The country music news cycle is finally picking up as we near the summer, which means we hear from a lot more of y’all in the voting and makes this column a lot easier to write; both are great Easter presents for yours, truly! We’ll try to deliver and make this month’s column worth y’all’s time; whether it’s baseball, fishing, hiking, or even a beer on the back porch, spring brings a lot of competition for a little column of country news and numbers. Thankfully, between record voting participation, a new Wallen album tracklist, the results from last month’s Country Album Madness, and the start of the parade of summer album releases, we have a lot to get into regarding the CC50. Below is the full data table; let’s dive in!
Biggest Risers and Fallers
We’ll get into it later, but this month saw many voters chiming in, indicating a broader voting base with less niche artist interests. This was more apparent than in the biggest risers, which contain some big brand names. 6-10 aren’t included in the above table but are equally star-studded, with Combs, Aldean, Strait, Chesney, and Cody Johnson all posting excellent months. Part of this shift could also be listeners moving towards different artists in the spring and summer months. Luke Bryan earned the honor (or dishonor, depending on your perspective) of the king of Spring Break for a reason. Whiskey Myers is the exception to the rest of the top 10 risers, making a deserved appearance in anticipation of their late-April release of the single “Time Bomb,” their first release in 3 years.
On the other hand, April was not as kind to several of the young stars of the country world. Gossett and Barber had been on good runs, so there is likely just some basic regression to the mean going on here; Barber has the new April single “Man of the Year” for voters to weigh in on in May, which could help his numbers. Charles Wesley Godwin has more to be concerned about, as he has steadily descended the CC50 since its inception. What was once a 45% Interest has evaporated to sub-30%, even as he released music. His beautiful West Virginia storytelling style is unique, but hasn’t seemed to connect with listeners as much since Family Ties.
Quick Hits
- One of the driving motivators behind the launch of the CC50 a year and a half ago was to answer the question, Is there seasonality behind music fans’ interest? Does the time of year affect the amount of interest and which artists’ fans gravitate towards? We don’t have enough data to answer these questions definitively, but some definite indicators exist. One of the more marked trends is that there seems to be a cyclical pattern, with average interest peaking in the summer months and declining in the fall and winter. This is an industry-wide average, so it doesn’t speak to each individual artist (for example, Zach Top’s rise to popularity occurred in the fall and winter, perhaps partly because of a relative lack of competition), but it sets an interesting baseline pattern. Of course, a lot of it could be explained by there being more spring/summer concerts and releases, but I suspect at least part of it is due to different listener habits. I know quite a few people who only listen to country music during the summer months and are drawn to other genres for the rest of the year.
‹
- Many artists have difficulty sustaining success at the top; even successful artists like Zach Bryan and Chris Stapleton have seen a definite fall in their numbers since the launch of the CC50. The one artist that has been immune to that so far is Morgan Wallen. Currently, at the peak of his career with regular releases and a remarkably wide-ranging fanbase, he has been extremely consistent at the top of the rankings and set his highest interest ever at 78%. Even when he has played second fiddle in the CC50 rankings, first to Zach Bryan and now to Zach Top, he usually draws more votes than they do (just more negative votes), meaning he has the strongest brand recognition (positive and negative combined) in the game. The chart below illustrates his remarkable consistency.
- Overall listener interest rose again in April, continuing a strong run with an Interest percentage of 40.3% (indicating that the average artist on the CC50 has 4 in 10 audience members interested in their releases), up a point from last month and 3 points over February. The overall vote count was 659,660, setting the record for most votes by 150k. Additionally, more than 19,000 voters weighed in on Morgan Wallen this month, shattering the individual artist mark previously held by Zach Bryan of 15,953 votes, set exactly a year ago in April 2024.
Behind the Scenes of Country Central Madness.
Yes, this is not Wildcard Watch, but hopefully, y’all will be able to survive being bereft of your favorite Inside the CC50 segment. While we love getting updates on what’s going on in “Country Central’s other monthly voting” (Editor’s Note: No one has ever called the CC50 Wildcard voting that), another voting last month was heavily related to the CC50 and deserves a little attention. March Madness is a content creator’s dream, as it generates community interaction and brings out the competitive side of people. That said, it takes some doing to keep a country music bracket from blending in with the million other brackets that flood social media (it’s hard to believe, but when we did the first Country Central Madness several years ago, there were almost no brackets in the country music social media world, it is wild how much the space has grown in the last 5 years). We also wanted to avoid it turning into a carbon copy of the CC50, so we chose to do the voting based on albums, an easily identifiable and different category that is easily separated into 4 decades. We based seeding off the commercial success of albums to wash our hands of the inevitable “what were y’all thinking ranking X over Y??” comments.
All in all, the album bracket was a big success, even if the result was predictable. The engagement was enormous, with voting peaking at about 70k per matchup, a massive number. The ‘90s and ‘00s quadrants produced some big upsets and fun matchups that even I had to think about when voting – A Lot About Living vs Blue Clear Sky or Unleashed vs Wide Open, anyone? However, perhaps the biggest takeaway is how much Garth Brooks has impacted his legacy with the younger generations by not putting his catalog on streaming services. Obviously, he is still wildly popular and sells out shows. Still, the fact that Trisha Yearwood squeaked him before getting absolutely demolished by Alan Jackson in the second round is very concerning for the best-selling solo artist of all time. Don’t get me wrong, I love Trisha and Alan (more than I love Garth, to be honest!), but when they were all making music in the ’90s, those two never belonged in the same breath as Garth, who was posting eye-popping sales for any genre, let alone country.
Nothing there was too surprising as far as the actual Final Four went. Of course, One Thing at a Time would always win, and Wide Open and This One’s For You were always excellent bets to come out of their decade quadrants. Of all of them, Blue Clear Sky was the only one I couldn’t have predicted, but it was likely the result of some artist-based voting rather than album-based voting. When compiling the list of albums, I was shocked to see Blue Clear Sky clock in at such a low seed, but George Strait was a lot more about consistency than hit albums. Almost every one of his 31(!) albums has a hit, but none have the 4 or 5 mega-song lineups that many of the other albums in the bracket have. For example, Blue Clear Sky has “I Can Still Make Cheyenne”, “Blue Clear Sky,” and… maybe “Carried Away” qualifies as a hit. At the end of the day, I think a lot of it is just a difference in albums between then and today. Wallen will never release 31 commercially successful albums, but his 36-song albums will inevitably produce more hits than Strait’s eight-song albums.
Well, as much as I appreciate y’all taking the time to join us here like you do every month, all those things I mentioned at the beginning of the article should be calling your name right about now. At least if you live in the South as I do, the window between pollen season and the oppressive summer heat is short-lived, so now is the time to get outside. Maybe turn on some good music (Wallen, Church, or Zac Brown Band, if you ask this month’s voters) and enjoy the good weather. That means it’s time to run to rec league softball, maybe drop a fly ball or two, and wait for the Minnesota Twins to give me the call-up to the majors. The way they’re playing this year, I expect to hear from them any day; I’ll keep y’all posted. 😉
