Photo Credit: Kristin Barlowe

Big Kenny returned to his family farm in Culpeper, VA to film the video for his debut solo single “Long After I’m Gone.” Co-directed by Big Kenny and Christian Holiday, it is receiving immediate heavy rotation on CMT and GAC. Fans can watch the video and get a free download of the track at www.bigkenny.tv.  The song is written by Big Kenny, Richie Supa and Marc Beeson and co-produced with Chris Stone.

“Long After I’m Gone” makes its way into Big and Rich’s summer show as both Big Kenny and John Rich perform a few of their solo projects’ songs. The 35-city run culminates in Atlantic City on Sept. 5.
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Columbia Nashville duo Caitlin & Will are premiering the video for new single, “Address In The Stars” exclusively on Opry.com today. This will be the first time Opry.com has premiered a music video and it will be available for 24 hours. “Address In The Stars,” is one of six tracks already released on Caitlin & Will’s self-titled digital EP, available on all major services. The video, directed by Steven L. Weaver (Revolution Pictures), tells the story of the song co-written by singer Caitlin Lynn about her aunt’s passing of breast cancer in 2006.

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Rascal Flatts have taken a unique approach to the video for its latest hit single “Summer Nights” by not appearing in the music video itself. Instead, Gary, Jay and Joe Don can be seen in the intro and outro. Directed by Shaun Silva and shot in Pismo Beach, California, “Summer Nights” can be seen on TV and online starting July 20. The song is climbing the country radio charts,  and also being used in ESPN’s Major League Baseball coverage.

Michelle Branch wrote on her official message board that she recently finished mixing the last track for her upcoming solo CD, “I can’t believe I’m finally officially finished. It’s been well worth the wait. (At least I think so.)” The album’s first single, “Sooner or Later,” will premiere on her website July 20.

Zac Brown Band is premiering its new video for “Toes” exclusively on The Boot, watch it here.

Love And Theft will be the first country artist featured in the ABC Music Lounge. Visitors to www.musiclounge.abc.go.com will see Love And Theft featured on the homepage and in the ABC Music Lounge Discovers section with artist profiles and music. Other acts featured in the Lounge include Black Eyed Peas, Coldplay, Adele, No Doubt and Lady GaGa. The trio has also been selected as Clear Channel Radio’s NEW! featured country artist for July. One benefit of this is that visitors to the country station websites will be able to preview five tracks from Love And Theft’s upcoming debut album, World Wide Open, which will be released August 25.

Katie Armiger (center) has been on her National Mall Tour, which will include a stop today (7/15) at Opry Mills Mall at noon and 6 p.m.

The quote of the week belongs to Sony CEO Howard Stringer, who when asked about the success of Twitter and other social networking sites replied, “A lot of people are doing very well at making very little money. It’s not a club I’m looking to join.”

The joke may be on the Sony CEO because, know it or not, he’s a card carrying member of the country [music] club which can certainly be described these days as “making very little [much less] money.” Sales are down, margins crunched, marketing costs up, labels continue to buy their way up the radio charts and retail shelf space evaporates while most players do the same ole, same ole shuffle. Most troubling is the format’s lack of an artist middle class.

It’s easy to point to the superstar crowd—Swift, Underwood, Flatts, Sugarland, Paisley, Urban, Chesney, Strait, McGraw, Keith and maybe a few others we’ve mistakenly omitted, but what about the up and comers? Where is country’s middle class? A quick look at the Top 10 selling country albums this year names the following; Swift, Hannah Montana, Rascal Flatts, Zac Brown Brand, Keith Urban, Darius Rucker, Jason Aldean, Sugarland, Swift and Underwood. Only two of those CDs have broken the million mark this year; only three have passed the 500k goalposts, which is the start of profitability for many labels.

So yes, based upon RTD sales (release to date over 500k), we can point to a few middle class candidates, such as ZBB, Darius and Aldean named above plus toss in a pinch of Lady Antebellum and some Jamey Johnson for seasoning. That still leaves precious few to fill the spots at the top. And we invite readers to answer this one for themselves: How many of the superstars named above passed their career zeniths long ago? [Answer: lots.]

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who, like Stringer was attending an ultra-exclusive media mogul gathering in Sun Valley, Idaho called the faltering economy “the new normal,” advising companies to “figure out how to be happy and get our lives together in this new configuration.”

One overdue prescription for country’s “new configuration” might be to get smarter about radio promotion. Entire Nashville business models are built upon the promise of airplay, factoring zero for sales risk. Few if any other business industry would accept such a deal. Sure radio exposure remains an important part of the success mix, but how many records have we seen in recent months that paid and paid to enter the Top 10 mainstream airplay charts only to reap coal in their Christmas SoundScan stockings? Marketers can judge early on if a song is going to move the sales needle using data from a myriad of available sources. Isn’t it time to get more aggressive about indexing the correlation between airplay and sales and stop the tail from wagging the dog?

Your favorite social network may tell a lot about you. For example, Twitterers are more interested in sex than users on other social sites. LinkedIn users are more likely to watch soap operas and MySpacers are generally not into exercise. According to an Anderson Analytics study, a user’s social network preference can identify “likely interests, buying habits, media consumption and much more.” Tom Anderson, Anderson Analytics founder tells Ad Age, “There are definite data-driven segments in the social-networking-site market, both for non-users and users.”

Conservative estimates say that about 60% of the U.S. online population uses social networks or about 110 million people. On average users visit social sites about five days a week, four times a day for a total of about one hour each day. The study was completed in June with a sample of 5,000 demographically representative respondents. Ad Age then worked with the Anderson team to create the following mini-profiles. Here’s some of what they uncovered. For more details visit AdAge here.

Users Overall
• 45% link only to family and friends
• Most users not wasting company time. Only 15% said they visit networks at work
• Four categories: business users, fun seekers, social-media mavens (key group) and late followers

Non-Users
• Not tech haters, still spend time surfing web
• Three groups: no time, concerned about security and think it’s stupid

Facebookers
• 77 million users skew a bit older, extremely loyal

Twitterers
• Entrepreneurial, super-user group
• Skew very high interest in news, pop culture, music, movies with buying habits to match

MySpacers
• Young, fun and fleeing
• Overall useage down, but 67 million still having fun

Allen & Co., a New York-based investment bank, is hosting its annual conference of the top national entertainment and technology leaders in Sun Valley, Idaho this week. The brainstorming and socializing event, often described as “summer camp” for the media world, is closed to the press though some are attending as guests and others remain camped out at the resort.

Among the more than 250 attendees are IAC’s Barry Diller and wife Diane Von Furstenburg, Berkshire Hathaway Chairman and investment guru Warren Buffett, News Corp Chief Rupert Murdoch, Sirius CEO Mel Karmazin, Sony Chief Executive Howard Stringer, Bill Gates, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Google’s Larry Page. Basketball superstar LeBron James is even in the mix.

Since the opening economic panel, word is that the conference has a lingering sense of pessimism, which is more pronounced in some executives than others.

Twitter is among the hot topics. The Los Angeles Times reports that while “old-time media moguls think their content is worth something, they’re not so sure about Twitter…Everyone seems to love it, but no one is sure about how to make money off of it.” Twitter co-founder and Chief Executive Evan Williams was in the audience for a panel that reiterated this point, but remained quite.

Murdoch spoke briefly to reporters, saying he wasn’t interested in buying Twitter or the Los Angeles Times, and answered “Hell no,” when asked about putting MySpace on the block.