IBMA Keynote Address: October 14, 2002
(reprinted with permission from Alison Brown)

I am honored to have been invited to give the keynote address at this year’s IBMA convention. The membership of the IBMA is made up of a lot of very special people. When I think of my place in this community, I’m often reminded of the notion that members of the same family are not always born under the same roof. Tonight we’ve come from all over the country and all over the world to gather here in Louisville, individuals from very diverse backgrounds but a family joined by our mutual love of bluegrass music. I’ve always been proud to be a part of the bluegrass family and it is truly a privilege to get to share some thoughts and ideas with you this evening.

But I’m sure some of you are wondering, Why is a progressive banjo player--a so-called jazz-grasser who regularly plays with piano and drums--addressing the IBMA?” Well, I’ll tell you why. It’s because I love bluegrass music.

I can’t imagine what my life would be like if I hadn’t discovered Earl Scruggs when I was 10 years old. I’ll never forget what an amazing feeling I got listening to Earl’s Foggy Mountain Banjo album for the first time. I just had to learn how to make that sound. And it’s funny because it wasn’t a sound that I heard growing up. My parents are both lawyers, neither one of them played bluegrass; in fact they labeled my Earl Scruggs cassette “hillbilly music.” And when they told me “Alison, when you grow up you can be anything you want to be,” I’m pretty sure that “banjo picker” wasn’t what they had in mind. But, like a lot of us, the music reached out and tapped me on the shoulder, and I’ve been hooked ever since.

As a teenager growing up in Southern California, my obsession with bluegrass contributed greatly to my popularity in high school…not. I clipped pictures of all my favorite banjo players out of Bluegrass Unlimited and carried them around in my notebook. I tuned in to Wayne Rice’s Bluegrass Special radio show every Sunday night without fail. If I hadn’t met Stuart Duncan, I might have felt like an utter pariah. But the two of us forged a musical partnership born out of our mutual love for Star Trek, Chef Boyardee lasagna (in a can, of course) and the whole spectrum of bluegrass music: from the Stanley Brothers to Andy Statman.

The summer I turned 16, I got a chance to make my first pilgrimage to the festivals “back east.” With Stuart’s dad, Emmett at the wheel and our Bluegrass Unlimited festival guide readily at hand, we hit festivals from California to Kentucky, Oklahoma to Canada, Emmett often driving overnight so we could see J.D. Crowe on Saturday night in one state and wake up to Ralph’s gospel set in another. It was my first experience getting to hear the music in the places where it was born and it was an eye opener in many ways. At one festival, Stuart and I entered the contest with a spirited rendition of an original tune called “The Great Lasagna Rebellion,” only to be warned by an irate festival goer not to “mock the music.” Up until that time, I don’t think I had realized that there were dividing lines in bluegrass.

When it was time for me to pick a college, I made my school selection in the only sensible way I could think of: I pulled out my copy of Bluegrass Unlimited again, compared the number of concert listings in New Haven to those in Boston, and the decision was clear. At Harvard I hosted a radio show called “Living Traditions in Bluegrass,” which followed the legendary “Hillbilly at Harvard” every Saturday, (except during football season, of course), and we played everything from the traditional albums by Don Stover and Joe Val to the more progressive artists of the day including Larry McNeely and Byron Berline and Sundance. To me, these artists were all facets of the same diamond. I even convinced the History and Literature department to let me write my senior thesis on bluegrass music.

So when I say I love bluegrass music, I hope the depth of my respect and devotion to the music is obvious. But as a banjo player, I have often felt that there are lots of people who can lay the thumb to the 5 far better than I can, and in an effort to follow my muse and make what I hope is a contribution to my instrument, my own musical pursuits have taken me to some very different musical places.

Though it might not always sound like it and even though I spend most of my musical life on the fringes of bluegrass, what I’ve learned from playing bluegrass music is at the core of what I do.So my message to you today won’t really surprise you. In fact it’s probably what you would expect to hear from me: when it comes to the music, embrace it all. I don’t say this just because I want you to support progressive bluegrass music. I say this because the growth that we are seeing right now in bluegrass that is capturing the attention of the media and the mainstream consumers is happening at the fringes of the music—not at its traditional core. However, I believe that every success on the fringe of the music will ultimately benefit and strengthen the core of the music. That’s why I think it is more important than ever that our community draw together, support one another--traditionalist and jam grassers alike--and embrace it all so that we can take advantage of the opportunities out there right now.

Let me take a few minutes and talk about some of the opportunities that I see for bluegrass music right now and some of the challenges facing us, too.

