Even Our Best Friends Do It

A&O loves Radio Ink. I have subscribed for many years, through thick (issues) and thin (ones too). Publisher Eric Rhoads, one of radio's biggest cheerleaders, has spoken at our client seminar going back to the days when it was at the Opryland Hotel 15+ years ago. We buy ads in it because we know that the people we need to reach read it. In fact, we did so in last month's Country Radio Seminar special edition.

So, Radio Ink, do me a favor and drop the hay bales.

Get the latest Arbitron Radio Today report and go to pages 15-19. If you have access to local qualitative, so much the better. Let's get relatable to today's country radio audience.

Country consumers are becoming increasingly well educated at the university level, with about one in six adult Country listeners having earned a college degree. The format’s 16.3% college graduate level in Fall ’10 was the highest reported in the past nine years, and the 89% proportion as high school graduates was also a nine-year high. Nearly half of adult Country listeners resided in households earning at least $50,000 per year, a figure that remained consistent between Fall ’09 and Fall ’10.

And, while I'm at it, Nashville song writers, artists and label execs, can you please do so as well?

A lot more of our fan base lives in cities than resides up in a "holler."

Let's relate more consistently to 18-49 and 25-54's real lives in our music and marketing than to their fantasies of escaping their busy, over-committed lives to a non-existent imaginary small town.

Country certainly encompasses pick up trucks, hunting and fishing, but at its most broadly appealing it's always been about the real life universals which unite all of us.