Woman Walk The Line: How The Women of Country Music Changed Our Lives, edited by Holly Gleason, has won this year’s Belmont Book Award. The honor will be presented to Gleason on June 1 during the International Country Music Conference held annually at Belmont University, the conference is the foremost academic gathering devoted to country, roots and bluegrass music in the nation.

“I was startled and thrilled for all of the writers and the artists they celebrated,” Gleason said of the news. “I know how academically accomplished those judges are, and it speaks volumes about the work each of these women did. How music impacts a life, changes a person or even empowers an individual is something we don’t pay enough attention to. At a time when #MeToo and TimesUp matters, this book – and the response to it — is proof that positive women do listen to women’s art, and find within that art a sense of strength, comfort, inspiration and validation. What’s amazing is how many men did, too.”

Gleason will be part of a panel in late July in Cleveland as part of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s Author Series, and will also appear on an as yet determined panel at the Country Music Hall of Fame this summer. She has also appeared at the Southern Festival of Books, the Miami Book Fair, and a South by Southwest panel.

iHeartMedia has launched iHeartMedia Analytics, a fully-digital attribution service for broadcast radio.

By leveraging the data from iHeartRadio’s digital ecosystem, iHeartMedia will enable broadcast radio to measure and show results in the same way as digital media, giving advertisers easy access to state-of-the-art campaign performance insights.

These new capabilities will allow advertisers to track audience reach, branding metrics and even sales outcomes for iHeartMedia radio ad campaigns in real-time by using data science to fuse information about its digital audience, with broadcast ad logs, on-air programming and commercial content. Advertisers will also have the ability to measure a radio campaign’s impact on a brand’s website visitation, social media engagement, physical foot traffic and more.

“We continue to see advertisers spend money on less effective mediums simply because they provide a perceived level of measurability and accountability,” said Brian Kaminsky, President of Revenue Operations and Insights for iHeartMedia. “Now marketers will be able to capitalize on the unmatched scale and reach of iHeartMedia’s more than 270 million monthly broadcast listeners, and receive the same kind of innovative real-time measurements, insights and custom reporting they are accustomed to getting from digital media, quantifying the full power of radio — in addition they can get attribution information that is missing from most of the digital marketplace.”

iHeartMedia Analytics is part of the company’s ongoing focus to assist brands and marketers in targeting consumers across it’s quarter of a billion monthly broadcast listeners. iHeartMedia Analytics is the latest addition to the company’s marketing optimization tools including SoundPoint (programmatic real-time radio ad buying platform) and the recently introduced SmartAudio, which enables advertisers to do impression-based audience planning and dynamic radio ad creative that utilizes real-time triggers such as weather, pollen counts, sports scores, mortgage rates and more to deploy different campaign messages based on what is happening in a specific market at a specific moment. SmartAudio has allowed brands to use broadcast radio ads to dynamically serve the most relevant message in each market, at each moment, just as they do with digital campaigns to ensure increased relevance and impact.

Jim Lauderdale is releasing two albums simultaneously, Time Flies and Jim Lauderdale And Roland White, August 3 on Yep Roc Records. The two projects are Lauderdale’s 30th and 31st studio albums, and mark his long-awaited return to the Yep Roc roster after a decade.

Jim Lauderdale And Roland White is Lauderdale’s previously unreleased first full-length record, a collection of classic bluegrass recorded in the basement of Earl and Louise Scruggs’ Nashville home in the summer of 1979 and then lost for nearly four decades. Lauderdale was new to town at the time, while White was already a bluegrass legend, known for his mastery of the mandolin and foundation of such iconic groups as The Kentucky Colonels and Country Gazette. The master tapes went missing for 39 years and were only recently rediscovered at the bottom of a box by White’s wife, and the album provides an intimate look into the nascent beginnings of an Americana artist’s vast career.

Time Flies features Lauderdale at his best, writing and performing classic tunes distinctively infused with striking notes of country and soul. The project was produced by Lauderdale and Jay Weaver at Nashville’s Blackbird Studio and House of Blues Studios.

Lauderdale will mark the arrival of both albums with an assortment of upcoming live shows, including headline dates and festival performances such as this Saturday’s Appalachia Rising event at the Carter Family Fold in Hiltons, VA (May 19) and a May 31 show at Nashville’s Station Inn.