Without a doubt, this has been a great year for bluegrass. In the 30 years that I’ve been playing bluegrass, I don’t remember a time when there has been more national attention focused on our music. Sales of acoustic instruments are up, festival attendance is up, and satellite and cable radio stations are broadcasting bluegrass music 24/7. Certainly the phenomenal success of O Brother, Where Art Thou?--which has sold nearly 6 million copies according to Soundscan – has elevated the perception of bluegrass music within the media and has put this “hip’” music on the radar of many consumers who have never owned a bluegrass record before. The Dixie Chicks have brought the sound of the banjo to top 40 country radio. IBMA favorites Alison Krauss + Union Station and Nickel Creek are topping the Billboard charts. And the jamgrass acts like Leftover Salmon, Acoustic Syndicate and Yonder Mountain have become such a powerful contingent that there was actually a multi-artist jamgrass tour playing the concert sheds last summer. In fact there is so much activity that Billboard magazine ran a recent cover story declaring, “Bluegrass is Booming!”

But I think there’s a real paradox here. A lot of this music isn’t bluegrass. At least not if you stick with a purist’s definition of bluegrass as the music that Bill, Earl and Lester were playing in 1945. It’s all very certainly related to, inspired by and derived from bluegrass music, and in every case, played and sung by musicians who share a deep love of bluegrass music. But for the most part this music really exists on the fringes of the bluegrass tradition. However, without question, these mainstream successes are, by the very fact of their success, strengthening the traditional core of bluegrass music.

How? That’s something else that I find very interesting because I don’t think that it is happening in the obvious way. You might assume that all the attention that bluegrass music is receiving means that sales of bluegrass records are up across the board. I haven’t found that to be the case. At the same time that the O, Brother soundtrack has scanned nearly 6 million copies, the combined soundscans of the Top 5 albums on this month’s Bluegrass Unlimited chart are less than 7000 units. That’s combined. Individually none of the albums has scanned more than 2000 units and one of them has yet to break triple digits.

Now, of course, you can make the case that SoundScan is an imperfect method of tracking sales, since not all retailers report to SoundScan. But even allowing for a 50% margin for error, I think the point is plain. There is a general record biz rule of thumb that 2% of all records account for 98% of the sales volume. I think the same rule applies here. A few albums--those on the Billboard Top Bluegrass Albums chart, for example--account for almost all of the sales in the genre. The other 98% follow the more expected sales patterns for niche music, selling in small numbers through specialty retailers and at live performances and generally suffering in the over all dismal climate of today’s retail market.

So let me put on my record company hat for a moment and outline some of the challenges that labels face selling bluegrass music today. I don’t know how many of you follow the trades, but anyone who does is well aware of the state of misery among record retailers. The market is completely saturated with new releases--some 45,000 new albums were released last year in the U.S. alone compared to around 12,000 when I started Compass Records in 1995. And at the same time, the over all account base of retailers--the number of record stores out there--has fallen, especially the number of independent stores.

That trend is largely due to the fact that some new players entered the record retail market in the mid-90s, including electronics chains like Best Buy and Circuit City. These stores sell CDs at loss leader pricing to drive consumers into their stores, driving independent shops out of business in the process. In the face of shrinking profit margins, many record stores have turned to mortgaging their floor space--in the form of listening posts, endcaps and other placement programs which they sell to record labels for $3-$5 per unit--a tremendous expense for labels and yet, often the only way to get the store to buy in a meaningful number of CDs on a new release. That means that if you go into a store and can actually see a release, if it’s not just stuck in the bin, it’s because the record label paid to position it in the store.

Quick turnover has also become the name of the game for retailers. In this climate, stores can’t afford to hang on to slower moving titles. Their credit limits with their distributors don’t allow for it. In order to stay competitive, they need to put their buying dollars into hit product that will sell quickly. That doesn’t bode well for bluegrass titles that traditionally sell maybe a couple of units a month. I recently had a conversation with the head buyer for independent music at Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard in L.A., a guy who has been with Tower for years and has a real passion for music. We started talking about Joseph Spence who is a legendary Bahamian guitarist. In his opinion, the world music section wasn’t complete without Spence’s music in the bins. But his ability to stock these legendary records is being compromised these days because the Tower inventory system is programmed to delete any title that doesn’t turn over four times within a year.

And speaking of Tower, when I first discovered bluegrass, I spent hours down at Tower Records on Sports Arena Boulevard in San Diego buying LPs and building my bluegrass record collection. In those days, you could count on Tower to stock all those great “catalog” albums. But with Tower teetering on the edge of bankruptcy for the last 12 months or so, stores are leaning out their bins and can no longer be counted on to stock older eclectic titles, even if they are classics to you and me, unless they sell through quickly. The same thing is true to some extent throughout the best known stores that carry bluegrass music: Border’s, Barnes & Noble and Virgin. In fact, the only music retailers that seem to be up in this climate are the racks, Target and Walmart, known throughout the industry as retailers for mostly hit product. Add to this the closure last year of one of the primary distributors of bluegrass music, and the problem is compounded.

