Welcome back to Inside the CC50! After a month’s hiatus while we were focusing on running the March Madness brackets of best country songs by decade, we’re back and ready to cover the power ranking moves that always start to pick up this time of year. But before we do, I want to give y’all our sincere thanks for participating in the March Madness bracket. I’ve been doing those for five years now, and this year’s was unquestionably my favorite. We had high participation (average of 25k votes per matchup, closer to 50k in the later rounds), some big upsets (#15 Springsteen in the final and no Morgan Wallen or Zach Bryan entries in the Final Four, a first in my time doing these), and most of all, a lot of love for Toby Keith, who landed 50% of the Final Four entries and the ultimate champion, a well-deserved “Should Have Been a Cowboy.
”Things haven’t been quiet on the CC50 front either, though. Ella has absolutely nailed the build-up to Dandelion, her album that was released earlier this month. The voting took place before its release, but her 80%+ Interest suggests there will be lofty expectations from the audience. She’s not the only artist riding the pre-release wave at the moment, though. Cody Johnson has seen a recent surge, releasing several strong songs leading up to his June album (and notably sports the lowest Disinterest percentage in the whole CC50). Further back, artists like Jason Aldean and even Noah Kahan have big April albums that came out after the voting and await the voters’ verdict in the upcoming May voting. We have a lot to cover this month, so let’s jump in with the full rankings as always:
Biggest Risers and Fallers
Long-time readers will notice a little different format here this month, as in the past, we’ve separated the Biggest Risers and the Biggest Fallers into two distinct sections. This month, though, we’re trying it with them combined into one table, I think it makes it easier to see some of the broader trends and reduce clutter. For example, this month, there’s one thing that should jump out immediately. The Biggest Risers data points are a lot greener than the Biggest Fallers. On the surface, that seems to make sense; after all, green is good and red is bad. But if you think about it, the higher your interest rate, the harder it is to add to it. Let’s say there was an artist that every single voter in the CC50 was interested in and had a 100% Interest% (I know, I know, this is wildly unrealistic, even for our patron saint Dolly). It would be literally impossible for them to experience a rise in interest rates the next month. It’s the reason that artists who have had a really strong run in the CC50 usually end up in the Biggest Fallers category eventually. It is less extreme as you get into the 60% range, where this month’s Biggest Risers Interest% lands, but it remains a fact that it is harder to climb from 60% to 70% than it is to climb from 20% to 30%, making it notable that all five Biggest Risers rose from a higher Interest percentage than all five Biggest Fallers fell from.
Moving from the big picture to some of the more specific narratives here, it’s hard to trace out reasons for the strong performance from most of these Biggest Risers. One theory is that it’s a result of the March Madness voting directly preceding the April CC50 voting. Every year that pulls in voters and engagement that normally aren’t interacting with the CC50, and might have boosted the resume of these bigger names like Johnson, Combs, and Strait. Cody Johnson in the top spot also makes some sense in the lead-up to his new album, On the Banks of the Trinity, as releases like “Traveling Soldier” and “Blame Texas” have excited fans. On the flip side, the undeniable correlation between Adcock and Mason continued. It seems like every month one goes up, so does the other, and vice versa.
Quick Hits
- After 6 months of tight jockeying for the top spot after Zach Top’s undisputed reign came to an end, Ella Langley finally not only claimed her three-peat atop the rankings last month, but she did so in convincing fashion, opening up a jaw-dropping 9-point gap over the second-place Zach Top, breaking the record for the biggest gap between the first and second-place artists. The previous record was 8.2% between Zach Top and Riley Green all the way back in December of 2024. The gap narrowed a bit this month as Top gained some ground back, but 7.2% is still a larger gap than anything we’ve seen in over a year and the 5th-largest gap of all time. The full table for the past year is below – notice the tightening margins in the late summer of last year as Top fell back to the pack, followed by 6 months of very tight margins, and now Ella’s burst here in the spring.
On a related note, thinking about the gap between the #1 and #2 spots got me wondering what the average historical gap between all the places in the CC50 has been. The chart below shows the answer, mapping the Average Interest percentage for each of the 50 places over the 2.5 years of data. You’ll notice immediately that the graph is not a straight line, meaning that there are bigger gaps between certain ranks than others (e.g., the difference between #1 and #10 is much bigger (25-point gap on average) than the gap between #31 and #40 (8-point gap on average). I have three key takeaways below the graph:
- As I pointed out above, the steepest portion of the graph is in the 1-10 range, meaning the gaps between the top 10 artists are more pronounced than that of the middle of the pack. That makes climbing the rankings much harder once you get into the top-ten than when you are lower down and a couple points in Interest% gained can shoot you up a handful of spots in the rankings.
- You’ll notice a small “fishhook” in the middle of the top ten, where it flattens out for the #4 and #5 spots, before resuming a steep decline. This is because for most of the CC50’s history, there was a pretty clear Fantastic Five, and then everybody else. Zach Bryan, Morgan Wallen, Cody Johnson, Luke Combs, and Riley Green stood out from the rest of the rankings for the first 18 months of the CC50, with Zach Bryan being replaced by Zach Top more recently. This trend is starting to break up, however, as Ella Langley has broken out and Wallen and Green’s popularity has dwindled down to the low 60s, not that different from Stapleton and Treaty Oak on their heels.
- Finally you’ll notice how the slope picks up right at the end, suggesting that the final five artists tend to sit a good bit back from the rest of the CC50. This is simply a product of the wildcard cycling. While there have been some great success stories, the vast majority of wildcards struggle to break 20% Interest and usually sit further behind #40-45 than you would expect given the trend line.
- Overall listener interest held steady in April, with an Interest percentage of 36.8% (indicating that the average artist on the CC50 has 3.7 in ten audience members interested in their releases). The overall vote count was 397,300, higher than the past few months, but lower than previous Aprils.
Spring is always a fun time for the CC50. The rate of releases is picking up a lot, the concert season is in full swing (I can attest Knoxville is abuzz for Luke Combs in Neyland Stadium, should be a great time!), and of course, those bring the news cycles and shifting voting with them. More music is always a great thing, especially when the sports calendar is slow. You are a fan of as profoundly disappointing a franchise as the Minnesota Twins (although they did pull off a rare win even as I wrote this article, you know what they say about the blind squirrel and the nut, or in this case, the Twins’ bats and the ball). We’ll call it a wrap there before I get further afield and write more sentences a grammar teacher would shudder to diagram, but thanks for reading as always, and we’ll see you in a week for May’s voting!
