I happen to agree with Loretta Lynn.

During McBride's Vocal Point podcast, Lynn said, "I think (country music) is dead. I think it's a shame. I think it's a shame to let a type of music die. I don't care what any kind of music it is. Rock, country, whatever. I think it's a shame to let it die, and I'm here to start feeding it.
"I'm not happy at all. I think that they're completely losing it. And I think that's a sad situation because we should never let country music die. I think that every type of music should be saved, and country is one of the greatest. It's been around, as far as I'm concerned, longer than any of it."

http://www.cmt.com/news/1817442/loretta-lynn-shares-her-thoughts-on-modern-country-music/

I think Keith Urban still had some elements of Merle Haggard in his guitar arrangements early on and sadly gun grabber Sturgill Simpson's music had some classic vibes but mostly...

I honestly though Chris Gaines would save it from Garth Brooks but alas he never caught on.

Sturgill and his anime can fuck himself but, there is still hope with Cody Jinks, Tyler Childers, Jamey Johnson and a few others. Keep the faith.

Kenny Chesney is a huge part of the pop / pseudo country movement. It’s all pop now.

There is still some really great country music and country music artists out there, but for whatever reason the big wigs at the music labels want to keep pushing this horrible pop country garbage.

Edited to add....the best country music is coming out of Texas not Nashville.

Gary Allan begs to differ

Pop country sucks. The shit played on the radio is pop country. Country music not played on the radio. Country is not dead unless you are trying to find it on the radio.

This.  Quit looking in all the wrong places for good Country.  Fuck everything from Nashville.

This forum actually had a thread awhile back with some pretty good suggestions - I found Colter Wall's music through Arfcom.  Definitely inspired by Townes Van Zandt and Cash which is awesome.

Alt Country and Red Dirt is doing a good job of keeping the faith.

Yup...   Country is the new Pop.....

...

I just head back in time to the 80's....

Saw him live acoustic a couple years ago, amazing. Most country from Nashville is crap now, hate it.

Colter Wall can be added to the list of artists keeping country alive.

If you want to hear good country look up Tony Jackson.

I listen to Willie’s Roadhouse. Country music was murdered about 2000.

Same here, plus Dwight Yoakams Bakersfield station and outlaw country ( which does slip in some crap Nashville pop).

I grew up on Marshall Tucker band, The Band, Eagles and other stuff that I thought was rock but was derivative country and started listening to alt country in The late 80s.

Good, roots country is out there just have to find it.

I also listen to the Steve Earl station on Amazon. Hes a commie, but plays real country.

The Gourds
Old 97s
Reckless Kelly
Robert Earl Keen
Turnpike troubadours

Plenty of other good bands out there. Have to search, Nashville does not support that genre

it's dead to me
but Willie and Waylon weren't bad in the 70's

Most of you have never heard of the Radio Texas Live app. I’m sorry you’ve been in the dark this long.

The Overton window working as advertised.

We are seeing a repeat of "the Nashville Sound" commercial domination of the 60s and 70s.

Let's not forget that rebellion from this spawned the outlaw country thing...so Loretta may be right, but we also may be on the cusp of the next Waylon and Willie arriving on the scene.

I saw that article yesterday. Then I went to Bass Pro Shops last night and the crap they were playing on the muzak forced the article to the front of my mind. I think she is on to something, though I'm holding out hope for whiskey myers and turnpike troubadour. Where is junior brown when you need him? And for crap sake what happened to the deraillers.

It's not dead, you just have to look harder for it. The record companies and radio stations aren't going to make it well known, because right now crapppop is what is selling. Heck, I remember whe pop music was good too. It's just that anything that gets any play is mostly crap.

Nashville Sound isn't bad, just not country. Very guitar centered still. Jason Isbell (shut up and sing why dontcha?) would be what I call Nashville.

Austin music is pretty good (ie., Pat Green) but still not country.

Ryan Bingham is maybe the modern version of outlaw country? I like his sound.

Easy as I think modern country music is formulaic crap.   I just listen old stuff, Merle Haggard, Charlie Pride, Old Hank Williams, Ronnie Milsap, Connie Smith.m Marty Robbins.

I may despise the druggie drunk culture of the old country music but I dig the sound.

They may be old or even dead but the music is there.

I do the same with movies.

Plenty of movies made quite well in the old days.   The sixties and seventies had some real sleepers.  Spy movies were suspenseful not CGI crapfests.  Smileys People.   Tinker, Tailor,  Soldier, spy.   The Third Man.

Dig into the past vaults.  Yea there are turkeys with the gems.

