CMA 50th Anniversary - Taking Country into the New Millennium: 1999-2008
Deborah Evans Price
December 01, 2008
As CMA entered its fourth decade after having helped grow Country Music to worldwide popularity, ambitions were set even higher and momentum continued to build as CMA rushed into the new millennium. In 2001, Fan Fair moved from the Tennessee State Fairgrounds to Downtown Nashville, where it was christened CMA Music Festival. That same year, an unprecedented 12 inductees were welcomed into the Country Music Hall of Fame. In 2005, the CMA Awards took over New York City during a one-year move to Madison Square Garden. And when the event returned to Nashville in '06, it relocated from its longtime home at the Grand Ole Opry House to the Sommet Center in the heart of Music City.
This decade also marked a change in leadership at CMA, as Executive Director Ed Benson handed the reins to Tammy Genovese. Promoted to Associate Executive Director in 1999, Genovese rose to become Chief Operating Officer in 2006 and Chief Executive Officer in 2007, as Benson ensured the smooth transition by remaining on staff as Chief Strategic Officer until his retirement Aug. 19, 2008 after 29 years of service at CMA.
"Ed and [former Executive Director] Jo Walker-Meador set the tone for this organization," said Genovese. "Ed did so many things for me personally and gave me the opportunity to learn and grow here. Plus he was such a visionary and leader on some very crucial and important days for Country Music that helped us position ourselves.
"I just asked him not to change his phone number," she added, smiling. "But you know what? I know he will always be there for CMA, just like Jo. They've both been great mentors."
During this time, as in previous years, the annual CMA Music Festival maintained its status as a unique phenomenon. First staged in 1972 at Nashville's Municipal Auditorium, it now fills Downtown Nashville with activities that stretch from the Nashville Convention Center all the way across the Cumberland River to LP Field.
"The Festival was obviously outgrowing the Fairgrounds, so it was either going to have to expand or go away," said Tony Conway, CMA Music Festival Executive Producer and President/CEO, Buddy Lee Attractions. "There was a lot of discussion about that with the Board. But Jerry Bradley, who had done a fantastic job as Chairman of Fan Fair, encouraged me to take this project on, move it Downtown and make it much, much bigger than it had been."
This ambition was laudable and the time was right, but there were formidable obstacles. Not the least of those involved the money it would take to change the Festival's locale.
"We knew that it was probably going to cost three to four times as much to produce the event if we moved Downtown than what it had cost us at the Fairgrounds, which it did," Conway said. "So I was a little afraid of Downtown Nashville at first because I thought it would be hard to move everybody around. I was thinking that Nashville's Superspeedway made sense [as a Festival site] because we could have camping and we had acres and acres of parking. But then the Mayor [Bill Purcell] approached me and said, 'We'll work with you. We'd really like to have this in the city and we'd really like to have it Downtown.'"
Even so, it remained a gamble. "My initial projection to the Board was that we would not really make any money for the first four years," Conway recalled. "I thought we might break even on the fifth year. A big concern was the fans' reaction to moving it: Would they support it? Would they still come? If we could generate enough income from the event to justify the increase in cost in the move Downtown, then the answer to both of those questions would be yes. And in our second year [in Downtown Nashville] our ticket sales increased drastically, which eliminated our concern about not being able to pay for this event."
A tremendous increase in corporate sponsorships for the Festival also helped CMA handle the Festival's expenses. "We knew that to grow the music or to grow Fan Fair, we had to bring sponsors," said Benson. "For years, it had no sponsors. It was co-produced by the Grand Ole Opry and CMA. There wasn't such a thing as a sponsorship at Fan Fair. Only just in the year before we moved Downtown did we start to explore sponsorship, and after we made the move we were poised to do a lot more because of the experience we had gained over the previous 10 or 12 years of working with corporate America, not on behalf of CMA but on behalf of the industry. We were able to convert that knowledge over into things that benefited the organization's big events and activities."
