Country Music Aims To Increase Streaming Fans

Next week, Sony Nashville chairman/CEO Randy Goodman and executive vp/COO Ken Robold will travel to Amazon's, Spotify's and Apple's US headquarters to tout their heavy fourth quarter release slate.  Also tops on the agenda: how to convert lagging country consumers to streaming, reports Billboard.

Though country music accounts for 11.5 percent of all albums and track equivalent albums sold in the United States for the first half of 2017, the genre comprises only 5.6 percent of all streams, according to Nielsen Music. On Nielsen's top streaming artist tally for 2016, which combined on-demand audio and video streaming, the highest ranking country artist was Luke Bryan at No. 35 with 894 million streams, compared with Drake, who topped the chart with 6.8 billion streams.

More recently, for the chart week ending Aug. 11, The Billboard 200's No. 1 album, rapper Kendrick Lamar's Damn, earned 46.6 million streams. Country singer Brett Eldredge's self-titled set, which debuted at No 2, garnered 8.8 million streams, according to Nielsen.

The urgency has increased as streaming becomes the dominant consumption method: In 2016 streaming totaled 51 percent of revenue, according to the RIAA, marking the first time streaming had surpassed combined digital and physical sales.

Country consumers have not kept pace with their pop and hip hop counterparts because they skew older and have traditionally been resistant to switch to new delivery systems, labels say.  "The 5.5 percent of the streaming market is up from 4 percent two years ago, but, man, we all anticipated those numbers to be bigger by now," says Universal Music Group Nashville Chairman/CEO Mike Dungan.

Among UMG Nashville's artists leading the streaming charge in addition to Bryan, are Sam Hunt, Keith Urban, and, despite the older demo, George Strait. "His streaming numbers are phenomenal. they knock your head back. I wish I knew why," Dungan says.

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Paid-music streaming has become the largest revenue source for music, helping to stem a two-decade drop in sales. But country fans have been slower to log in. Even with growth of 83 percent last year, on-demand streaming generated just a fourth of country music consumption, 14 percentage points less than the industry average, according to Nielsen data.

According to Bloomberg, Amazon, along with competitors Spotify Ltd., Pandora Media Inc. and Apple Music, is trying to change that by planting a flag in Nashville, the home of country. The companies are tapping local industry veterans to run their operations there and build ties to labels and fans, which number about 107 million nationwide and span every age group, according to the Country Music Association.

At the organization’s CMA Fest, the four-day festival that takes over downtown Nashville in early June, the streaming services made their appeals to fans.

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