Far from dead. It may not be played on mainstream radio anymore, but it isn't dead.

We are in a slump right now where "lazy" music makes money. Listen to a rock station, 21 Pilots and Imagine Dragons? I mean come on. 15 years ago that would've been relegated to a teeny bopper pop station.

Billy Ray Cyrus did to country music what pantyhose did to finger fucking - Waylon. Been going downhill since.

I'm so glad I don't waste my time on music. I was listening to some idiot the other day talking about the "arts" and how important they are. Call me a pragmatist but you can't eat art or music or poetry or any of those other artistic endeavors. No artist is going to pay my bills. No artist is going to mow my yard or fix my tractor. No artist is goig to sem my arm back on or reroof my house.

I hate it all.   I can't stand country music.
Maybe 50 yo country music.

I'm a big Elvis fan, so I like Dwight Yoakum also but I view a lot of his music as Rockabilly and SOME of his music as Bakersfield Country.  He's one of those guys I'd like to meet if I had the chance also.

Thanks to those who introduced me to some names I hadn't heard!

Everything on the radio sucks, turn that shit off.

When my radio gets to that station I can not hit next fast enough, and it used to be the other way around. Crossovers nailed the coffin, but it was getting weird before that.

Country music has been dead for a while, now it’s starting to stink up the place.

That red dirt stuff is just the last twitches.

You do realize that this is the Music  and Musicians forum? Lol

Um, no, that was Merle Haggard talking about Garth Brooks.

Why wouldn’t an artist now his lawn? They might need the money since art doesn’t usually pay the bills.

Or maybe no artist will mow his lawn because they know he won’t pay them to do so. Maybe his lawn is so grody that not even an artist will mow it.

Imagine a yard so awful that an out of work bassist won’t even touch it for beer money....

Classic Country will live forever in my book,, Waylon, Johnny Cash, John Conlee, Chuck Pride, Dolly, the list goes on.  Its pretty much all I listen to on my TV,, no car insurance commercials every 4 mins, no mesotheloma lawyer commercials, none of that shit ,, just classic country

I haven't listened to a radio station (with the exception of talk radio) in nearly a decade.  It sucked back then and probably has only gotten worse.  Just about anything I'd listen to wouldn't get airplay anyway.

Absolutely, Texas country is what they call it in Texas.  Red Dirt music in Oklahoma.  Whatever you call it, it beats the hell out of Nashville.

Rock is dead, too, apparently.

But, here I am constantly going out and seeing bands, finding new artists I like, and enjoying it.

Another "the stuff that's popular sucks" whine, really. The music business and where you hear good stuff changed, creativity didn't.

Rock’s death rattle was the 90s grunge/alternative movement. There is some stuff coming out that is ok, but it’s smaller scale and very genre/specific.

Country got ridiculously pop-ified by Garth Brooks, and it’s been a downhill slide into ludicrous junk since. The “bro country” stuff is just plain awful. Red Dirt stuff is the last twitch of life, but even that subgenre has become a self parody.

Fundamentally, the music business has completely changed. Any swinging dick (whatever genre) can push stuff to SoundCloud, and the distribution industry is pure chaos. This means a couple of things: (1) there is an absolute fuckton of music that is available, and most of it is utter dreck that wouldn’t have made it out of the garage a decade ago... this makes the good stuff extremely hard to locate, which makes it even harder for good musicians to get heard (2) because of 1 above, it’s harder for the good folks to actually make money, which shortens a lot of careers

The flip side of (1) is that artists that slipped through the cracks can get their stuff out now. That’s legit, but whether you like it or not, having labels acting as a filter kept a landslide of junk in the garage where it belonged.

You're making my point. The creation, distribution and playing of music has been so democratized and reduced to the availability of the common man, that yeah - every swinging dick can record and upload to the internet (folks just like me, lol). What Tom Scholz did in 1976 (and he was a precious rare genius and lucky enough to have access to some very cool toys) is now the domain of almost anyone who can afford a guitar and a laptop and send their things to a mastering engineer. What you bemoan, I celebrate. It's fucking awesome.

So, sure, the noise ratio has gone up tremendously....there's so much bad stuff out there it's amazing, and the music industry shifted entirely away from pushing critically acclaimed or artistically viable artists to pop garbage. That's as much about market forces and the change since internet/downloading as it is about anything else really, but it happened.

