Curb Records Offering Cracker Barrel Exclusives

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Curb Records has announced a series of special album packages available exclusively at Cracker Barrel Old Country Store locations. Among the albums are recordings by LeAnn Rimes, Tim McGraw, Larry Gatlin & the Gatlin Brothers, The Judds and Wayne Newton.

“This is a great opportunity to share these special packages of our most popular recordings with Cracker Barrel customers,” said Benson Curb, VP Sales/Curb Records.  “We’re happy to offer these projects and look forward to adding more recordings into their stores in the near future.”

The packages include LeAnn Rimes (a special 3 CD collection); Classic Collection hits from Tim McGraw, Larry Gatlin & The Gatlin Brothers, The Judds and Wayne Newton; and self-titled Rodney Atkins and Love Heals, by Wynonna. All albums retail for $11.99

Weekly Register: ‘Tornado’ Triumphs While YTD Sales Dip

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Little Big Town’s Tornado easily blows onto the top spot of the country album charts this week with scans of almost 113k according to Nielsen Soundscan. Artistically, Tornado may be the vocal quartet’s best work since its remarkable 2008 Equity Records outing, The Road To Here. For comparison purposes, the group’s previous disc The Reason Why debuted 8-29-2010 with scans of 42k. By all measures, this week’s showing is a tour de force. And based upon the music, which these ears have been enjoying for a few weeks now, this new LBT set should benefit from WOM (word of mouth) throughout the holiday season.

But alas, LBT’s triumph was not enough to brace country YTD album sales from heading into negative territory, -1.4%! Exactly one year ago Lady A unleashed Own The Night with scans of (348k), more scans than this week’s entire Top Current 75 chart (327k), even including the LBT debut.

Kix Brooks landed inside the Top 10 with his debut this week, New To This Town (No. 10; 6.5k). Other debuts included Chris Knight (No. 25; 2.7k) and Idol alum Bucky Covington (No. 30; 2k).

Expect country’s YTD album numbers to head deeper into negative territory for the next few weeks. (Last year we also had a 197k debut from Scotty McCreery on 10/9/2011). However, the 2012 release schedule starts to shift gears soon with upcoming projects from power hitters Jason Aldean (10/16) and Taylor Swift (10/22), plus stocking stuffer holiday sets from Blake Shelton, Scotty McCreery and Lady Antebellum. For a full listing click here.

For those year-end prediction junkies, you can either read the tea leaves or wait and see how the Aldean and Swift CDs fare. As for this prognosticator, I’m seeing a positive finish shaping up…

Tracking The Sales
Tackling tracks is once again mostly about Ms. Swift who owns the No. 1 and No. 2 titles on this week’s Digital Genre Country tracks list. “We Are Never Ever…” was downloaded over 226k times for a RTD total of almost 1.7 million in five weeks! “Ronan” earned 116k credit card clicks for two-week RTD total of 327k. Very impressive. Those two Swift tracks equal 22% of the entire 100 track list. And lest we get called out by the affable Big Machine sales department, please note, that 22% doesn’t even include Swift’s six additional tracks included on the list.

Tracks are a bright spot this year, up 6% for all-genre and up 12.3% for country and the trend is expected to continue through the holiday season.

So as the year draws to a close, we’ll cross our fingers for the album numbers and good showings from the new offerings, while cheering as we break new records for  country track sales. However, when the bean counters hunker down to assess the year-end financial results, they will be less concerned with units sold and pay more attention to total revenue and profits. SoundScan numbers and percentages up and down tend to camouflage those dollar metrics because they don’t take into account pricing and margin.

Stay tuned...

Artist Updates (9/14/12)

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The RIAA has issued Gold certifications for sales exceeding 500,000 downloads of Lee Brice’s “Hard To Love,” following the album’s Platinum first single “A Woman Like You.” Also earning Gold are Rodney Atkins (“These Are My People”), Tim McGraw (“I Need You,” “Southern Voice,” “If You’re Reading This,” “Something Like That,” and “Last Dollar (Fly Away)”), Steve Holy (“Brand New Girlfriend”), and Hank Williams Jr. (“A Country Boy Can Survive”). Earning Platinum certifications are Atkins (“Take A Back Road,” “Watching You,” “Farmer’s Daughter”) and McGraw (“My Little Girl”).

Additionally, The Civil Wars’ debut album Barton Hollow has been certified Gold. The band will celebrate the achievement with a party at Grimey’s New & Preloved Music, where it is the best-selling record in the store’s history. The event takes place September 26, 6-7:30 pm and is free and open to the public.

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The Charlie Daniels Band’s classic hit “The Devil Went Down To Georgia” will be featured in the opening to ESPN’s Monday Night Football when the Denver Broncos, lead by Peyton Manning, head to Atlanta to take on the Falcons. The game airs at 7:30 pm/CT on September 17.