Much of this owed as well to the desirability of Country Music listeners as a customer base. "This genre is probably the most appealing for a sponsor to look at because our demo is getting younger all the time," said Genovese. "Festivals give the sponsors the opportunity to have direct contact with the consumer, and Country Music is the only format that has ever put on an event like this. The sponsors know that. Anytime they can come into Nashville and be part of an event that has 400 artists representing it, that appeals to American Airlines, Chevy, Crisco, Dr Pepper, Greased Lightning, McDonald's, Vault, Wrangler and all of our sponsors because they can do sampling and get to these people who love Country Music. And it helps the artists to meet these sponsors and potentially build relationships with them and do business with them on their own."
The costs of moving CMA Music Festival have been repaid and then some. The $15.5 million infused into the local economy by Fan Fair in 2001 expanded dramatically in the middle of the city's business district to $23 million. And thanks to CMA's "Keep the Music Playing" initiative, through which half the net proceeds of the Festival are donated to music education in Metro Nashville Public Schools, more than $1.1 million has channeled directly from Festival income to the purchase of hundreds of instruments, music labs and peripheral equipment since the program was launched in partnership with the Nashville Alliance for Public Education in 2006.
One favorite attraction for fans who attend CMA Music Festival, the 2004/2006/2008 IEBA Fair/Festival of the Year, is the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. CMA created the Hall in 1961 and has generously supported it ever since. But one particularly priceless contribution to the Hall occurred in 2001, when a dozen new members were inducted into the hallowed institution: Bill Anderson, the Delmore Brothers, the Everly Brothers, Don Gibson, Homer and Jethro, Waylon Jennings, the Jordanaires, Don Law, the Louvin Brothers, Ken Nelson, Sam Phillips and Webb Pierce.
"It was the opening of the new Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Downtown Nashville," Genovese said. "And our Board had felt for some time that we needed to catch up with people who certainly deserved to be admitted in different categories. It was a great opportunity. But we're back to our regular three inductions a year - unless there's a tie like this year. We enjoy having a smaller number because we can give each artist more attention and honor them in a bigger way than you can when there is a mass induction."
No CMA endeavor drew more headlines than when the CMA Awards migrated to New York City in 2005. The decision to hold this event for the first time outside of Nashville was key to the Board's strategy for boosting Country Music's profile and transferring the show to a larger venue in Nashville. Plans began taking shape at the end of 2003, when Benson took a call from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's office.
"Mayor Bloomberg had a group of people, which he called the Big Event Staff," Genovese explained. "They had put this group in place to go after major events to bring to the city after September 11th, trying to build the city back up and get tourism back in. They were going after the Super Bowl, the Olympics and all of these major events, so they rolled out the red carpet. They brought us to New York, and everybody from the Mayor's office to the Chamber of Commerce sat down with us to talk about the opportunities. We went to Madison Square Garden and did a tour. They said, basically, 'What would it take to get you here?' So we put the numbers together and said we really needed to offset those costs before we'd even consider going. And they came back and said, 'We'll do it!'"
As the CMA Awards trekked to the Garden, Country Music swept through metropolis like a cleansing breeze. "If you were in New York City before that event, you knew the CMA Awards were in town," Genovese said. "You could see (CMA Awards hosts) Brooks & Dunn on billboards from the airport to downtown. There was a ton of billboards in Times Square. We had artists playing all over the city. We had a cocktail party at Saks Fifth Avenue and all our nominees were there. Sponsors were there. The Opry played at Carnegie Hall the week of our show. We had all these unique and different things happening and drawing a lot of people throughout New York that week."
In addition to co-hosting the Awards, Kix Brooks was President of the CMA Board at that time. "When New York City pitched us that idea, my thoughts were it had the potential of being a great opportunity for the organization," he recalled. "The mission statement for CMA at that time was to try and broaden the base of Country Music, and New York City being the center of advertising pretty much gave us the opportunity to expand our horizons."
In any event, Brooks continued, Country Music already had established deep roots in the Big Apple. "The genuine thing about it is Country Music really has a great history in New York City, with Buck Owens and Flatt & Scruggs at Carnegie Hall as well as everybody from Dolly Parton to Vince Gill going in to do 'Letterman'. I felt like we had a great tradition of letting ourselves shine on the big stage."
