A 60-year-old who sports a foot-long white beard and can often be spotted devouring fried-bologna sandwiches in Nashville's honky-tonk district, Mr. Marks chooses the music played on SiriusXM's contemporary country channel, the Highway.
Despite an audience that is minuscule compared with FM radio stations in big markets, the Highway wields disproportionate influence on sales of records and concert tickets, say label executives, particularly for new and emerging artists from outside the major-label system, a group terrestrial country stations tend to avoid.
Country radio stations have long had a particularly cozy relationship with big record companies, whose lobbying efforts include wining and dining broadcasters at the annual Country Radio Seminar. That makes it difficult for independent artists to break through. But new music services from Sirius, Pandora, Spotify and others are starting to disrupt Nashville's long-closed ecosystem, even as terrestrial broadcasters pour their resources into amassing country listeners, who are generally wealthier, better educated and more likely to use social media than fans of other genres, according to their research.
John Marks with Florida Georgia Line (SiriusXM photo) |
The Highway's profile in Nashville began to rise about two years ago, after an artist manager gave Mr. Marks a single called "Cruise" by an unsigned band called Florida Georgia Line. In the three months after Mr. Marks put the song in regular rotation, the band sold 200,000 songs online without any significant airplay on FM radio.
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