The problems at retail these days require labels to adopt a much shorter timeline for marketing bluegrass in order to be competitive. From the time an album is released, there is typically a three month window where advertising, touring, press and airplay need to line up. If a demand isn’t generated and the title hasn’t sold at the end of three months, it’s going to be returned to the distributor and then to the label. So the big challenge for labels and artists is how to get the word out within this narrow window. Radio is one answer to the puzzle. But since almost all bluegrass radio airplay is on specialty shows once a week, even heavy rotation can mean just 15 spins a week which isn’t enough exposure in itself to drive sales at retail. The sales figures for the top 5 albums on the BU chart this month are a case in point. Press is obviously another tool that labels rely on, although the very long lead times with the bluegrass and folk publications usually mean that feature stories and reviews don’t run for months after a new release has been shipped, and returned, from retail.

I get asked a lot: how do you balance being an artist on one hand and a record label exec on the other? It’s a challenge, for sure. But being aware of the obstacles and challenges to marketing music has made me think more strategically about writing, recording and releasing my own music. And I think that if we are to take advantage of the bluegrass boom that is happening around us, one of the things we all need to do is think strategically. I would advise artists against going blindly into a recording project. Instead, envision the results that you want to achieve with an album--whether it be press you want to get, the type of touring you want to do or the radio exposure you are looking for--and work backwards. In other words, design your outcome. And then support the release with a well conceived and timely touring plan that gives the label the chance to promote your release in key markets. With so many artists out there, and so many releases, this kind of planning is the best way to position yourself to take advantage of the increased awareness of bluegrass out there.

Earlier I was talking about the mainstream attention and success that bluegrass is enjoying as a result of O, Brother, the Dixie Chicks and Nickel Creek, among others. I’ve talked about how this hasn’t necessarily translated into increased sales for bluegrass artists not directly involved with these projects and some of the reasons why it hasn’t. But as I mentioned earlier, these successes have benefited traditional bluegrass in more subtle ways. Among retailers, the perception that bluegrass is booming has driven them to create marketing and placement programs for bluegrass releases and has kept bluegrass bins in the stores at a time when the genre might just as easily have been consolidated into the folk bins. Among the press, the perception that bluegrass is booming has encouraged them to give the genre ink in mainstream tastemaker publications like Time, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. All of this mainstream attention is putting bluegrass in front of a new audience. And I think this is the greatest gift our community is being given right now.

But, in the bluegrass community, I think there is a tendency among some people to want to build a wall around the music in the hopes of preserving the tradition. Well, I think that when you put a wall around something, you stand more chance of keeping people out than keeping people in. And, particularly at this moment in time, that type of thinking is a real detriment to the music. The people who are discovering bluegrass music these days are more than likely coming to the music from a different place than you or I did. Instead of Flatt and Scruggs, it’s more likely to be because they bought a Dixie Chicks record or saw a Leftover Salmon or Flecktones show. But that’s great, because Bela Fleck, for example, might lead them to Tony Trischka which eventually might lead them all the way back to Earl. I know how happy it makes me when a young banjo player comes up to me after a show and says he searched out John Hickman because he heard John influenced my playing and that his research eventually led him all the way back to some of the earlier greats like Eddie Adcock and Don Reno. And in that way, the music that exists on the fringe is key in drawing new fans to the tradition of bluegrass.

So, in conclusion, it would be easy to sit back and congratulate ourselves on the current success of bluegrass music. But the spotlight that is shining on bluegrass music today may not be shining tomorrow. That’s the way the media works. Do any of you remember The Buena Vista Social Club from a few years ago? It is a wonderful Cuban record produced by Ry Cooder that spawned a documentary and sold many millions of copies. For a while, because of the success of that record, Cuban albums were appearing everywhere and people who had never owned a Cuban record before were discovering the music. In the industry, they call a record that achieves that kind of mainstream success a coffee table record. Well, the same thing is happening with bluegrass and O, Brother right now. And chances are, a year or two from now, the media spotlight is going to be shining somewhere else. The question is, how many of these interested consumers and potential new bluegrass fans will we be able to draw in to our music while the spotlight is on us? Will we make them feel welcome, even if their initial interest comes from a more progressive place?

Imagine if we could go back in time a couple of years and I said to you, “I have a great idea for a movie. It’s a comedy starring George Clooney (you know, that guy from E.R.?) It’s going to have a country/old time soundtrack and be directed by a couple of Jewish guys, and it’s going to be the best thing for bluegrass ever.” You’d have said, “That sounds great Alison, but I think I’ll keep Bill Monroe in my CD player and my money in Treasury bonds.” Well, as you know, it was the best thing that has happened for bluegrass in many years. But imagine if we could have shot the idea down: Where would we be today?

So that’s my point. This is our moment. It seems to me that what matters most right now is to tear down the walls. Remember that we all have an important role in this community. Support one another, whether you’re a traditionalist or a newgrasser, an oldtimer or a newcomer. Embrace each other. Embrace it all. The future of bluegrass music will certainly be the better for it.

Alison Brown

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