Ah, Christmas in the country music world is the most wonderful time of the year when we get the obligatory Brett Eldredge Christmas album and not much else in the way of new music. But hey, that’s the great thing about being the CC50 writer: there’s always content for me to write about while my far more talented single-review counterparts at Country Central have to fight over which of the conglomeration of live recordings, unnecessary Christmas covers, and low-profile singles they want to review each week. It’s not like there’s a shortage of CC50 content, either. In December, we saw the highest Interest score ever recorded, the biggest fall in a single month, the first former top ten artist to fall out of the CC50, and the 5th highest Wildcard debut of 2025. Let’s jump into the numbers and find out more about these:
Biggest Risers & Fallers
While the bottom half of the rankings was pretty stable this month, the top half was anything but. A few prominent chart toppers took dives (we’ll get into that in a second), but even more saw solid growth in interest. Each of the top five increases came from the top 20 of the CC50, an impressive feat when interest in your music is already high. The most notable here is – stop me if you’ve heard this before – Zach Top, as his eight point increase (only six points if you adjust for the general two-point rise across the market this month) boosted his Interest% to a jaw-dropping 84.6%. You might be asking if we’ve ever seen an artist with 80%+ Interest before; the answer is no. Only two artists have even broken the 78% Interest threshold, Zach Bryan (three times) and Luke Combs (two times), the most recent being Bryan in May of this year. The Red Clay Strays also broke into the top 15 this month with a nearly seven-point increase on the back of their Live at the Ryman this past month – not too shabby for a group that wasn’t even in the rankings at this time last year.
As we hinted earlier, it was not as merry of a Christmas for several of the biggest names in the country. The headliner here is Zach Bryan, who continues the freefall he began just a few months ago; that’s notable enough that we’ll highlight some of its significance in its own Quick Hits feature. But interestingly, three names often joined at the hip, Post Malone, Wallen, and ERNEST, all simultaneously dived. While Malone’s fall off after the F-1 Trillion on the CC50 is well documented, it hasn’t previously impacted Wallen and ERNEST. This suggests that we could be seeing more of a low turnout in voting from country fans who enjoy that trio, as there is a significant amount of overlap. We see this from time to time, with various groups of artists similar to each other, which will have better or worse months depending on what demographics turn out to vote. Perhaps I’ll do a segment on the CC50 artists whose results are correlated the most strongly here in the next few months.
Quick Hits
- As promised, we have to spend one of this month’s features looking at Zach Bryan’s drop from 65% interest to 57% interest in just one month. But first, let’s address the elephant in the room: no, 65% minus 57% is not a drop of -10.1% like the last column in the table below shows. However, you have to adjust for overall market sentiment from a statistical perspective. If the market sours on everybody, and everybody’s Interest drops by 8%, then it isn’t particularly notable if an individual artist drops by 8%. However, suppose voters are engaged in a particular month, and the average interest increases by 2%. Suddenly, an artist shedding 8% Interest is even more significant in that case, roughly equivalent to a 10% drop in an average month.
With that in mind, ZB’s 10-point market-adjusted Interest % drop becomes even more historic – the biggest-of-all-time-historic. As you can see in the chart below, Oliver Anthony (whose fall off caused quite a stir on the CC50 at the time) had two worse unadjusted months (October and November of 2023), but both were in months where the market generally did poorly. When the market adjustment is made, Zach Bryan stands atop the list and does so by nearly one and a half points, which is an unenviable achievement. What does this mean? Well, it’s hard to say, and ranking #10 in the CC50 is still quite the achievement. Perhaps his live album, released in December, will also drum up some audience interest. But for months now, there have been warning signs that audience fatigue with ZB was reaching a breaking point, and it feels like an inflection point.
- December’s voting was also historic for another artist, with several entries in that table we just looked at, such as HARDY. HARDY was flying high when we launched the CC50 in the fall of 2023. He took 7th place in the inaugural voting, with an impressive 60% of the audience interested in his new music. Fast forward 15 months, and he has become the first of the top 10 artists to fall out of the CC50, taking 47th with sub-20% Interest this month. What happened? Well, there’s likely a few factors going on here. The answer that many people will jump to will be that he has leaned into rock music lately, so the CC50 can’t accurately measure his music. That is true, although I would contest that the CC50 does measure his music quite well – as country music. It’s similar to Noah Kahan; if enough country fans view his music as country and are interested, he deserves a spot on the CC50. If they don’t see it as the country, they will not be interested in it, and it will fall off organically without any artificial work needed from us.
The numbers back up this theory about HARDY’s music as well. If people saw his music as becoming much worse than it was previously, we’d expect to see his Disinterest% rise, whereas if people don’t even see his music as country, they’ll either skip the question or vote Unsure. Sure enough, in this time series below, we see his Interest % consistently falling while his Unsure % steadily rises. Yes, there is about a 15% increase in Disinterest, indicating that work like Quit!! It hasn’t landed the way “Wait in the Truck” or “TRUCK BED” did last year, but overall, it seems like the country music world has passed HARDY and his rock phase by for now. Perhaps new work in 2025 will change the narrative, but for now, HARDY joins the wildcards on the outside looking in, which, in a poetic sense, I think he just might be happy with.
- Overall listener interest jumped noticeably in December, with an Interest percentage of 38.5% (indicating that the average artist on the CC50 has 3.9 in 10 audience members interested in their releases), up from last month’s mark of 36.5%. This is the third consecutive month with an increase and the most positive audience mood since the first half of this year. The overall vote count was 363,658.
Wildcard Watch
December saw two of the stronger exciting Wildcard debuts of 2024, with Hudson Westbrook (#27, 31.7% interest) and Braxton Keith (#36, 26.4% interest) making the immediate impact we predicted in last month’s column. Westbrook at #27 was the 5th highest Wildcard debut of 2024, behind Post Malone (#10, June), George Strait (#11, July), Ella Langley (#18, August), and Red Clay Strays (#25, January), an exceptional list to be a part of. Keith was the 12th-highest wildcard debut of the year. Behind Westbrook’s self-titled November album and Braxton Keith’s December EP “Blue,” there will be fresh content for voters to vote on in January. Still, I would not be surprised to see a strong performance. Conversely, wildcard veterans and fellow December debutants Justin Moore, Old Dominion, and Keith Urban returned to the Wildcard voting after finishing 48th, 49th, and 50th, respectively.
In January, we’ll be welcoming back some old friends, such as 49 Winchester (5th promotion), Dylan Marlowe (first CC50 appearance since June 2024), Midland (3rd promotion and first appearance since September 2024), Sturgill Simpson (2nd promotion and first since September 2024 as well), and the Castellows (bouncing right back in after falling out last month) make up the promotion class. They’ll all be hoping to make some traction that they haven’t in the past, but the lack of new music outside of recent singles from 49 Winchester and the Castellows makes it hard to predict much of a splash. Instinctively, the Castellows feel like they might be in the best spot to make a run, given their relative lack of recognition until this year, but we’ll see what next month’s voting holds!
It’s been another fantastic year sharing these columns with you. I can’t express how grateful I am to see you here each month. I’m hoping to have a year-over-year CC50 comparison for the first article of 2025—we’ll see what I can whip up. But for now, the College Football Playoff games are calling my name, so I’ll wrap up here. Merry Christmas from all of us here at Country Central. See you all in the New Year!
