Country's New Face: It's Young and Blond

Country's New Face: It's Young and Blond

By JON CARAMANICA

IN a video posted to YouTube in January 2008, Veronica Ballestrini — then 16, blond, precocious — sits on a wrinkled couch wearing a pink Abercrombie & Fitch zip-up hoodie and clutching a guitar. “Today one of my fans messaged me, and he thought I should do a Taylor Swift song,” the singer said, then began a committed, occasionally imperfect version of Ms. Swift’s “Teardrops on My Guitar.”

It was one of several videos she posted over the span of a few months, revealing a streak of determination at apparent odds with the casualness of the videos, each one filmed on a different couch or chair.

When she first began recording music at age 13, “I had no idea about anything, nothing about the industry or radio or singles,” Ms. Ballestrini recalled last month, on the phone from Peoria, Ill., during her first tour of country radio stations. “But I did know I needed a lot of fans.” And so from her Connecticut home Ms. Ballestrini set about cultivating an audience online: MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, DigitalRodeo and more.

A year and a half later, all the screen time has begun to pay off. Last spring she recorded a proper video for “Amazing,” a single of her own, and uploaded it. After a couple of weeks it was picked up by CMT.com, the digital arm of Country Music Television, and shown on CMT Pure Country, the network’s all-video digital channel.

A young female country singer savvily using online media to construct a career built on largely self-written songs about teenage experiences? The Taylor Swift Playbook is making the rounds.

Ms. Swift, 19, who has sold more than seven million records in the last four years, has proved to be seismic in Nashville. And thanks to the pop crossover success of Ms. Swift and Carrie Underwood, 26, who has sold 10 million albums, notions of where a country star might fit in are being rewritten almost daily.

“Taylor is having such massive success,” said David Ross, publisher and editor of the Nashville trade magazine Music Row. “Should we be surprised that marketers are saying, ‘Hey, I need a Taylor too?’ ”

The next generation proposes a range of options. It includes clean-scrubbed country-leaning pop singers like Ms. Ballestrini, chipper country modernists like Jesse Lee, the TV-child-star-turned-musician Jennette McCurdy, sassy country-rock sirens like Jessie James and even some young women with a more traditional Nashville style, like Mallary Hope and Katie Armiger. (Both, perhaps not coincidentally, are brunettes.) Even Miley Cyrus is making a land grab: her single “The Climb,” from the recent “Hannah Montana: The Movie” soundtrack album, has been a hit at pop radio as well as country.

The groundwork for this movement was laid in 2005, the year Ms. Swift signed her recording contract and Ms. Underwood won the fourth season of “American Idol,” validating the idea that a country singer could still succeed on a pop stage, something that hadn’t truly happened since Shania Twain in the 1990s.

In hidebound Nashville, though, where male acts easily dominate the genre in sales and recognition, their success was by no means a given. In April Ms. Underwood won entertainer of the year, the top prize at the annual Academy of Country Music Awards, making her the first solo female artist to do so since Ms. Twain in 1999.

Together, Ms. Swift and Ms. Underwood began clearing huge swaths of brush out of Nashville’s clogged pathways. The duo, along with their fellow blond country singer Kellie Pickler, 23, the former “American Idol” contestant and Ms. Swift’s best friend, were photographed together at a December 2007 Nashville Predators hockey game, making a public show of unity. In July 2008 the three appeared on the cover of Country Weekly magazine under the headline “Girls Rock!”

In 2007 Ms. Swift and Ms. Pickler were both opening acts for Brad Paisley; they also appeared in his video for “Online.”

“The reaction to these guys was spectacular,” said Bill Simmons, Mr. Paisley’s manager. “We watched Taylor explode.”

Mr. Simmons now also manages Mallary Hope, 22, who this week will digitally release her debut EP, “Love Loves On” (MCA Nashville). For “all the kids sitting at home right now who are 12 and 13 and who want to be Carrie and Taylor,” Ms. Hope said, the success of those singers “gives all of these dreamers some hope.”

Apart from some notable exceptions — Tanya Tucker, LeAnn Rimes — youth has often been a liability in Nashville. More than any other genre, country music leans heavily on storytelling, an area where life experience, or perceived life experience, makes a difference.

Katie Armiger, 18, began coming to Nashville four years ago in search of a record deal. “At that time there were not any artists out like me,” she said, adding that a couple of labels offered her contracts but “told me that I would be on the shelf for five to six years.” Last year Ms. Armiger released “Believe” (Cold River), her second independent album, and her videos play regularly on the GAC (Great American Country) music channel.

“In the past, I’ve seen talent at a young age and was averse to starting a business relationship,” said Mike Dungan, the president and chief executive of Capitol Records Nashville. “I felt our radio partners wouldn’t be receptive to it.”

Last month Capitol announced the signing of Jennette McCurdy, 17, a star of the Nickelodeon show “iCarly,” who arrives with a built-in fan base. When she began posting videos of herself singing in a husky, twangy voice, she said, “I got a huge response from my online site community.”

Veronica Ballestrini, who has cultivated fans using an online strategy, at a fund-raiser in Nashville.

Even though Ms. McCurdy has a leg up on her peers thanks to her acting profile, her use of video and social media to promote herself reflects a new approach to generating attention that, while common in other genres, is still coming slowly to country, which has long lived and died with radio airplay.

