Country Music in the 80s/90s Compared to Now

[thy4568]

I only started listening to music (including country) in the 90s.  Do you think there were more or less album releases in the 80/90s compared to 2000s/10s?  Were there moe or fewer artists with the major labels?  Did artists release albums on a quicker pace?  I think in the 70s, many artists released 2 albums a year! 

It seems to me that we have more singles released each week.  And we have more EPs.  I don't think EPs existed back then, or did they?  But I think they had more albums released back then.

I remember Capitol Nashville and Curb Records had lots of signees and veteran artists.  And they let some of their veteran artists release albums even though they were no longer making the charts.  Case in point being Anne Murray, Crystal Gayle, Barbara Mandrell, Lee Greenwood, and Ronnie McDowell all had albums released way into the 90s when none of them were having any substantial hits.  

[Ten Pound Hammer]

EPs did exist in the 80s but weren't as prominent. RCA did EPs for some artists in the 80s, including Vince Gill, The Judds, and Restless Heart. Boy Howdy also put out an EP in the 90s which contains their two biggest hits.

Also, I get the impression that radio was less prone to being meddled with by the bean counters back then. There weren't radio conglomerates like iHeartMedia back then, so there was no way to artificially inflate a debut position, and there weren't overly cautious PDs dragging their heels on deciding whether or not to add a hot new song that was at #10 and still clearly creating buzz. And there definitely weren't labels keeping singles alive as long as humanly possible; if a song was only at #26 after 19 weeks, then it was definitely going bye-bye after week 20.

Curb doesn't so much "let" veteran artists keep releasing new albums as they keep going back to the catalog to re-release the same stuff -- I swear they've released about 500 "greatest hits" album from Ray Stevens in the past decade alone, and Lee Greenwood has a zillion albums that just have "God Bless the USA" tacked on -- or hastily churning out re-recordings. They actually had the audacity to get Conway Twitty to do a re-recordings album not long before his death and then market it as being his "last" recordings.

[thy4568]

Wow! So many things I didn't know. With Conway Twitty, what's the "last" album called?

I notice Curb did release a Deborah Allen album full of new songs but they tagged on "Baby I Lied" and marketed it as her "greatest hits" hoping to sell more copies. And they did over-satuate the market with LeAnn Rimes' very early recordings that I am sure Rimes cringe whenever she hears them today.

[Ten Pound Hammer]

May 24, 2016 19:30:47 GMT -5 thy4568 said:

Wow! So many things I didn't know. With Conway Twitty, what's the "last" album called?

I think it's this one. I've seen it in the $5 bin at Walmart: www.allmusic.com/album/greatest-hits-curb-capitol-mw0000313792

The Deborah Allen one is re-recordings too. I got fooled by iTunes once with it, as it had a terrible sounding redo of Baby I Lied where she couldn't hit half the notes. Keep in mind that Deborah was never on Curb in her prime. They also did that with T. Graham Brown -- he was never on Curb, but they suckered him into doing a re-recordings album.

[ilikemusic]

I don't think country music has ever sounded more poppy in it's entire existence like it does now. Most of the songs use R&B beats now. Super weird how drastically the genre has changed in such a short amount of time...

Taylor Swift, her impact!

[ericNY2002]

For most of the 1990's, artists were routinely have 3-4 singles released a year (most songs flew up the chart and were coming down the chart by 13-15 weeks). There was rarely a single that was on the Billboard country chart for more than 20 weeks (if there was it was due to the single being a album cut getting enough spins to chart before it was an actual single) As for album releases, most artists released an album every 18 to 24 months (most albums went 5 singles deep, a few even more).