Issue #39: Country music is bigger than ever

Anyone But Morgan Wallen 2024

not this guy, please!

By

Natalie Weiner

The numbers are in! We are in “country’s new golden era” (according to the AP) after "country’s 2023 boom” (according to Billboard), and wouldn’t you know, this is a country music newsletter! What luck! Let’s take a look at who’s responsible for this bounty:

Truly wild that “Tennessee Whiskey” is still up there almost a decade (!) after its release, but I digress. Obviously the story here starts with an M and ends with an N.

This particular ranking is important to consider because country music was the 3rd-fastest growing streaming genre in 2023, with streams increasing by 23.7% in 2023. The honky-tonk (or at least country pop) crowd has finally embraced the (problematic in many ways) streaming era and/or non-genre orthodox streamers are picking up on Nashville-made hits (by white men, of course).

I would like to formally apologize for being ahead of the curve on Morgan Wallen and his unshakeable reign atop not just country music, but music, period. He had the biggest (most consumed as measured by equivalent album units, for our purposes) album of 2021, the third biggest album of 2022 (with the same release, Dangerous), and the biggest album of 2023 (don’t worry, Dangerous still held strong at no. 5 across genres). (A woman has not had the top album of the year since Adele in 2015 (!), naturally.) Country generated 113.1 billion streams in 2023; I don’t have the info to know exactly what percentage of those came from Morgan Wallen, but the above chart shows he’s responsible for at least 3 billion of them and I’d feel confident guessing the total is, conservatively, at least three or four times that. “Last Night” is the second song ever to amass more than 1 billion streams in a year; the first was, happily, “Old Town Road.” When people like country, they really like it (and love it, and want some more of it…sorry).

Those numbers are wild. Nobody, in any genre, is that dominant save Taylor Swift — with Taylor, though, physical and digital album sales (not the most relevant media, I’m sorry to say) are big factors in her sway on the year-end charts. She has four of the top five best-selling country albums of 2023, but just one of the top five by total equivalent album units (Billboard-ese for streaming + sales). It is — definitely in country and largely in American pop music — Morgan Wallen’s world and we’re just living in it.

His continuing stranglehold on country begs some questions, not the least of which is who are these people who are listening to him ad nauseum?!

This chart comes from Luminate, formerly known as Nielsen and the source of the data Billboard uses to make its charts. I was shocked by this — my assumption was that Wallen was a strictly Gen Z phenomenon, but I guess I was underestimating my own generation’s capacity for basicness. Less surprising is that Zach Bryan has sway with the Gen Z crowd; I have to imagine that Luke Combs’ Gen Z influence is coming exclusively from “Fast Car” (sorry Luke).

The distressing part of all of this is that these audiences still prefer their country music come from white men, whether said white men are rustic and raw-ish like Zach Bryan, Nickelback + steel guitar types like Bailey Zimmerman or post-R&B slicksters like MW. Here, we return to the same chicken and egg question as always. Do they in fact prefer that, or is that what they’re being fed by the labels?

It almost doesn’t matter what the answer is. The people who run Music Row are profiting mightily from the genre’s growth, and no doubt have their eye on pop and rock’s market share — for them, the answer is always to follow the money even when it’s been made off a self-fulfilling prophecy. We will brace ourselves for that many more new Wallens and Bryans and Zimmermans (and others whose names end in N); maybe some of them will actually be good (I know, I know, you all like Zach Bryan and that’s fine). I’m not holding my breath, though, for more than one woman at a time to get a big money nod.

Another Luminate chart with an embarrassing reveal — among the top 500 country artists (would love to see that list!), last year women got just 14.3% of streams. That’s barely better than radio, as friend of the newsletter Dr. Jada Watson has documented so well. I would also hazard a guess is the tiny amount of growth is more for catalog country artists, considering the current wave of ‘90s nostalgia (with its many massive hits by women artists), then for new and current ones. A mess!

The only real optimism I can offer is woefully Reaganomics-y. I think we’ve already seen some of how country’s growth (and especially the ZB phenomenon) can compel labels etc. to take swings on more new artists in hopes of hitting gold. The trick is getting them to imagine that the next Zach Bryan might not be anything like Zach Bryan; the next stripped-down singer-songwriter with disproportionate resonance to pop audiences probably won’t be another white guy from Oklahoma, after all! (A SZA country album? Who says no?) Trickle-down musical diversity is quite a long shot, but for the rest of us, there is ethical consumption under Morgan Wallenism — and we are doing our best to lead you to it right here at Don’t Rock The Inbox. :)