Making this one-time move from Nashville was not a decision taken lightly. "Nashville is the home of Country Music and we'd never been out of the city," Genovese explained. "But we were looking for a transition to grow into a bigger venue. The Opry House has a great, classy vibe. It had been a great environment for the Awards, but we had outgrown it several years before. To grow the event and to include the city of Nashville more, to make it more of a local event but also to grow sponsorships, we needed to be in a bigger venue. That helped us to transition from the Opry in 2004 to Madison Square Garden in 2005 and back to Nashville to the Sommet Center in 2006. Once people understood that we were not just picking up and moving to be moving, that it was a real strategic initiative for CMA and on behalf of the industry, most of them came around."
"It was never meant to move the CMAs to New York City," Brooks added. "It was always meant to be, 'Let's go on the biggest stage in the world and show them what we've got!' It's no different than Ronnie and me going to Detroit last week and doing a concert for a huge crowd at a sold-out arena. People around the country love what we do, and it's important every now and then to show them it means enough to take it to them and show them what we've got. It's a sales call. It's just like any other business, and New York is the biggest venue in the world. If we were ever going to take the Awards out of Nashville, what better place is there to do it?"
It also marked the first time tickets to the Awards were made available to the public for purchase, a decision that by 2007 was bringing enough fans to town to channel $2 million into the local economy, according to the Nashville Convention & Visitors Bureau. "Certainly it helped us in a financial way to add more money to our bottom line and help offset some of the costs of production," Genovese said. "But more than anything, it brought a lot of energy to the building."
In 2006, the CMA Awards moved from its longtime television network home of CBS to ABC. "We had a great run with CBS for 35 years," Genovese said. "But when the contract was up three years ago, the opportunity was there to explore other networks. ABC came into town and made a great presentation. They embrace Country Music. It's a part of their culture. You'll see a lot of Country artists participating on 'Extreme Home Makeover' and other shows on ABC. The demo is younger - 18 to 49. So lots of things attracted us to ABC at that time - intangibles that you can't put a dollar value on. Plus, at the end of the day, they came to the table with a great proposal."
For six years, part of the CMA Awards experience has involved a national broadcast of the press conference at which nominees are announced. The tradition began on CBS with "The Early Show" in 2003, and ABC augmented it by scheduling "CMA Music Festival: Country's Night to Rock" shortly before revealing the names of nominees on "Good Morning America" and CMT in September 2008.
"It's an unbelievable commercial," said Conway. "Fortunately, we've already sold a lot of tickets for '09 Festival, but we saw a big jump in ticket sales after this year's show aired and again when it re-aired elsewhere throughout the year. I'm proud to say that this is the only music festival in the United States, in any genre of music, that has a primetime network television special. And it's a great sales tool for Nashville because it also says a lot about nightlife and historical parts of the city."
It's an important message and an effective one too, as more than 34.6 million viewers tuned in to ABC for all or part of last year's CMA Awards, according to Nielsen figures.
Along with network television coverage, CMA has benefited through its 17-year relationship with Premiere Radio Networks. "It's been an amazing partnership," Genovese said. "I could not ask for anybody to be more professional and customer-friendly in representing CMA and our brand to the radio community. That whole aspect of the drive-time team being in Nashville, being part of the CMA Awards and the CMA Music Festival, gives us the opportunity to reach millions of listeners right before the main events. Premiere has been a great partner. They bend over backwards to make it first class and meet the needs of the artists, the radio people and certainly CMA."
For 50 years, CMA has been bringing people together from every facet of the Country Music community, with direction from a hard-working Board whose vision places the common good over individual agendas of its members. "CMA has been an amazing ground-breaking organization," Brooks said. "When you have that many people, there are so many agendas involved, but at the end of the day I have been around the Board table and seen those label heads and managers ask, 'What is best for Country Music?' It really happens. It makes you sit back and smile. It isn't always what's best for Brooks & Dunn, but ultimately what's best for Country Music is what's best for Brooks & Dunn."
As she steers CMA through the next chapter in its history, Genovese is clear about what she hopes to see in the Country Music industry and how those goals can be attained. "I would love to see it transition more into the digital world," she said. "I would love for CMA to position itself as the leader in helping our industry turn that corner and I think we're doing that. We've committed to a major research project for the next three to five years to help determine who our consumer is and help our industry find growth opportunities in all kinds of areas, not just in CD sales or downloads but also with touring, sponsorship, publishing, radio and more - all the segments that our membership represents. Music consumption is up and the business model has to continue to adjust. I'm certain that CMA will be a leader in getting us all there."
