challenging them and presenting them something new, which is Saving Country Music’s focus.

Certain artists, fans, and members of the industry have completely sworn off Saving Country Music simply because someone’s record didn’t see a review. On a personal level, this also plays against my workaholic nature, and my personal passion to attempt to elevate independent music in album review form. So even though I know it is difficult to impossible to feature everything, I nonetheless attempt to do so in a way that sometimes can be counterproductive and detrimental to other important music coverage, along with taxing on my personal life.

Some still believe that the singular role of Saving Country Music is to post in-depth album reviews as opposed to also broaching critical subjects on the way country music is discussed in the media and Academia, perceived in the public, and managed from an industry standpoint. All of these things are critical issues to the effort to save country music, including, if not especially issues such as Beyoncé and her supposed country album.

Though album reviews always have been and always will be a cornerstone of Saving Country Music coverage, sometimes other subject matter takes greater precedent, even if it’s something you don’t particularly enjoy reading. This isn’t just a music recommendation website. It was a website founded to save country music, with one of its many functions being music recommendation and review.

The continued challenges presented by the volume of music releases was not the only adversity Saving Country Music faced in 2024. After publishing a critical, but comparatively anodyne article about Morgan Wallen and the challenges country music faced through his stardom, the site experienced a malicious DDoS attack of the size and scope certain internet security professionals said they had never seen brought to bear on a website of this size, making it unreachable for the longest period in the site’s history.

Though this was eventually resolved, gross mismanagement by Saving Country Music’s hosting service and an outside development company meant people still had trouble connecting to the website, and eventually resulted in the website being hacked and taken offline multiple times in August. And while these hacks were actually minor in scope and could have been resolved in minutes, they took hours because of the hosting company dragging its feet. Even worse, once the hacks were resolved, someone had told Google to stop cataloging the website, resulting in a crash of traffic by some 60%.

To add insult to injury, during this time, the same hosting company said they no longer wanted to work with Saving Country Music. So along with having to deal with a litany of daisy chaining technical issues, I had to find a new home for the website. As a result, I probably would never recommend anyone do business with Pair Networks out of Pittsburgh.

The good news is that the new hosting company, rocket.net, has been absolutely incredible. And no, this is not a paid endorsement. As soon as the site was moved, virtually all the technical issues went away or were resolved, the site started loading faster than it ever has, and they continue to be incredible partners for making sure the website is accessible and healthy. The ultimate stress test is the annual live blog during the CMA Awards when many thousands of people try to access the website at the same time. Rocket.net passed with flying colors.

One problem, however, is both the DDoS attack, the hacks, the extended loss of Google traffic, as well as a slight increase in monthly hosting fees, and a slight decrease in ad revenue across the online publishing industry means that despite still receiving strong traffic—especially for a web property with only one primary contributor—Saving Country Music is facing financial headwinds. This is also facilitated by the fact that the site has one of the lightest ad sets you will ever see on the internet, including no video streams for core readers, no paywall, and no ads within the reading space.

For Saving Country Music to be effective, it’s imperative that it remains free, open, and inviting to everyone. So paywalls or subscription schemes even for certain bits of content are a non-starter. The site has always been more of a financial burden than an asset. But to close the budget gap, and ensure a sustainable and long future, ads might start appearing in the middle of longer articles, and/or a tip jar might be employed, along with general belt tightening here at SCM headquarters.

Please feel free to share your opinion as a reader as to what you think might be the least intrusive option, and the one you’re most likely to interface with. And yes, short-run merch sales might finally happen to also support the site.

Yet another emerging challenge is the onset of AI. Though the fear of outright replacement by AI models still seems to be a concern that is years away—and is more deleterious in the realm of image generation and artificial song creation—AI is nonetheless encroaching in more subtle and slowly painful ways. Along with a few isolated incidents of people using chat GPT to reconstitute original articles published here, Google AI now presents search results right on the search page as opposed to facilitating people visiting the website itself to find the information they’re seeking, resulting in further loss of revenue.

To be frank, all of these adversities made it appear that attempting to keep Saving Country Music going into 2025 as a full-time pursuit seemed foolish. Saving Country Music will never go away, but devoting 72 hours a week to it as is presently called for did not feel smart. Yet after the technical revival thanks to rocket.net, and some surprising strength in the latter half of 2024 and early 2025, there seems to be no reason to not keep this thing going into the foreseeable future.

That said, things must continue to evolve so that Saving Country Music as both a website and an organization can both sustain into the future, and hopefully continue to influence the musical marketplace in a positive manner moving forward. This might mean focusing a little less on making sure an article or two is posted every single day (Saturdays have been optional for a while), and worrying less about posting about every little news item, and focusing more on big important subjects.

Similarly, as things continue to move towards video formats and social media, so must Saving Country Music. Some of SCM’s pursuits and objectives happen behind-the-scenes in ways that don’t always result in “content,” but that are critically important for moving the music forward, an advocating for artists. As time goes on, bigger projects and opportunities might be pursued, or perhaps must be, to keep the positive momentum going.

In many respects, it’s not if AI will ultimately make many of our jobs obsolete—especially in music—but when, and how. The bigger question is what we can do now to help shape that future in a way that is equitable to creators, and can afford even more freedom to musicians who express things the rest of us struggle to as opposed to sidelining them for inferior technological replacements.

Time and technology are not going to wait around on any of us. They are going to trundle forward boldly and sometimes foolishly. But as technology continues to encroach on our everyday lives, the pull of things that are rootsy and real like country music will only become more appealing as a respite and retreat from digital immersion and incursion. How to continue to leverage technology for the betterment of country music as opposed to bellyaching about how things once were is the exciting challenge we all must tackle.

As always, thanks for reading.

–Kyle “Trigger” Coroneos

© 2025 Saving Country Music