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Eric Church has premiered the new video for his new “Creepin’” exclusively on rollingstone.com. Directed by Peter Zavadil, the clip was shot in Chattanooga at the East Chattanooga Depot and features Church and bandmates playing early 20th century train robbers. See it here.

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The Roys recently released a new EP called New Day Dawning, which debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard Bluegrass Albums Chart. They will support the release with upcoming appearances on on CBS This Morning tomorrow (9/15)  at 7 pm/ET and Fox & Friends on Sunday during the 7 am/CT hour. The sibling duo will be featured on an episode of Dr. Steve Show airing Saturday and Sunday. Check here for times. Later in the month on Sept. 26, they will make an appearance on The Better Show. Additionally, the Roys have announced a strategic partnership with Team RealTree Outdoor Energy Drink and will travel to upcoming shows in a newly-wrapped bus featuring the RealTree graphics.

The Roys recently visited Renegade Radio Nashville to promote New Day Dawning. While in studio, The Roys performed “Grandpa’s Barn” for listeners. (L-R): Renegade Radio’s Captain Jack, Elaine Roy, Lee Roy, Renegade Radio’s Laura Lynn


rpmentertainment, Sony Music Nashville Enter Exclusive Agreement

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Scott Siman, President of rpmentertainment, and Gary Overton,  Chairman and CEO of Sony Music Nashville, today (9/12) announced an exclusive worldwide distribution and licensing agreement between the two companies.

Under this new relationship, Sony Music Nashville will exclusively distribute RPMe singles and albums to digital and physical outlets. Together with RPMe SVP April Rider, Siman will continue to oversee artist development, management, marketing and radio promotion for its roster, as well as business development. Maggie Rose’s “I Ain’t Your Mama” will be the first single under the arrangement, with a debut album to follow in February 2013.

“Sony gives us access to the world’s best record distribution system and we are honored that they believed in our new business model and musical vision,” said Siman. “We are on track and poised for an exciting future starting with Maggie Rose, and continuing with all of our future projects at rpme.”

RPMe is comprised of rpme records, rpme publishing and rpme management, with a roster including Rose, Yarn and Humming House, The Command Sisters, and Matt Ramsey.

Weekly Register: Country Fans Further Embrace The Digital Shift

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The 2011 full year TEA Index was 25% country and 27.7% all-genre.

(TEA) Taylor Equivalent Albums
With all the Taylor Swift tracks that fans are downloading we might consider renaming the Index to the above headline. Swift’s “…Never Ever…” single has scanned 1.46 million in 4 weeks and “Ronan” debuted this week with over 211k sales. Sales numbers are strongly influenced by release schedules, and Taylor’s track offerings are affecting the TEA balance. In fact, compared to last year the country index is up 5.56% while all-genre is only up 4.05%.

The numbers show that the shift to tracks is more pronounced this year among country consumers than overall fans, who likely shifted earlier as evidenced by country track sales being up 11.5% compared to all genre increase of only 6%. Further supporting this idea, digital country album sales are growing, but still only 27% of total albums, while all genre album sales are almost 39% digital. And finally, tracks and TEA are playing a larger role in Music City sales because country album sales have fallen from a high of 8.4% (5/13/12) to this week’s rather flat tally of .2% giving track sales more weight.

TEA methodology: Once again, let’s briefly review MusicRow’s TEA Index criteria. The Index measures physical, digital and TEA albums (track equivalent albums; 10 tracks=1 album) then calculates the percentage of total album sales that come from the TEA category. The idea is to measure TEA sales against the combination of physical and digital album sales. (Our numbers are gathered by industry sources from Nielsen SoundScan.)

Weekly Register
As we slide into mid-September, we are experiencing the calm before the storm. This week Top 75 Current Country plummeted to slightly below 234k, one of the lowest weeks of 2012. Carrie Underwood (No. 1; 29k) and Luke Bryan (No. 2; 15k) led the charge with slight increases, but most every other album fell off. A rash of album product will be hitting physical and digital shelves soon from Taylor Swift, Jason Aldean, Toby Keith and others plus holiday sets from Lady Antebellum and Blake Shelton. How strong will the cash register winds blow? Well, Little Big Town released a Tornado this week…

The tracks department featured Ms. Swift in positions No. 1 and 2 as mentioned above followed by Carrie Underwood (No. 3; 74k), Little Big Town (No. 4; 71k) and Hunter Hayes (No. 5; 69k). Newcomers Florida Georgia Line are making inroads with their track “Cruise” (No. 7; 46k).

