1990 - A Preamble

Hey, good news if you’re still patiently reading along: these entries are about to get shorter.

We’ve already been over some of the changes in country music as the ‘80s drifted into the ‘90s. Lots of longstanding artists finally dropping off the charts, with the plot twist that the younger ones taking over their old spots were often more steeped in genre tradition than the folks they replaced. But it wasn’t just the names at the top that were changing, it was also the methodology of deciding who was winning in the first place.

First off, Billboard’s singles chart had previously been based off of exhaustively compiling playlists submitted by country radio stations and sales reports submitted by music retailers. The former was wildly inefficient, and the latter was also becoming less relevant as the days of the 45 rpm vinyl single faded and sales of singles in cassette or CD format never quite took their place. The trend was shifting to just buying the more-expensive full album, which the industry didn’t exactly discourage. More songwriter royalties to go around, longer shelf life for product, more encouragement of long-term fandom etc. 

Plus, in the days before email and electronic recordkeeping were universally de rigeur, physical sales of both albums and singles were often tabulated by methods as unreliable as having Billboard reps call up record stores on the phone and just asking what was selling. You can see how that’s open to accidental or intentional (or downright corrupt) misreporting. So it was understandable and perhaps laudable that Billboard decided to get with the times and overhaul things. Performance of commercial radio singles would now be tracked by a Nielsen Broadcast Data Systems approach akin to how TV ratings were measured, and sales of physical products were about to enter the SoundScan era. That bar-code-based system of reporting sales seriously democratized the public perception of a hit album in a way that ended up being absolutely huge for country music, rap, alternative rock … all in all pretty much everyone outside of the usual huge-pop-star mainstream. Perhaps most relevant to the sudden realization of just how big of a deal country music was, the sales at big retailers like Wal-Mart, K Mart, Target etc. were finally being factored into the Billboard 200 albums chart. 

This was a revelation. Country music’s core audience leaned more than most towards older people who didn’t frequent record stores, not to mention rural or small-town listeners who didn’t live anywhere near a record store and weren’t really looking for one. They could hit the Wal-Mart and pick up whatever albums they were most likely interested in, right alongside the usual cornucopia of clothes, home supplies and recreational gear. Those sales arguably mattered even more than whatever was going down in the brick-and-mortar stores dedicated to music, and it was a wakeup call for a business that had pigeonholed country music as a regional niche geared to the south, the heartland, the sticks, whatever. The biggest country stars just might have been among the biggest American music stars, period. And once this became clear, the ensuing media coverage and industry attention just made it bigger. 

So, going forward, we’re back to multiple-week runs at #1 becoming common for hit singles, so we don’t have to talk about around 50 songs each year. Not that I don’t enjoy it, but that’s probably kind of a relief for readers. Offsetting it a little, we’re going to see a glut of new artists being introduced as most of the ones we mentioned before 1988 or so disappear. We won’t have to come up with 30+ new things to say about Conway Twitty or Merle Haggard or even Ronnie Milsap, which I’m going to kind of miss. And given that 1990-1995 or so is kind of my peak immersion phase in contemporary radio country, I don’t think I’ll be needing to take many breaks to consult YouTube or Spotify or whatever to jog my memory. For better or worse, pretty much all of these songs are stuck in there for good.

Oh and yes I’m aware there’s a bit of an interest revival in ‘90s country music going on right now, so if you’ve got any friends that don’t give a shit about the old stuff then maybe this is a good place for them to start reading.