It is hard to believe it is almost July, but the 99-degree temps outside as I write this would make me a liar – it doesn’t get much more July in Tennessee than stepping into an oven whenever you open the door. Besides, June was a great month in its own right, with long-anticipated releases from Parker McCollum, Zach Top, Brian Kelley (okay, maybe he’s the odd one out here, but Sunshine State of Mind Season 2 was surprisingly fun; check it out!), and even a song from Tyler Childers. We also got to experience the blast that is CMA Fest and watch as the Grammys scrambled to do damage control by announcing a new “Traditional Country Album” so that they could feel comfortable giving the other awards to artists who once came within a 4-hour drive of a corn field.
June also brought some changes in the CC50, including some pretty surprising shifts. Most notably, the bubble of interest building over the first half of the year for Morgan Wallen’s album seems to have burst, as he shed a substantial 8 points in interest, sliding down to 6th from 2nd. Perennial summer favorites Kenny Chesney and Luke Bryan saw their usual seasonal bump. Tyler Childers and Gavin Adcock saw increasing interest in the run-up to their album releases later this summer. Below is the full data table:
Biggest Risers
When you’re on as hot of a run as Zach Top seems to be, announcing an album (Ain’t In it for My Health, out in August) is enough to push you over the rarified 80%+ interest threshold. Now comes the tricky part: keeping that interest as he releases music from it. Post Malone struggled to keep fans’ attention as the hype turned into actual music. We’ll get our first indications next month as voters weigh in on the initial single, “Good Times & Tan Lines,” his first release since “Beer for Breakfast” almost a year ago. It puts the feel-good 90s sound we associate with him front and center, but it felt uninspired lyrically. Adcock and Childers also have to feel great about the public’s anticipation for their releases later this summer, and Kenny Chesney remains the king of spring and summer. We only have 2 years of data, but from March, he has averaged 38% interest and 33% in all other months, a fairly noticeable difference that jumps out in the graph below.
Biggest Fallers
The big news here is, at least in the early results, Wallen’s big album release last month has been a flop. Not only did he shed 8 points month-over-month since releasing I’m the Problem, but this is actually the second lowest Interest score Wallen has logged since the inception of the CC50. His lowest score was 66.4% back in December ‘24, notably at his deadest period before he started releasing singles from I’m the Problem throughout the first half of 2025. Hopefully for him, listeners will warm to the massive album. Still, for now, it seems like the lengthy tracklist overwhelms listeners and makes it hard to resonate with individual songs. The fact that his early-release singles almost universally boosted his CC50 Interest numbers also seems to back that theory, as fans only had to digest one or two songs at a time. Lainey Wilson also saw a disappointing slide (while remaining in the top half of the rankings) ahead of her deluxe version of Whirlwind scheduled for August. “Somewhere Over Laredo” was much less tacky than I expected of a Wizard of Oz tribute; I found it enjoyable and a great fit for Lainey’s delivery.
Quick Hits
- This month, we’re introducing a new metric to the existing 42 metrics we track for each artist, called Interest-Engagement Gap. The idea is to identify outlier artists with unique attributes by combining our two biggest metrics, Interest and Engagement. Interest measures voters’ interest in a particular artist. Engagement measures how well-known an artist is by combining voters who like and dislike the artist (and ignoring those who don’t have an opinion about an artist), creating a proxy for name recognition. Obviously, someone like Luke Combs will have high Interest and high Engagement, whereas some newer artists in the bottom half of the CC50 will likely have low Interest and low Engagement. Where it gets interesting is the other two quadrants: artists with high Interest and low Engagement (potential breakouts) and artists with low Interest and high Engagement (controversial stars). The chart below shows the ten biggest outliers on both the high and low end. The results were fairly expected. The five highest Interest-Engagement Scores were all from artists with engagement below 50%, and they are all artists with small but dedicated fan bases. On the flip side, Wallen, Wilson, Davis, Post Malone, and HARDY have been dominating the radio for the last few years, so they have a large listening base but also have earned a lot of people who don’t care for their music. Lainey Wilson is actually the reason I decided to dig into this. She routinely posts top engagement numbers on the CC50, but her interest numbers are only slightly above average, at #21 in the rankings.
- It’s the question we’ve all wondered at some point: how long will it take for Noah Kahan to fall off the CC50? As someone who has no skin on whether he is on (that’s up to the voters), it has shocked me how long he has hung on. Stick Season was admittedly laced with themes that resonated strongly with country music listeners (including myself!). Still, Kahan has made no indication that he considers himself part of the genre or plans to release more music similar to Stick Season. That has taken a toll on his CC50 interest, as he has fallen from his peak of #10 and 50% interest (February 24) to #41 and 23.3% Interest. By my completely accurate back-of-the-napkin, he has lost an average of 1.7% Interest per month. Given that the average interest demotion cut-off has been 21.2%, Kahan will have two more months of 1.7% decreases before falling below that 21.2% threshold. That said, falling artists tend to hit some resistance at the demotion cut-off line, so I will double that number to 4 months and predict that Kahan will fall off in October’s CC50. If I’m right, I’ll make sure to remind y’all. Otherwise, I’ll let this prediction fade into obscurity. 🙂
- Overall listener interest decreased slightly in June (but still elevated over the CC50 historical average), with an Interest percentage of 38.1% (indicating that the average artist on the CC50 has 4 in 10 audience members interested in their releases). The overall vote count was the second highest at 595,456, behind only the record set two months ago in April.
Wildcard Watch
Vincent Mason leads the way into July’s voting as the top wildcard vote-getter, with Midland (it wouldn’t be a Wildcard Watch without at least one reference to everyone’s favorite Austin group), Braxton Keith, Miranda Lambert, and Cody Jinks. Mason returns after a reasonably successful run from November of last year until falling out in May – a run of 7 months. He received 67% Interest in the Wildcard voting (where voters express higher interest than the regular CC50), which raises the interesting question of whether there is a correlation between how well wildcards did in the preceding wildcard voting and how they did in the general CC50.
That analysis would take a whole article to dive into, but today, we’ll limit ourselves to looking at the five highest Interest scores in Wildcard voting history. Instantly, some names should jump out to you, especially Parker McCollum and George Strait, who became the poster children for Wildcard success stories, posting huge numbers close to 50% in their CC50 debuts and never looking back. Treaty Oak Revival doesn’t get as much attention and had a much slower CC50 start, but they, too, have become a CC50 staple, posting their all-time high-interest mark just last month. All in all, this looks like great news for Mason. Still, the one caution would be that Turnpike Troubadours are a much more recent comparison, and they had a huge 40% drop in interest moving from the Wildcard voting (surrounded by fewer big artists) to the CC50 voting where there is steeper competition. They survived last month’s cut, but not by much at #43.
As always, I appreciate y’all spending some time with me here at Inside the CC50; it’s always a blast sharing the love of country music and numbers! The heat apocalypse we’ve had here in East Tennessee is finally letting up (before my editor jumps in and reminds me of my article lead-in; this is being written on a different day than when I started. Who cares about article continuity?). and Saturday afternoon on the lake is calling my name, so I’ll leave y’all to your Alan Jackson or Zach Top (or Brian Kelley) and see ya back here in July!
