Chris Parr The Importance of Music Videos
The importance of music videos to the country format, I think, is it changed a lot of people that may not be – maybe didn’t grow up listening to country music or find themselves searching it out. It’s really an entry point. The music video is really an entry point because, mostly, you have this very contemporary, if you will; I mean, they’re using the same techniques and a lot of the same processes.
The directors and the production companies are using processes that keep them on par or competitive with all music videos that are out there, regardless of if you’re a hip-hop artist or a rock artist or whatever it may be, so they certainly – that gives you an entry point. I think, visually, it gives you an entry point to maybe listen to the music when you might not have. If you ask somebody and stopped them on the street and said; do you like country music; nah, and it’s like you’re in the middle of Chicago or San Francisco or something.
Their needs or reaction might be like; no, I don’t really like country music. I listen to whatever, but then you ask them about; well, do you like this artist or do you like this artist, and they go; oh, yeah, I love that artist, and a lot of times, we find it’s about because they have some visual impression, especially younger demographics.
I think it’s an incredibly – music videos for country music are incredibly, incredibly valuable for the imaging of these artists, where country music is pardon parcel of everybody’s entertainment choice. As a consumer, you’re gonna make a choice as to where you spend your money, whether it be movies or music or whatever, and it’s like I think it makes it competitive with the other things, and it also breaks down some of those stereotypes.
Some of our biggest artists today have grown up and been influenced by – their music has been influenced by the Jones and Haggards and Willie Nelsons of the world, but they also grew up in a time where they were influenced and television was a big part of their world, and other music was a big part of their world. They might have just as well been influenced by Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen and Queen as anything, and you’re seeing, over the last – I think, especially this generation, some of our biggest artists like Chesney and Toby and Sugarland and you just go down the list.
It’s like they’ve been influenced by that, so they want their videos and their visuals and their image to be competitive with that, so it’s a really interesting kind of time, where it’s a way for them to express themselves in that visual medium versus just like one-dimensional; you have to love country music to buy it for the consumer. It’s like; well, take a look at this. Hopefully, you capture them with a visual. If they’re not fans of the music, that visual gets them interested long enough to maybe just give it a listen, and I think that’s why you’ve got – some of our biggest artists; they’re selling out stadiums and selling millions and millions of records.
The core country audience – there’s a ceiling to that, and it’s like, at some point over a few million records, it’s like you know you’re tapping into a bigger audience than just a country music audience, and I think that goes back to why is that important to CMT? Well, we wanna reach the broadest audience possible, obviously, through television.
Yeah, if you put a map on – our theory is, and, actually, we talk about it a lot in our programming philosophy. If you looked at a map of the United States, we feel like there’s probably – we would over-index, if you will, in the middle of the country. The coast, not that we aren’t gonna program to them, but sometimes, I think if you looked at television in general, you’re gonna see that most television is made on either coast, New York or LA, and so it has that kind of east coast or west coast interpretation or filter, if you will.
We think there’s great opportunity, and I think we’ve built our business, and certainly, in reaching 80 million homes, where there’s an audience out there, and we happen to live and create this television in the middle of the country in Nashville, Tennessee, so our point of view is a little bit different, we think, and we think that’s a great strategic opportunity for us, frankly. You just look at it with a little different take on it.
One of the things we’ve seen – a trend we’ve seen in television over the last few years is very – a lot of these competitions on television; you’re competing for this, that or the other, and so if that’s what the audience is kind of interested in and you see these things being very successful, of course, we, as a major network, are gonna look at it and go; well, perhaps we should have something like that. What’s our interpretation? And we had many discussions about it and actually started down a path that was pretty typical of a lot of other networks, but then we realized; you know what? The thing that we know or we believe about our audience and why we’re different is that our audience really isn’t – so many of those competitions; they’re kind of mean-spirited.
Somebody’s gotta lose. There’s very, some kind of black and white kind of, and not that it can’t be competitive. You can’t have a competition and not have a winner and loser, but it’s the idea that it doesn’t have to be this mean-spirited approach to it. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing, so to speak, and so we’ve really kind of used that and we look at that. I think the country music audience, the hardcore fans especially; they’re very interested. They’re extremely loyal to the artists, the country music artists, and also, they don’t seem to be too terribly interested in a gossip column about them or kind of the dirty laundry of it, but it’s like they really don’t show much interest in that a lot of times.
If you look at; for instance, one of the examples of that is there really isn’t kind of, as you have all these magazines that are on the magazine rack and you don’t really have a dirt-slinging kind of country music magazine. It all very much celebrates the artist, and not that you’re not gonna have some real-world information or whatever in there, but it’s like the point of it is not to kind of sensationalize whatever’s happened to this particular artist sooner or later, and we don’t do that on the channel. We don’t do that in our news. We think that the relationship between our fans and the artist is a little more sophisticated than that, and they keep indicating that to us in various ways.
One of the criteria that we have for an artist, whether they’re an independent artist or a major-label artist; I mean, obviously, major labels are able to show us so many more ways that they’re establishing and growing an artist, so that makes us feel like we’re part of that process; that we’re not just out there on our own on something, perhaps, or whatever, but can an artist do it?
The one criteria that we have is that you need to have a nationally distributed – because what we don’t want to do is go play somebody, and then a consumer can’t go buy it in the marketplace, and that’s a frustration we don’t want to really create, and it’s kind of like – and also, to some extent, honestly, it’s to protect people from going and throwing money at music videos, thinking I’m gonna be a star tomorrow. It’s why are you making the music video? If you’re just making a music video to get your face on television, then yeah; I mean, it’s probably not – the odds are against it, but the point should be that you are trying to convey your image and your music to someone and have them ultimately make a decision to purchase your music, and, thus, there’s a financial transaction that’s happening, or go download the track or however people want to choose. Everybody’s choosing different ways now.
So I think it’s really we have – one of the key criteria we have is that you have to have national distribution because we’re a national network; that people can basically go get it anywhere, so that’s kind of – we’re pretty sticky about that, and, ultimately, could an artist decide to do something on their own; I mean, country music, in particular, has not had a – there’s not been a history of a lot of independent labels within the format. They’ve typically been mostly major labels, unlike rock; for instance; I mean, a lot of the alternative rock; you got tons of independent record labels out there, and they make a great living and they support the artists and the bands that they are promoting, and it works for them, but it’s kind of atypical for country music and for national in particular.
Recently, though, I think over just the last few years, we’ve seen some independents, some up-and-coming, as the major labels have constricted because there’s such a dynamic change in the financial. In their business world, they’ve had to kind of constrict their overhead, their business, the number of people they employ, the number of artists they sign. They just had to be much more focused about it, and that has created an opportunity for some independents to come into the marketplace.
And so we’ve probably got more independents right now in 2006 than we’ve ever seen, and being successful. We actually, for our award show this year, we have an outdoor stage; we call it our pre-party stage, and it’s part of the red-carpet process, and it’s a launching pad for a lot of our new artists, artists that we believe in, but we may not have a slot for them on the big stage on the award show because that’s kind of reserved for the biggest artists and the most popular artists that are out there. It’s what people expect to see on the award show.
But the pre-party; it’s like – interestingly, this year, two out of the three performance slots that are on that stage are – independent record labels are represented there, so I’ve always said CMT – my music programming philosophy is we don’t care who you are or where you come from. If it’s great music and it’s a great music video, then we’re going to be interested. It doesn’t matter what label it has on the album or the video at the end of the day, but it does kind of need to be able – a consumer needs to be able to get it, so it’s, I guess, a little answer to that is a little bit of both ways.
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