Solid State

Fayetteville’s Music Scene Changes With The Industry

STAFF PHOTO ANTHONY REYES 
Despite ice and cold, many still showed up to see country/rock band Backroad Anthem perform Dec. 12 at George’s Majestic Lounge in Fayetteville.

STAFF PHOTO ANTHONY REYES Despite ice and cold, many still showed up to see country/rock band Backroad Anthem perform Dec. 12 at George’s Majestic Lounge in Fayetteville.

Monday, December 23, 2013

Editor’s Note: This is the second in a three-part series exploring the evolution of visual and performing arts in Northwest Arkansas. The first report may be read at nwaonline.com.

Checking the marquee at George’s Majestic Lounge might cause sensory overload.

During one week in July, the 80-plus-year-old live music venue hosted a Texas country musician, an English electronica act, a Nashville, Tenn.-based songwriter, a successful local blues rock act and a Cuban-American author of murder ballads and comic books.

Brian Crowne, co-owner of George’s and general manager for both that venue and the outdoor performance stage known as the Arkansas Music Pavilion, brings musical talent to Fayetteville.

He often tries to put himself in the minds of college students, who have been coming down Dickson Street to George’s for decades. But what they listen to is an ever-changing proposition. Gone are the days of homogenized, album-driven sales. Here are the days of song-by-song digital sales with tracks placed on handheld electronic devices.

“What’s in their iPods?” Crowne often wonders. “It’s all over the place.”

Sales trends at the historical club do paint him a picture of the scene. Attendance numbers at mainstream rock ’n’ roll shows are down. Electronic dance music — also called EDM — is hit and miss, with large crowds for some shows and sparse crowds for others. Attendance for country music remains steady.

Some drop in attendance can be attributed to paid parking in Fayetteville, Crowne said. In particular, attendance at the 6-8 p.m. Friday night happy hour shows, a longtime staple for the venue, has declined. The events are populated by local bands and local patrons.

Attendance for national acts hasn’t suffered. Fans driving in from outlying locations may not know of a Fayetteville that didn’t have a paid parking system. Their event-spending budget includes paid parking, Crowne said.

Music industry listening habits also are to blame.

That country music continues to be a popular live draw should be no surprise, considering national sales trends. In 2012, the first year that saw overall increases in music sales since 1999, gains in country music sales outpaced every other genre. Sales of physical copies of country albums in 2012 grew at a rate of 4.2 percent compared with 2011 sales, according to Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks music industry sales.

Country music also had a large increase in digital sales, jumping 37.8 percent to 11.2 million purchases in 2012. Other genres, with the exception of rock, experienced a decline in sales of physical copies during 2012.

Digital sales are popular, but so too are an increasing number of platforms for music delivery that don’t necessarily require a purchase. Nielsen and Billboard, the latter another music industry tracking service, both document a decrease in album and per-track sales in the first half of 2013.

Online technology news service The Verge suggested it is the rise of streaming services such as Pandora, Rdio and Spotify cutting to sales in 2013. All of them allow customers — who can choose between various ad-supported or fee-driven models — to listen to songs without purchasing copies.

Not every music group allows licensing to streaming services, but longtime online holdouts Led Zeppelin just signed an exclusive deal with Spotify in early December, leaving just a few bands in a digital moratorium. Nielsen said music streams were up 24 percent in the first half of 2013.

“I think it’s definitely harder (for new musicians),” said Earl Cate, one-half of the brother duo that has likely sold more records than any other Northwest Arkansas-based act. The Cate Brothers Band’s song “Union Man” was a national Top 25 chart hit in 1976. On the strength of that song, several blues-rock albums and well-connected friends such as Levon Helm, the brothers toured the world.

Keyboard player and lead vocalist Ernie Cate has mostly retired, but Earl Cate performs almost every weekend with Earl & Them. They perform throughout the mid-South. That kind of touring — with a dedicated fan base and sales of albums directly to those fans — may be the new music industry “success.”

It’s been the model for Fayetteville-based roots and American band 3 Penny Acre for several years. Formed in 2008, the original quartet slimmed to a trio in 2010. Several years of dedicated touring and writing efforts have turned them into a national draw.

The group performs throughout the country, sometimes on their own headlining tours or via festivals. Contacts made through the band have allowed the three members to use the tours and music-related activities as careers. Multi-instrumentalist Bayard Blain makes instruments on the side, and Bernice and Bryan Hembree, the band’s other two members, help organize the now-annual Fayetteville Roots Festival.

“I’ve been in the music scene for 15 years, and it’s as good a time as any,” Bryan Hembree said.

Craig Strickland thinks so, too. The frontman for pop country act Backroad Anthem believes Northwest Arkansas can be a launching pad for national success. His band, just more than a year old, has already opened for national acts such as Gary Allan and Eli Young Band. A recently started tour will carry Backroad Anthem to college cities such as Athens, Ga., and Lawrence, Kan., during the next few months.

“We’ve got a lot of great opportunities. This area can really nurture a baby band, especially a country band,” he said.

Area recording engineer and studio owner Adam Putman, who listens to about 300 live music sets per year as production manager at George’s, believes Backroad Anthem has the best shot at national success of any act based in this region.

“They are writing some killer pop-county songs,” he said.

Even if Backroad Anthem can’t catch lightning in a bottle and find a national hit, music fans outside the region will continue to eye this part of the country, Hembree said.

Music festivals continue to be a trendy way to further a music scene in the current climate, and Northwest Arkansas is in close proximity to several of them.

The Roots Festival brought in several thousand attendees during its most recent four-day run in various Fayetteville-area venues. Festival rosters are filled with dozens of similarly themed but sometime greatly divergent acts, fitting for the digital shuffle generation of music fans.

In nearby Ozark, three festivals on Mulberry Mountain annually bring in about 35,000 music fans, their tastes split between a dizzying array of genres.

“We’ve got great festivals. You’ve got people looking at Fayetteville to see what’s going on,” Hembree said.