But as the radio industry has consolidated, playlists have become more restricted. The target demographic for country radio, which has historically been middle-aged women, hasn’t helped usher in younger stars, though executives say that for new artists to have stability they must attract mothers as well as their children. As a result, Mr. Dungan said, “as the talent has changed, and as the lines have blurred between genres, there’s been opportunities that have been missed.”

To a degree, video has filled in the gaps. “In this current environment, video channels can play a more important role in breaking an artist,” said Ed Hardy, president of GAC. “We’re playing young artists next to the superstars.” The channel was an early supporter of Ms. Swift, featuring her in a series of biographical shorts as she released her first single in 2006.

And such exposure is translating into sales. Take Gloriana, an exuberant new roots-pop group featuring two female singers: Cheyenne Kimball, 19, and Rachel Reinert, 20. The group will release its vibrant self-titled debut album on Tuesday on Emblem/Warner Brothers, but it has already sold more than 200,000 digital singles, a number Gator Michaels, senior vice president at Warner Brothers Records Nashville, said was “disproportionately high” given its radio airplay. He attributes the sales to the band’s heavy presence on video channels and aggressive online marketing. Gloriana is also an opening act, along with Ms. Pickler, on Ms. Swift’s current arena tour. (It arrives at Madison Square Garden Aug. 27.)

“What you’re seeing is a greater divide than ever in the correlation of radio hits and record sales,” said Craig Kallman, the chairman and chief executive of Atlantic Records, a major label that has been increasingly making overtures to Nashville, most recently with the signing of Jesse Lee, 22.

“Everything points to Taylor Swift,” Ms. Lee said. “The timing for me couldn’t have been any better.” Ms. Lee will release her charming debut album, “It’s a Girl Thing,” this fall, featuring production by Mark Bright, who has worked with Carrie Underwood, and Nathan Chapman, a main producer on both of Taylor Swift’s albums. The result is a fusion of styles palatable to mainstream pop tastes, Ms. Lee said: “I get all these messages from these young fans: ‘I don’t really like country, but I like your song.’

“My iTunes sales have far exceeded my chart position on radio, so if it’s not radio play, what is it?” Ms. Lee continued. “I answer back every person who writes me. I’m active on Twitter. People are finding me through YouTube.”

Meanwhile, the radio industry, in the early stages of a sea change in how it tracks listener habits, has lost its position as the genre’s reliable indicator of success. “Airplay,” Mr. Michaels said, “feeds our egos well, but what we actually do is sell music.”

Ms. Swift was among the first country artists to aggressively use online media to promote herself. “That helped apply a lot of pressure to radio, or helped them notice her, depending how you look at it,” Mr. Ross said. But country music still lags behind other genres in its use of the Internet. Music Row recently began publishing a chart tracking Twitter followers of country acts. Apart from Ms. Swift, Ms. Cyrus and her father, Billy Ray, no country artist has more than 100,000 followers, a threshold crossed by several major and minor stars in other genres: Justin Timberlake, Moby, Matisyahu, Jim Jones, even Jon Secada.

So when someone like Ms. Ballestrini arrives essentially unannounced and begins to attract attention, it’s significant. She is “really the first artist to pop up in a completely independent sense, getting noticeable figures online on her own without a major machine,” said Jay Frank, the senior vice president for music strategy at Country Music Television.

One of the first label meetings Ms. Ballestrini, who will release her album “What I’m All About (TimBob) this month, took was with Jive Records, home to Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake. “They saw me as a pop artist,” she said. “Without the banjo and the fiddle, this could be a pop album.”

Hearing Ms. Swift and Ms. Underwood on pop radio stations means that for a new generation of listener, country is no longer taboo. “Eighteen- to 29-year-olds, you used to ask them what they listen to, and they’d say ‘All kinds of music except country,’ ” Mr. Frank said. “Now that’s changed. If we nail it right as a community, we’ve got an audience that we’ll take with us for the next 20 years.”

Regenerating its audience is something that’s been heavily on the mind of Nashville of late. In March the Country Music Association released the results of a 2008 marketplace study it commissioned, the largest in its history. The findings identified one of the largest locuses of growth potential as “pop country” listeners, whom it described as “very urban, responding to new, female, pop-leaning country artists.”

Whitney Duncan, 24, whose debut album, “Right Road Now” (Warner Brothers Nashville), is due out this fall and who as a teenager languished on Capitol Nashville for three years, said, “If they’re listening to Taylor, maybe they’ll turn on CMT and watch other videos.”

Or if Jessie James, 21, whose glossy self-titled debut will be released on Mercury this month, has her way, maybe they won’t have to turn on CMT at all. Her album features a mélange of influences, from country to soul to teen-pop.

Last month, coming off a brief run supporting the Jonas Brothers (they share a management team), Ms. James opened for the rising pop-rock band the Honor Society at the Gramercy Theater, trying to win over a few hundred skeptical teenage girls.

“I always wanted to be a country singer,” Ms. James said before the show, recalling her experiences trying to get a Nashville record deal. “They thought I was too pop, too sexy, too brunette.”

So rather than force pop into her country, she’s opted for the opposite approach. “It’s been a struggle to continue keeping my country influences, but I’ve fought for it,” she said of being on a mainstream record label.

For Ms. James, the best way to infiltrate a newly flexible Nashville is from the outside. “I want to be able to play the Grand Ole Opry on Tuesday and then fly off and do the MTV Awards on Saturday,” she said. “I want to do what Taylor’s doing: I want to be able to go both ways.”

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