Last.fm Top Artists
If anything cam be taken from this week’s charts, it’s that The 9513 fans are not beholden to pop culture and the media to dictate their listening habits. Either that, or no one’s gotten the memo that Taylor and Carrie are the biggest things in country music right now. Probably the former, though. For the second straight week, Miranda Lambert is the #1 artist, with 32 listeners, leaving the rest of the group in the dust. Carrie “Hot Pants” Underwood comes in at #3 with 25 listeners, along with Alan Jackson,
Johnny Cash and
Brad Paisley.
Taylor Swift, on the other hand, finished with 22 listeners, leaving her at #11 along with
Dwight Yoakam. Keith Urban,
Rascal Flatts and
Gloriana, the other big country winners at last night’s American Music Awards, had 17, 13 and 10 listeners, good for #27, #42 and #79, respectively. We’re so counterculture. Speaking of,
Ryan Adams led the Americana artists with 14 listeners, with
Hayes Carll and Rosanne Cash with 13.
Last.fm Top Albums
The triumvirate of Underwood, Swift and Lambert had six of the 13 albums in the Top 10, with Revolution at #1 (22 listeners), Carnival Ride at #2 (18) and
Fearless at #3 (15). Two new releases, Underwood’s Play On and Tim McGraw’s Southern Voice (11) came in at #7. Terri Clark made it to #10 with The Long Way Home (10). Those close-but-not-quite-Top 10 albums included Darius Rucker’s Learn to Live, Gretchen Wilson’s Here For The Party and
Eric Chuch’s
Carolina. Right at the bottom of the list, mixed in with some very good albums, there is
Kristy Lee Cook’s
Why Wait, with 5 listeners. I guess it’s a testament to the album that two years removed from being the designated country castoff from American Idol, she’s still getting listeners. I just don’t want to see any of you all putting Danny Gokey’s country album on the charts, okay?
Last.fm Top Tracks
Lambert’s “Time To Get A Gun” and
Lady Antebellum’s “
Need You Now” both had 10 listeners to lead the way, with
David Nail’s “
Red Light” had 9 to be at #3. After that, it’s a barrage of Underwood and Lambert tracks, with only a handful of male singers getting any significant showings at all. Paisley’s new single, “
American Saturday Night” had 7 listeners, as did the
Garth Brooks classic “
Friends in Low Places.” Reba McEntire had 8 listeners for “Consider Me Gone,” and Gloriana had 7 for “
Wild At Heart” to lead the way for the other female/female-dominant acts.
Billboard Country Singles
After a week at #1, Underwood’s “Cowboy Casanova” falls back a spot, making way for “Need You Now” by Lady Antebellum. Those two relatively new acts will have to compete with McEntire, who’s got her hottest single in years with “Consider Me Gone.” It moves up to #4.
Craig Morgan’s “
Bonfire,” for whatever reason, is one of the hottest songs on the chart, moving from #10 to #6. Maybe you have to be from the backwoods, hicktown, small town USA to appreciate it. The next batch of singles are already making their way up the charts, as Paisley’s “American Saturday Night” jumps from #41 to #30, Urban’s “’Til Summer Comes Around” debuts at #41, and
Zac Brown Band debuts at #54 with “
Highway 20 Ride.”
Americana Music Association Chart
Cash’s The List pushes its way to #1 this week, with 520 spins putting it almost 100 ahead of its closest competitor, Robert Earl Keen’s The Rose Hotel. The biggest gainers were
Chip Taylor’s
Yonkers NY, which moved from #19 to #14, and
Chuck Prophet’s
Let Freedom Ring, moving from #24 to #15. The only debut for the week was singer/stone mason (seriously, check his Web site)
Kevin Deal, who starts at #38 with
7 Seven.
David Rawlings Machine had 13 adds for
A Friend Of A Friend, so it’s likely to have a strong run on the chart when it gets released.
Freebie Of The Week
If you’ve never spent time at the Live Music Archive at
www.archive.org, you really need to. It features more than 70,000 full-length concerts, all legally available with the artists’ permission. The sound quality isn’t always perfect, depending on how the concert is recorded (occasionally you can get one recorded directly from the sound board), but you can easily lose a day or three checking around the site. Just through a few minutes of perusal, I found Corb Lund covering “Seven Spanish Angels.” He did a killer version of this when I saw him live, so I’m glad to have a version of my own. The quality is outstanding, too. Check it out here (
http://www.archive.org/details/corblund2006-11-30.sbd.flac) and have fun exploring.
Chuck Prophet