How Satellite Radio Is Breaking Country’s Next Big Stars
Every day, plenty of tourists in Nashville pass by the gleaming Bridgestone Arena Tower without so much as an inkling that its upper floors house SiriusXM’s Music City studios. Right next to Lower Broadway’s strip of honky-tonks, the nerve center of popular satellite radio stations like Outlaw Country and the Highway is hiding in plain sight. And you could say the same thing about the influence the Highway wields in the country music industry — it’s possible to miss it if you don’t know what you’re looking for.
For a good, long while, there was pretty much one path to country radio airplay — airplay that remains essential to gaining any kind of foothold in mainstream country music. An act had to be signed by a major label (or a heavyweight indie like Big Machine Label Group), sealed in the most commercially savvy packaging possible and delivered to terrestrial stations with a pricy radio-promotion push. For an unsigned act, it was a prohibitively expensive proposition. But it’s no longer the only option.
After migrating from a program director post at terrestrial country radio to Senior Director, Country Music Programming, at SiriusXM in 2010, John Marks slowly but surely began steering contemporary country satellite radio channel the Highway toward a mixture of current hits — the same Luke Bryan, Blake Shelton and Jason Aldean tunes you’d hear on any station — and unknown quantities that he deemed promising. Thanks to Marks, acts with no label backing whatsoever have gotten a taste of national airplay. The Highway’s audience of SiriusXM subscribers may be dwarfed by the number of listeners who tune in to FM country, but its reach stretches from Albuquerque to Anchorage.
Kevin Neal, a booking agent whose clients Florida Georgia Line benefited mightily from satellite play, puts it this way: “You get on the national stage immediately, as opposed to getting your song tested in Bossier City.”
After FGL’s debut single “Cruise” got airplay on the Highway in May 2012, the duo not only circumnavigated Bossier City, Louisiana — they went on to sell a slew of downloads on iTunes, sign with Republic Nashville, part of Big Machine Label Group, and dominate terrestrial country radio for nearly half of the next year.
“Trying to find acts to break nationally” is part of Marks’ stated mission at the Highway. A weekend show called On the Horizon introduces new music, and throughout the week, select new songs are repeatedly spotlighted as “Highway Finds.” “[The listeners] want to hear the hits, yes, of course, and we play the hits,” Marks tells Rolling Stone Country with the crisp, even-toned affability of a guy who has spent a good chunk of time around commercial radio. “But a large reason of why they’re tuning in to SiriusXM is for the curation of new music, us helping them understand what new music is out there and suggesting songs they may want to hear.”
A program director at a terrestrial station probably wouldn’t be tossing around a term like “curation” or touting the appeal of music discovery. The opposite of novelty reigns at FM, the idea being that listeners are less likely to start channel surfing when songs they already know come on.
“I’m hardly an expert, because I haven’t been there for a long time,” Marks notes diplomatically. “But the [Portable] People Meter ratings methodology [of terrestrial radio] punishes unfamiliar music, by and large. That’s my understanding. So radio used to be an active medium, and now it’s turned into more of a passive medium.”