In Focus: Australian country music – part three

This is a three-part feature. Part one can be read here. Part two can be read here. 

The Cost of a Country Career

Australia’s country music acts tend to be the glass-is-half-full kind. You’d be hard pressed to catch them boasting or flaunting their fame, but without impressive sales figures, radio additions and consequential mainstream accolades, the future looks bleak for our wide-eyed up-and-comers. Catherine Britt has one eye on posterity – the singer and radio announcer’s admiration for country stems from a long career as the hot, new ticket – but now, at 26, she fears for those just entering her level of exposure.

“It’s very hard to make a living out of this industry that we call country music,” says Britt. “That should change, a lot of the artists coming through, the Amber Lawrences, the Morgan Evans, the Jasmine Raes, they deserve to make a living out of country music.”

When Jasmine Rae was asked if music was her primary income, she revealed it was, and that it was because of her major label backing. “I’m very lucky that I’ve got a label behind me – ABC who is distributed by Universal – a great management team and an agent, so I’ve got a lot of people helping me. It can still be difficult […] I obviously want to make money from what I’m doing because I want it to be my job, [with] all the work you put in, you want to get something out of it, and I do at the moment – but I want more. If you do this just because you want money, you should definitely just go and be a lawyer or something,” she laughs.

Preventing the Bias

It’s easy to become resigned to corporate Australia’s disaffection towards country music, but this isn’t to say the majority of the industry are in a state of acceptance. In fact most are so aware of the genre’s dwindling popularity that they are actively either campaigning for progress or changing their own respective corporate giants from the inside out.

As Program Director at Country Music Channel, Tim Daley is able to concertedly program the 24-hour Foxtel channel in a way that doesn’t reinforce the genre’s secular stereotypes instead offering its audience – a predominantly 35+ viewership –  an eclectic taste of modern country music. 

“We’ve got a big gap from the 18-30 age group where people kind of go away from it by and large,” he says. “But they come back to it because country music is so about real people and real things and not quite so many ‘ooh baby babys’. It’s more about the actual meaning of the songs rather than the sound of the songs.

“If you watch CMC for a day, you’ll see that it’s a really easy-to-watch channel, even if you haven’t heard of any of the artists […] If any of those radio programmers actually tuned into CMC for half a day, they would get an understanding that their perception of country music is very different from the reality.”

Originally, CMC was created as a response from its previous owners Austar in 2002 to complaints, after US video format CMT (Country Music Television) was sold to CBS – the acquisition resulted in the shutting down of all international feeds. This understanding of country music’s appeal to Australians sparked the CMC Rocks festival brand. Curated and promoted by Rob Potts Entertainment Edge and Chugg Entertainment, and launched with a festival in the Snowy Mountains in 2008, the CMC Rocks brand holds the title of Australia’s biggest international country and roots festival. September saw Alan Jackson headline the North Queensland event and this March Toby Keith will perform at the Hunter Valley edition. The festival’s success is no surprise: bring any international superstar across the pond and Australians will flock, well aware that a second chance to see any given country artist live is unlikely. But what may surprise those who are yet to attend one of the festivals is that the average age of ticket buyers is a tender 24.

“We present it as you would a Big Day Out, Splendour or a Soundwave,” says Daley. “We present it as great sound, great stages, great talent, and a great environment.”

On the other side of the spectrum is Tamworth Country Music Festival. Held over ten days in January each year, over 800 artists perform more than 4,000 performances at 150 local venues. And while the festival relies heavily on stakeholders and corporate sponsors like Toyota, Australia Post and United Breweries (who invest up to $500,000 each), the local council provides the infrastructure and coordinates the branding, sponsorship, marketing, transport, data capture, and programming.

The past few years have seen major changes for the festival: last year a delegation for Tamworth council went to the biggest festival in the US, the CMA music festival, to observe their marketing stratagy and forge relationships. They came back, having solidified Tamworth as a sister city to Nashville, and are now able to embrace TCMF’s economic worth after years of ineffective leadership. Festival Manager Gavin Flanagan understands the event’s place in Australia’s festival climate but interestingly, hopes to compete with the CMC Rocks brand.

“We had a number of American artists here in January and they were warmly received and we’d like to continue to bring international guest artists to the festival, however we need to be presented with the right opportunity in order to do that.”

Daley disagrees: “They’re never going to compete with CMC Rocks because they’re never going to get five acts that cost six figures each, but they’ve got a great heritage.”