But, at the root of it, there are more good bands making music and putting their stuff out now than at any time in American history - that's just a fact of statistics. When everyone can access the tools of a major studio, more or less, and their worldwide distribution mechanisms, then even if 1 in 10,000 bands are great, that's 100 times more than were ever around in the 70's and 80's and releasing music, and you only heard the tip of THAT iceberg.

You're complaining about the lack of access to those artists, to finding them, not whether they exist or if the music is dead (it's not, it never was, never will be). All that's changed is the consumption and business side of it, that's all. And, that's a great thing. The almost comically corrupt music industry took a beating, and now they peddle garbage to imbeciles. It's so easy to avoid that culture now that I honestly haven't heard a top-40 station or song list in a decade. I wouldn't even know what that shit is. I don't think the radio in my car has ever been turned on, just the aux. setting.

Every time I fire up Spotify and load my playlist, it recommends similar or new artists below it, and I'm constantly hearing new and cool stuff, songs and artists that keep pumping out great tunes. Country, folk, rock, indie, alternative, even metal. None of it's dead, the MUSIC industry is dead, and people want spoon fed.

Sorry, I'm not buying for a second that a genre is in trouble because your Clearchannel station sucks at picking songs. It reminds me of the craft brew industry, really. If you only go to Walmart to buy beer, yup....your selection sucks. Get in your car, hit the crazy places and distributors and visit some microbrews. More beer out there than a man could ever hope to drink, but it's not going to find you. Great time to be alive and making and listening to music, from my seat.

Dude, calm down.

All I’m saying is that the whole topology of the music business has changed. Most people (even a lot of musical folk) haven’t grasped that. It’s a whole different world, and there is good and bad that are the result.

That there’s more good music out now than ever before is a matter of opinion, yet you treat it as objective fact. There is no objective “good” or “bad” when it comes to music. It’s purely a matter of taste. Your good and my good may be entirely different things, and that’s ok.

I can find new stuff that I like, sometimes, but it’s work.  For every one good artist, there are literally 10K or more that are total wastes of bandwidth.  Major labels put out lowest common denominator crap, but there were “underground” and “alternative” labels too (before those things became popculture marketing buzzwords). Like it or not, they lowered the signal to noise ratio significantly.  Some good artists fell in the cracks too, but all that shows is that there were trade offs then too.  It’s just the other side of the same coin.

PS - I love craft brews too, but most of them suck.

That you resort to the “enjoy your clearchannel” nonsense this early just shows that you’d rather just preach from a high horse, so enjoy that, I guess.

Maybe not, but they make it a fuck ton more enjoyable when I do those type things.

Yep.  Life needs a little spice.

I'm not worked up. Just been listening to this constant derision of the current state of music since I was born, and it's always the same complaints just evolving with a new set of reasons and an ever-changing tipping point of when it supposedly changed for the worse.

So, yeah, I have strong feelings - but I'm not throwing shit around the room.

And, yeah, with musicians able to learn, share, adapt and grow from existing styles easier than ever before...standing on the shoulders of earlier pioneers more people are in the game than ever before, on orders of magnitude. That means more good musicians are making more good music than ever before. Yeah, it kind of is a fact if you'd stop and consider what's actually happening instead of Debbie Downing the entire world of musical arts.

If you can't believe it from a "I know what I like" standpoint, take it from someone who was out playing in bars and touring in the late 80's up until very recently, and I still make and sell music. There are more bands and artists now than I've ever seen in my life, sure most suck, but there are amazing artists, players, songwriters still banging out awesome stuff...literally every weekend I'm out watching bands I see someone that just blows my doors off. I remember a lot of times in my life when live music was more scarce, and the quality wasn't there. There's more than I can keep track of, and I don't find it that hard at all to stumble onto them.

Spotify, playlist generators, Pandora, "People who bought this also bought this" on Amazon, even Youtube will aggregate for you. None of that takes work. Listen to something you like, let it suggest more for ya. Download a bunch of playlists, give it a chance. I don't see how it can be easier. Fuck, start a thread and ask for good new artists in whatever gender right here on this site. Let hundreds of ARFcommers do the heavy lifting.

That's all too much work for you? Yeeesh.

You seem doggedly determined to find the negative, so yeah probably feels like I have a superiority complex when I'm telling you that it isn't the case that music is worse than before Nirvana. It's the halcyon days, both as a performer and a listener, I can't believe we're alive to live in an age where you can hear anything you want, by anyone you want, free, right fucking now.

And, you think it all sucks. I'll take the high horse, my friend, it's a hell of a lot more fun up here.

What? Marty Stuart and his Fabulous Superlatives aren’t dead. Paul Martin should not have left the band but that’s a different matter to discuss.