Stay tuned…

Apple Plots Personalized Radio, iPhone 5

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Apple will soon offer customizable streaming radio stations, according to numerous reports including the Wall Street Journal. The service would likely run through iTunes, which already offers streaming radio. It would compete with similar offerings from established companies Pandora, Slacker, Spotify and iHeartRadio.

Apple aficionados know that the tech giant earns most of its profits from hardware sales of iPods, iPhones and iPads, instead of music downloads. This will likely give Apple an advantage over radio rivals because it isn’t vying for hard-to-grasp profits from streaming radio.

In related news, Apple is expected to debut the iPhone 5 tomorrow (9/23). According to AdAge, iPhone sales account for about 70% of the company’s profits. The trade publication reports, “The phone, to be introduced tomorrow by CEO Tim Cook, will probably have a new hardware design, including a bigger screen and thinner body, as well as new mapping software and compatibility with speedier next-generation data networks.”

Apple could sell as many as 10 million iPhones by the end of September alone, according to Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray Cos.

Turner Earns Two Platinum Singles, Heads to Sirius XM

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MCA Nashville’s Josh Turner is celebrating the recent news that his hit songs “Your Man” and “Would You Go With Me” have both reached Platinum status for sales exceeding 1 million. Both tracks appear on the double Platinum 2006 album Your Man.

Additionally, Turner’s current single “Time Is Love” from the new album Punching Bag has attained Gold status for sales exceeding 500k.

“’Your Man’ and ‘Would You Go With Me’ are both incredibly special songs to me,” says Turner. “These songs gave me my first two No. 1 singles and I have great memories of the times surrounding both.”

Additionally, Turner is celebrating the top 10 sales debut of his new Cracker Barrel exclusive album Live Across America, which was released August 27. The all-live collection features performances from 12 different concert performances.

To support the release, he will co-host Sirius XM’s “The Highway” with Storme Warren to talk about making the record. That show airs Wednesday, September 12 at 8 pm/CT with other airings Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Turner also has upcoming appearances scheduled for NBC’s Today on Sept. 19, and Fox News’ Fox & Friends on Sept. 21.

Aldean Partners With Coors Light

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Jason Aldean has landed a partnership with Coors Light, which will become Aldean’s exclusive alcohol sponsor and launch a national retail promotion around the singer.

“Coors Light is associated with so many of my favorite experiences… tailgating before University of Georgia games, vacations to the beach with my friends, playing bars and clubs when I was coming up in my career,” said Aldean. “This was a no-brainer partnership for me, and I’m especially looking forward to the fridge full of Coors Light they promised all of us for the road.”

Included in the partnership are retail promotions to support the Oct. 16 release of Aldean’s fifth album Night Train. Point-of-sale materials found at outlets like Walmart will feature Aldean’s image and Coors Light Brandling.

In other Aldean news, the young star was recently nominated for three CMA Awards for the Nov. 1 show, including Entertainer of the Year, Male Vocalist of the Year, and Single of the Year (for “Dirt Road Anthem”). His new single “Take A Little Ride” is zooming toward the tops of all the charts after its release in July.

Niemann Announces ‘Free The Music’ Campaign

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To celebrate the October 2 release of his sophomore release Free The Music, Jerrod Niemann is offering 10 days of giveaways. The first of these is a free download of the album’s first single “Shinin’ On Me” through today (9/10) on his official website. Album pre-orders from iTunes will receive an instant download of the title track.

Additionally, fans are able to subscribe to Niemann’s Free The Music Spotify Playlist and enter to win a free upgrade to a year-long premium Spotify account, until tomorrow (9/11).

Further announcements will be made promoting the Sea Gayle Records/Arista Nashville release, which Niemann co-produced and contributed co-writing credits to every track.

“This album is my interpretation of how I feel about country right now,” said Neimann. “The pedal steel guitar has come to define country music, but there were years and years of country being made before that instrument was even invented. Horns have been in country going back to the 1920s, and fiddles and other string instruments date back even further.”

For access to Niemann’s Fan Pub (a.k.a. fan club) visit www.dehydrationnation.net.

 

Underwood’s “Blown Away” Album Goes Platinum

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Carrie Underwood’s fourth album Blown Away has been certified Platinum by the RIAA and returns to the No. 1 spot this week, marking six cumulative weeks at the summit of Billboard’s Top Country Albums Chart. The album’s title track is steadily climbing the charts, hitting No. 5 on the MusicRow chart this week.

On September 14, Underwood will launch the North American portion of her third headline arena tour, The Blown Away Tour, in Manchester, NH

Earlier this week the nominations were announced for The 46th Annual CMA Awards and Underwood earned her seventh Female Vocalist of the Year nomination. Underwood and Brad Paisley will return for a fifth year to co-host the show which airs Thursday, Nov. 1, 8-11 pm/ET on ABC.