The ties to Nashville are met with high hopes for Tamworth Country Music Festival and the Australian country industry as a whole. Australia expects our nascent artists will collaborate with hit-driven teams in Nashville and return with chart toppers, raising the profile, credibility and craftsmanship of country music here.

“We need to step it up and get people to pay attention because it doesn’t have the fanbase it should,” gripes Newcastle singer-songwriter Catherine Britt. “You’ve got the biggest market in the world now on side and these things are really important in moving country music forward in Australia.”

Flanagan’s hopes are entirely for TCMF. Now in its 42nd year, the age of the festival’s attendants is between 45 and 54, and it’s been made clear that promoters currently need to get international acts on the bill if they want younger punters on side.

“Festival fans now have more choice than they have ever had before when it comes to choosing which festivals they attend, so the changes we have made in recent years are to ensure that our festival remains the biggest in Australia.

“Although Nashville is a much bigger city, its country music beginnings are very similar to Tamworth when you compare radio stations WSM Nashville and 2TM in Tamworth and how they were able to connect with the audience in the early days to create the iconic identity that both cities enjoy today. Nashville has created an incredible legacy built on its musical foundations, that now sees it as an economic powerhouse in the States. Tamworth can learn an enormous amount from Nashville in a number of areas.”

According to TMCF’s largest survey in history (taken in July with input from 3,358 fans, artists, management and record companies) most respondents (61.21%) said international acts on the bill would improve the festival; more than 60% of artists who took part in the survey and 64% of industry players were in favour of an international sway.

Rob Potts and his Entertainment Edge have been audibly requesting more country music support for more than three decades. As the former international director of the Country Music Association America, current Chairman of CMA Australia, and member of the Contemporary Country Music Coalition (CCMC), Potts is continually involved in some form of bias-prevention for the genre. At last year’s inaugural Country Music Radio Australia Seminar in Tamworth, the main subject for discussion was how to get Australian country on to commercial radio and his advisory group for the CMA America – which also includes CRA CEO Joan Warner and TCMF representatives – are currently working on ways to interact with the Australian market for mutual benefit and to work as a collective in doing so.

“If we don’t create new stars the only thing we can do is keep importing stars,” says Potts. “You also want a strong, healthy, vibrant local market that reflects a bit more of the local sound and the local culture and the local idiom. You want your country’s music to be just as much at the forefront.”

Another achievable ambition of his is to establish an Australian Top 40 Country Singles airplay chart. He’s actually halfway there, a new chart system was discussed at the 2012 Country Music Radio Australia Seminar and six months ago ARIA agreed to take the Album Sales Chart from a Top 20 Country Albums into a Top 40 Country albums.

“It’s not a process that can happen overnight”, says Potts, “but what has happened is we are starting to engage the collective thought process, in the past it was a lot of individuals, all with the best intent, but still all up individually doing what they do without any regard to thinking collectively as an industry.”

Those at the forefront are just as united in their refusal to sound popular in order to be so. Gold-selling artist Troy Cassar-Daley holds longevity and integrity above all else, it’s clear he will never pander to hit-driven trends exported from the USA; his hero is living-legend John Williamson.

“What John Williamson is achieving now in his lifetime – he’s got a long way to go John – that to me is a lot cooler than trying to make country music cool to young people. To me those young people are going to grow up and discover this wholesome music and they’re gonna go and buy it, they’re going to find it organically, they’re not going to have it shoved down their throat.”

Cassar-Daley may not have the industry pull of Entertainment Edge or the CMC, but with his Troy Cassar-Daley Scholarship to the Country Music College in Tamworth, he’s making sure Australian youth are aware of its relevance.

“If it means more Indigenous kids can get to Tamworth to be part of that collage I will pay for that. I don’t care if it costs me several thousand dollars, it doesn’t matter.”

Potts, like most in the industry, refuses to take on a fatalistic view. He’s optimistic for different reasons entirely: he believes Australia has all the ingredients necessary to mimic the US industry, and feels his active approach is necessary if the industry wants commercial radio to take notice.

“Let’s start to behave like a format,” adds Rob Potts. “Let’s start to think like a format and get on the same record at the same time so we can drive that hit process.

With a plan of attack in place, and headstrong artists unwilling to compromise their craft, 2014 just may signal the start of Australia’s country music revolution.