2008 CMA Close Up® News Service / Country Music Association®, Inc.
This decade also marked a change in leadership at CMA, as Executive Director Ed Benson handed the reins to Tammy Genovese. Promoted to Associate Executive Director in 1999, Genovese rose to become Chief Operating Officer in 2006 and Chief Executive Officer in 2007, as Benson ensured the smooth transition by remaining on staff as Chief Strategic Officer until his retirement Aug. 19, 2008 after 29 years of service at CMA.
"Ed and [former Executive Director] Jo Walker-Meador set the tone for this organization," said Genovese. "Ed did so many things for me personally and gave me the opportunity to learn and grow here. Plus he was such a visionary and leader on some very crucial and important days for Country Music that helped us position ourselves.
"I just asked him not to change his phone number," she added, smiling. "But you know what? I know he will always be there for CMA, just like Jo. They've both been great mentors."
During this time, as in previous years, the annual CMA Music Festival maintained its status as a unique phenomenon. First staged in 1972 at Nashville's Municipal Auditorium, it now fills Downtown Nashville with activities that stretch from the Nashville Convention Center all the way across the Cumberland River to LP Field.
"The Festival was obviously outgrowing the Fairgrounds, so it was either going to have to expand or go away," said Tony Conway, CMA Music Festival Executive Producer and President/CEO, Buddy Lee Attractions. "There was a lot of discussion about that with the Board. But Jerry Bradley, who had done a fantastic job as Chairman of Fan Fair, encouraged me to take this project on, move it Downtown and make it much, much bigger than it had been."
This ambition was laudable and the time was right, but there were formidable obstacles. Not the least of those involved the money it would take to change the Festival's locale.
"We knew that it was probably going to cost three to four times as much to produce the event if we moved Downtown than what it had cost us at the Fairgrounds, which it did," Conway said. "So I was a little afraid of Downtown Nashville at first because I thought it would be hard to move everybody around. I was thinking that Nashville's Superspeedway made sense [as a Festival site] because we could have camping and we had acres and acres of parking. But then the Mayor [Bill Purcell] approached me and said, 'We'll work with you. We'd really like to have this in the city and we'd really like to have it Downtown.'"
Even so, it remained a gamble. "My initial projection to the Board was that we would not really make any money for the first four years," Conway recalled. "I thought we might break even on the fifth year. A big concern was the fans' reaction to moving it: Would they support it? Would they still come? If we could generate enough income from the event to justify the increase in cost in the move Downtown, then the answer to both of those questions would be yes. And in our second year [in Downtown Nashville] our ticket sales increased drastically, which eliminated our concern about not being able to pay for this event."
A tremendous increase in corporate sponsorships for the Festival also helped CMA handle the Festival's expenses. "We knew that to grow the music or to grow Fan Fair, we had to bring sponsors," said Benson. "For years, it had no sponsors. It was co-produced by the Grand Ole Opry and CMA. There wasn't such a thing as a sponsorship at Fan Fair. Only just in the year before we moved Downtown did we start to explore sponsorship, and after we made the move we were poised to do a lot more because of the experience we had gained over the previous 10 or 12 years of working with corporate America, not on behalf of CMA but on behalf of the industry. We were able to convert that knowledge over into things that benefited the organization's big events and activities."
Much of this owed as well to the desirability of Country Music listeners as a customer base. "This genre is probably the most appealing for a sponsor to look at because our demo is getting younger all the time," said Genovese. "Festivals give the sponsors the opportunity to have direct contact with the consumer, and Country Music is the only format that has ever put on an event like this. The sponsors know that. Anytime they can come into Nashville and be part of an event that has 400 artists representing it, that appeals to American Airlines, Chevy, Crisco, Dr Pepper, Greased Lightning, McDonald's, Vault, Wrangler and all of our sponsors because they can do sampling and get to these people who love Country Music. And it helps the artists to meet these sponsors and potentially build relationships with them and do business with them on their own."
