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Country Awards Ratings Drop

TheBigA said:
It wasn't unexpected, but last night's Academy of Country Music Awards special on CBS registered a 38% drop from last year's show, despite having all star talent;

http://www.thetvratingsguide.com/2020/09/wednesday-tv-ratings-91620-academy-of.html
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In some ways, the show was boring and with very limited excitement. The lack of crowds in the three venues, the distancing on the stage, the giving of the awards by having artists pick them up off a table... even singing a song with a wall in between (yes, a pretty and artistic wall... but a wall!)... made the show seem slow and lacking in warmth.

There were a lot of good songs, and the tribute to the great female artists was excellent. The Blake Shelton duo was marvelous, showing a non-country artist can do a great job with the right guidance.

I found the Taylor Swift song way too long and borderline boring.. That was the low point; kiss her goodbye and leave her far away from Nashville.

But there were some bad and slow segues between scenes, and it was just not exciting.
 
DavidEduardo said:
In some ways, the show was boring and with very limited excitement. The lack of crowds in the three venues, the distancing on the stage, the giving of the awards by having artists pick them up off a table... even singing a song with a wall in between (yes, a pretty and artistic wall... but a wall!)... made the show seem slow and lacking in warmth.
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Most TV produced during the pandemic seems "off." There are constant reminders of COVID, and not just on entertainment programs like the ACMs. All those news shows with masked reporters and interviews conducted online, from home, with choppy internet video. Baseball games played in empty ballparks, with talking heads, far from the stadium, trying to stay focused on the game while chatting in three little boxes on the right side of the screen. Courtroom shows with plaintiff and defendant literally phoning it in. It's sterile, claustrophobic television, constantly reminding viewers of the little things they are missing in their own lives. Who wants to watch that?
 
CTListener said:
It's sterile, claustrophobic television, constantly reminding viewers of the little things they are missing in their own lives. Who wants to watch that?
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You are right with this observation. It's not the escape and entertainment TV should be. It is, instead, a reminder of how tortuous some aspects of life have become.
 
CTListener said:
It's sterile, claustrophobic television, constantly reminding viewers of the little things they are missing in their own lives. Who wants to watch that?
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By the same token, it was the top rated TV show of the night. So all of the other competing shows that didn't have the reminders of the lockdown did worse. That says to me that, like radio, real-time television viewing has changed drastically as a result of this. It's not necessarily the show itself, but the way people use TV. The linked story said social media interaction during the show was huge.

One thing we started to see two years ago was that viewers didn't watch the live show, but rather went to YouTube to see specific performances by their favorites afterwards. I think that's what we'll see here.
 
I haven't seen it yet, but I'm optimistic that having to be done differently means the songs will sound more "country". It has been my experience that the ACM awards don't even sound country. At least the CMA awards are better.
 
I may have been wrong about songs sounding "country". And there didn't seem to be clips from nominated songs. A song that included Justin Bieber won Song of the Year? Really? Well, that's "Song", not "Record". Surely anything with Bieber on it won't win anything. Ironically, I had never heard of Justin Bieber when there was a debate somewhere about how country certain artists were, and someone said of one band or artist it wasn't like they were Justin Bieber. Must be one of those "new country" stars, I figured.

So far I have skipped over all but one performance after listening to the first few notes to judge whether to listen to any more of it. Who would have ever believed I would stay around for Kelsea Ballerini?
 
vchimpanzee said:
Ironically, I had never heard of Justin Bieber when there was a debate somewhere about how country certain artists were, and someone said of one band or artist it wasn't like they were Justin Bieber. Must be one of those "new country" stars, I figured.
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Bieber seems to be a whipping boy for fans of every kind of music. Having listened to several of his songs recently, I wonder whether those who dismiss him out of hand have ever done the same. He does a good job on some very catchy material. I suppose the question of whether he uses AutoTune figures into the negativity, and of course the rock snobs will trash him because he doesn't play an instrument. But unless there's proof that he's a Milli Vanilli-style fraud or can't sing a single pure note without putting a computer circuit into heavy duty cycle, I'm not going with the music intelligentsia on Bieber.
 
