Country Music Is Changing, in Spite of Itself

The genre’s ongoing racial reckoning combined with a shift toward streaming listening could lead to a more inclusive future for both artists and fans.
Graphic by Drew Litowitz

No music genre is as beholden to corporate radio as country music, and no form of music media is as conservative, aesthetically and politically, as corporate radio. Put two and two together, and it makes sense that no genre is more conservative than country music made for the radio—an assembly-line product stuffed with references to patriotism and pickups, built by a massive industry centered in Nashville. That conventional wisdom accounts for the wide swaths of people whose response to seeing video of rising country star Morgan Wallen using the n-word last month was: “Is anyone surprised?”

The country industry’s answer to that question was both yes and no. As stars like Mickey Guyton and Maren Morris quickly pointed out, there’s at least a century’s worth of evidence that the genre was built by overt racism and discrimination—to paraphrase them, Wallen’s racism is country. In recent years, that bigotry and ignorance has been either expressed just vaguely enough (see: Jason Aldean’s Halloween blackface) or by artists obsolete enough that the industry hasn’t had financial incentive to address it. Wallen’s use of the slur, though, was clear-cut and impossible to ignore, given that it happened while he was literally the biggest artist in the country. Grotesquely, perhaps the most surprising thing about the ordeal was how neither Wallen nor his squad of flacks could find a way to talk around such an obvious offense. Within a day, all the major radio conglomerates had stopped playing Wallen’s music, an action that is unprecedented in scope and swiftness, particularly for the genre’s conservative gatekeepers.

A slew of necessary, overdue conversations about how to make country music more inclusive are now happening both on the record and behind the scenes. At the same time, Wallen’s album Dangerous has remained atop the Billboard 200 for the past eight weeks, as some stations continue to play his music. When Norfolk, Virginia’s US 106.1 stopped playing Wallen’s music for just one day, listeners revolted, and the station reversed course. “We made the decision to start playing him immediately,” program director Dave Parker recently told Country Insider. “Since that time, we have received almost exclusively—with the exception of two people—positive feedback and thanks for playing his music.”

Generally, though, corporate stations are still shunning Wallen, understanding how the explosion of activism in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of police last summer would have made country’s standard “no drama, just music” tack look extra tone-deaf right now. So country radio’s sudden sensitivity to outsiders’ perception of the genre is both a step in the right direction and ultimately self-serving—a reflection of how the tectonic plates of the country industry have already been shifting over the past few years. Where mainstream country’s motto, especially in the warmongering George W. Bush era, had been, “If you don’t have anything conservative to say, don’t say anything at all,” in the last election cycle, Maren Morris’ Biden endorsement was much more visible than any of her peers’ #Trump2020s—and she still had one of the biggest songs of the year.

But the main reason country music can no longer claim neutrality within an increasingly polarized cultural zeitgeist isn’t just because of political correctness. It also involves popular music’s overarching transition toward streaming—a mode of consumption not just divorced from location and community, but genre itself.

It’s important to note that country radio is still enormous. There are more country radio stations in America than there are of any other format. If your song is No. 1 at country radio, somewhere between 20 and 30 million individual people will hear it in a given week—making it imperative that your song is the one chosen by an insular cadre of radio conglomerates and major labels.

Streaming is showing the earliest signs of challenging that monolith. The pandemic proved to be a catalyst, moving country audiences, who have historically been slow to adapt to new technology, away from their car radios and commutes, and toward on-demand listening at home. According to an internal Country Music Association study, consumption of the genre grew 11 percent year-over-year from the first half of 2019 to the first half of 2020—entirely because of a 21 percent increase in streaming. “The Threat From [Streaming Services] Is Real,” as one slide of a PowerPoint shown at the Country Radio Seminar put it last month. They were specifically referring to listeners under 44 migrating away from country radio—but if people under 44 are categorically streaming more music, soon everyone will be streaming more music.

The growth in country streaming numbers suggests a nascent category of artist that, instead of being built for radio, might be built for streaming and its attendant global, often genre-agnostic audience. The demographic information available from streaming services makes it impossible to ignore that all kinds of people listen to music in the country format—not only white people driving trucks around small towns far from any coast. Labels, and more precisely, artists, have already begun to capitalize on that data.

Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” was a social media and streaming hit first. So were Breland’s “My Truck” and Blanco Brown’s “The Git Up.” And so was Kane Brown, one of very few Black artists to have been recently accepted into the country radio fold. Mickey Guyton, whose label, Capitol, has yet to release her debut album even though she’s been signed for almost a decade, saw her streams jump almost 700 percent—more than any other country artist last year—with the release of her now-Grammy-nominated single, “Black Like Me.” All of these artists are Black. None of them broke through on country radio. When there isn’t as insurmountable a corporate barrier to entry, country music looks and sounds more like the country it purports to represent.

The unprecedented streaming success of Morgan Wallen—which continues unabated—suggests streaming is hardly a cure-all for country’s diversity and inclusion problem. While fans can’t hear Wallen on many country radio stations right now, his music is still available via streaming. All that on top of the fact that streaming services rely on algorithms that reinforce existing biases—like, for example, country music is for white people. But streaming still has the potential to remake at least a corner of country music in its global, relatively inclusive image.

The hypothetical streaming country listener may not even realize that what they’re listening to is categorized as country. “We’re hoping that over time, as country becomes more of a global genre, its voices are diversified and hopefully, that its audience is diversified, too,” Spotify editor Laura Ohls told me in a recent interview for one of the service’s blogs. “There might be dated assumptions of who a ‘country’ listener is, but we’re finding that that’s changing.” Ohls edits the Indigo playlist, which is very specifically oriented to a listener that might not want to be defined by the “country” label yet features plenty of artists made on Music Row like Luke Combs, Eric Church, and Miranda Lambert. Apple Music is attempting to open country’s doors (and raise its audience numbers) by using a familiar format—radio—with an intentionally diverse cast of DJs and programming, including shows like Rissi Palmer’s Color Me Country, which focuses on the music and experiences of BIPOC artists, and Proud Radio, which focuses on LGBTQ+ artists.

It’s the very beginning of a shift within country music towards streaming and its genreless consumption and away from the rigid hierarchy of corporate terrestrial radio. Spotify and Apple Music’s initiatives within the genre are ultimately as much a result of corporate calculations as Wallen’s radio ban, presumably a reaction to their projections of who will be listening to country music in the next decade, and how. If their projections are right, country’s conversations about diversity and inclusion will be compelled into reality not only because of those people fighting vigorously for change, but because that’s where the money is going: More people making and listening to country music means more money for everyone. Radio will be in a position to either keep up, as it seems to be trying to do at the corporate level with the Wallen ban, or double down, as some stations are doing by continuing to play Wallen’s music. Either way, the genre, notoriously fixated on bygone traditions, has no choice but to embrace a new one: giving everyone an equal right to listen to and make “real” country music.


CORRECTIONS: This article originally stated that Spotify released an enhanced version of Morgan Wallen’s album Dangerous after radio stations started banning his music in February, but it was released before the ban. The article also alluded to Spotify reinstating Wallen’s music to their Country Coffeehouse playlist after removing it for a short time, but the streaming service never removed Wallen’s songs from that playlist in the first place.

A version of the story also stated that the singer-songwriter Nate Barnes is white but he identifies as biracial. The corresponding section of the article has been removed, and we regret the error.