The costs of moving CMA Music Festival have been repaid and then some. The $15.5 million infused into the local economy by Fan Fair in 2001 expanded dramatically in the middle of the city's business district to $23 million. And thanks to CMA's "Keep the Music Playing" initiative, through which half the net proceeds of the Festival are donated to music education in Metro Nashville Public Schools, more than $1.1 million has channeled directly from Festival income to the purchase of hundreds of instruments, music labs and peripheral equipment since the program was launched in partnership with the Nashville Alliance for Public Education in 2006.
One favorite attraction for fans who attend CMA Music Festival, the 2004/2006/2008 IEBA Fair/Festival of the Year, is the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. CMA created the Hall in 1961 and has generously supported it ever since. But one particularly priceless contribution to the Hall occurred in 2001, when a dozen new members were inducted into the hallowed institution: Bill Anderson, the Delmore Brothers, the Everly Brothers, Don Gibson, Homer and Jethro, Waylon Jennings, the Jordanaires, Don Law, the Louvin Brothers, Ken Nelson, Sam Phillips and Webb Pierce.
"It was the opening of the new Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Downtown Nashville," Genovese said. "And our Board had felt for some time that we needed to catch up with people who certainly deserved to be admitted in different categories. It was a great opportunity. But we're back to our regular three inductions a year - unless there's a tie like this year. We enjoy having a smaller number because we can give each artist more attention and honor them in a bigger way than you can when there is a mass induction."
No CMA endeavor drew more headlines than when the CMA Awards migrated to New York City in 2005. The decision to hold this event for the first time outside of Nashville was key to the Board's strategy for boosting Country Music's profile and transferring the show to a larger venue in Nashville. Plans began taking shape at the end of 2003, when Benson took a call from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's office.
"Mayor Bloomberg had a group of people, which he called the Big Event Staff," Genovese explained. "They had put this group in place to go after major events to bring to the city after September 11th, trying to build the city back up and get tourism back in. They were going after the Super Bowl, the Olympics and all of these major events, so they rolled out the red carpet. They brought us to New York, and everybody from the Mayor's office to the Chamber of Commerce sat down with us to talk about the opportunities. We went to Madison Square Garden and did a tour. They said, basically, 'What would it take to get you here?' So we put the numbers together and said we really needed to offset those costs before we'd even consider going. And they came back and said, 'We'll do it!'"
As the CMA Awards trekked to the Garden, Country Music swept through metropolis like a cleansing breeze. "If you were in New York City before that event, you knew the CMA Awards were in town," Genovese said. "You could see (CMA Awards hosts) Brooks & Dunn on billboards from the airport to downtown. There was a ton of billboards in Times Square. We had artists playing all over the city. We had a cocktail party at Saks Fifth Avenue and all our nominees were there. Sponsors were there. The Opry played at Carnegie Hall the week of our show. We had all these unique and different things happening and drawing a lot of people throughout New York that week."
In addition to co-hosting the Awards, Kix Brooks was President of the CMA Board at that time. "When New York City pitched us that idea, my thoughts were it had the potential of being a great opportunity for the organization," he recalled. "The mission statement for CMA at that time was to try and broaden the base of Country Music, and New York City being the center of advertising pretty much gave us the opportunity to expand our horizons."
In any event, Brooks continued, Country Music already had established deep roots in the Big Apple. "The genuine thing about it is Country Music really has a great history in New York City, with Buck Owens and Flatt & Scruggs at Carnegie Hall as well as everybody from Dolly Parton to Vince Gill going in to do 'Letterman'. I felt like we had a great tradition of letting ourselves shine on the big stage."
Making this one-time move from Nashville was not a decision taken lightly. "Nashville is the home of Country Music and we'd never been out of the city," Genovese explained. "But we were looking for a transition to grow into a bigger venue. The Opry House has a great, classy vibe. It had been a great environment for the Awards, but we had outgrown it several years before. To grow the event and to include the city of Nashville more, to make it more of a local event but also to grow sponsorships, we needed to be in a bigger venue. That helped us to transition from the Opry in 2004 to Madison Square Garden in 2005 and back to Nashville to the Sommet Center in 2006. Once people understood that we were not just picking up and moving to be moving, that it was a real strategic initiative for CMA and on behalf of the industry, most of them came around."