TheBigA said:
You realize Waylon Jennings was once in a pop band? John Denver once won Entertainer of the Year.
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And rather than announce him as the winner, Charlie Rich opened the envelope, then set the contents on fire. Considering that Charlie started as a rock 'n' roller before reinventing himself as a country balladeer, I'm not sure he was the one to speak for the country music purists on that matter.
 
CTListener said:
I'm not sure he was the one to speak for the country music purists on that matter.
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Exactly, there was a lot of hypocrisy then, as there is now. One of the true country purists was Gram Parsons, and he was kicked out of Nashville, as was Willie Nelson.

Country radio wasn't the national format it is today. Charlie Rich songs were played on a lot of MOR and AC stations at the time. John Denver was getting pop airplay. But that was the time when Denver had hits with "Country Roads" and "Thanks God I'm a Country Boy." Hard to ignore the impact those songs had.
 
TheBigA said:
Exactly, there was a lot of hypocrisy then, as there is now. One of the true country purists was Gram Parsons, and he was kicked out of Nashville, as was Willie Nelson.

Country radio wasn't the national format it is today. Charlie Rich songs were played on a lot of MOR and AC stations at the time. John Denver was getting pop airplay. But that was the time when Denver had hits with "Country Roads" and "Thanks God I'm a Country Boy." Hard to ignore the impact those songs had.
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Country purists don't exist anymore. It's just a subgenera of pop music at this point.
 
TheBigA said:
Exactly, there was a lot of hypocrisy then, as there is now. One of the true country purists was Gram Parsons, and he was kicked out of Nashville, as was Willie Nelson.

Country radio wasn't the national format it is today. Charlie Rich songs were played on a lot of MOR and AC stations at the time. John Denver was getting pop airplay. But that was the time when Denver had hits with "Country Roads" and "Thanks God I'm a Country Boy." Hard to ignore the impact those songs had.
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Those two Denver hits were a helluva lot closer to traditional country music than any of Rich's countrypolitan crossovers, although I admit that "Rollin' With The Flow" is one of my favorite country hits of that period and I'd rather hear it today than anything by Denver.
 
TheBigA said:
One thing we started to see two years ago was that viewers didn't watch the live show, but rather went to YouTube to see specific performances by their favorites afterwards. I think that's what we'll see here.
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And that was a good solution. The actual awards were somewhat sterile. We did not see the camera shots of the front rows of other country stars, the hugs from family members as an artist was named, the run from the aisles to the stage and the excitement on stage. So, lacking that, we could either use new media for specific artists or use our recording device to skip those parts that were not terribly thrilling.
 
CTListener said:
Those two Denver hits were a helluva lot closer to traditional country music
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If you look at Billboard, most of Denver's pop hits were also country hits. "Annie's Song," "Back Home Again," and "I'm Sorry" were all #1s. Much of his music (and that of other pop crossovers such as Olivia Newton John and Kenny Rogers) was pushed by big city country stations in New York, Detroit, and Los Angeles.
 
TheBigA said:
One of the true country purists was Gram Parsons, and he was kicked out of Nashville...
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Parsons was his own worst enemy. He was a "wasted talent" in all senses of the word "wasted." He also had little to no work ethic, which was got him fired from the Byrds. IIRC, he was kicked out of Nashville while with the Byrds, whom the Old Guard didn't care for, either.
 
KeithE4 said:
IIRC, he was kicked out of Nashville while with the Byrds, whom the Old Guard didn't care for, either.
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They didn't like anyone with long hair, which is why they didn't like Willie Nelson. But at that time, there was a huge movement of country music being done by young musicians (a lot of it being made in Nashville, but some also in Austin) that was far more country than was played on country radio. The Eagles, Marshall Tucker, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and many more.
 
TheBigA said:
They didn't like anyone with long hair, which is why they didn't like Willie Nelson. But at that time, there was a huge movement of country music being done by young musicians (a lot of it being made in Nashville, but some also in Austin) that was far more country than was played on country radio. The Eagles, Marshall Tucker, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and many more.
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When did The Eagles classify as country?
 
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