"It was never meant to move the CMAs to New York City," Brooks added. "It was always meant to be, 'Let's go on the biggest stage in the world and show them what we've got!' It's no different than Ronnie and me going to Detroit last week and doing a concert for a huge crowd at a sold-out arena. People around the country love what we do, and it's important every now and then to show them it means enough to take it to them and show them what we've got. It's a sales call. It's just like any other business, and New York is the biggest venue in the world. If we were ever going to take the Awards out of Nashville, what better place is there to do it?"
It also marked the first time tickets to the Awards were made available to the public for purchase, a decision that by 2007 was bringing enough fans to town to channel $2 million into the local economy, according to the Nashville Convention & Visitors Bureau. "Certainly it helped us in a financial way to add more money to our bottom line and help offset some of the costs of production," Genovese said. "But more than anything, it brought a lot of energy to the building."
In 2006, the CMA Awards moved from its longtime television network home of CBS to ABC. "We had a great run with CBS for 35 years," Genovese said. "But when the contract was up three years ago, the opportunity was there to explore other networks. ABC came into town and made a great presentation. They embrace Country Music. It's a part of their culture. You'll see a lot of Country artists participating on 'Extreme Home Makeover' and other shows on ABC. The demo is younger - 18 to 49. So lots of things attracted us to ABC at that time - intangibles that you can't put a dollar value on. Plus, at the end of the day, they came to the table with a great proposal."
For six years, part of the CMA Awards experience has involved a national broadcast of the press conference at which nominees are announced. The tradition began on CBS with "The Early Show" in 2003, and ABC augmented it by scheduling "CMA Music Festival: Country's Night to Rock" shortly before revealing the names of nominees on "Good Morning America" and CMT in September 2008.
"It's an unbelievable commercial," said Conway. "Fortunately, we've already sold a lot of tickets for '09 Festival, but we saw a big jump in ticket sales after this year's show aired and again when it re-aired elsewhere throughout the year. I'm proud to say that this is the only music festival in the United States, in any genre of music, that has a primetime network television special. And it's a great sales tool for Nashville because it also says a lot about nightlife and historical parts of the city."
It's an important message and an effective one too, as more than 34.6 million viewers tuned in to ABC for all or part of last year's CMA Awards, according to Nielsen figures.
Along with network television coverage, CMA has benefited through its 17-year relationship with Premiere Radio Networks. "It's been an amazing partnership," Genovese said. "I could not ask for anybody to be more professional and customer-friendly in representing CMA and our brand to the radio community. That whole aspect of the drive-time team being in Nashville, being part of the CMA Awards and the CMA Music Festival, gives us the opportunity to reach millions of listeners right before the main events. Premiere has been a great partner. They bend over backwards to make it first class and meet the needs of the artists, the radio people and certainly CMA."
For 50 years, CMA has been bringing people together from every facet of the Country Music community, with direction from a hard-working Board whose vision places the common good over individual agendas of its members. "CMA has been an amazing ground-breaking organization," Brooks said. "When you have that many people, there are so many agendas involved, but at the end of the day I have been around the Board table and seen those label heads and managers ask, 'What is best for Country Music?' It really happens. It makes you sit back and smile. It isn't always what's best for Brooks & Dunn, but ultimately what's best for Country Music is what's best for Brooks & Dunn."
As she steers CMA through the next chapter in its history, Genovese is clear about what she hopes to see in the Country Music industry and how those goals can be attained. "I would love to see it transition more into the digital world," she said. "I would love for CMA to position itself as the leader in helping our industry turn that corner and I think we're doing that. We've committed to a major research project for the next three to five years to help determine who our consumer is and help our industry find growth opportunities in all kinds of areas, not just in CD sales or downloads but also with touring, sponsorship, publishing, radio and more - all the segments that our membership represents. Music consumption is up and the business model has to continue to adjust. I'm certain that CMA will be a leader in getting us all there."
2008 CMA Close Up® News Service / Country Music Association®, Inc.
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