They Are Ready For Prime Time

Jimmy Carter in his homebase Nashville.

Jason Aldean, Luke Bryan and Eric Church are on fire. The dynamic trio has come from the back of the pack and is close to standing on top of the mountain.

The CMA Awards are not the end all, be all, but a win for these guys in the Album, Male Vocal and Entertainer of the Year would be huge and almost at this point expected.

The freshmen have pushed the varsity aside on the charts and in the amphitheatre ... now in 2013 the stadium.

The Aldean stadium announcement was not unexpected. With the near two million attending this tour, the bump-up was in the cards. The PR team has to be patted on the back for making it seem like such an event. Three cities in one day and a closing concert in Athens, GA took a of logistical work but paid off. Textbook PR! Make it an event -- and they have. That Aldean/Bryan/Owen/Rhett Athens, GA show will be 60,000 sell-out you just feel it.

The Capitol Records Street Party with Luke Bryan was a big deal. Many thousands crammed onto Broadway like a herd of cattle at a feed lot. They were young and loud and had a drink in their hand! Luke has enough hit songs now to hold a primetime audience. Good things coming for this young man.

The jury remains in deliberation for "Nashville" on ABC. It's big and pretty and expensive ...$2 to $5 million per episode. The music seems so-so to me. The folks who like it ... like it ... who don't ... don't. Two hundred-fifty jobs or so depend on it, so I hope it runs 10 years.

You can never rest on what you did last week or last month. The "what have you done for me lately" has never worked more true than now in the music business. You can not take for granted anything. The young demo is changing out as fast as it did in the '60s. Go look at those charts from 1964 to 1973 ... Huge swings in style and taste every few weeks.

Isn't lucky and brilliant, too, that Kenny Chesney have found an evergreen sweet spot in the touring business? It's become like the Andy Williams Christmas Shows; they are not-to-be-missed events.

For the others, it's not so easy. If you don't reinvent your sound and style every few years, you are toast! One axiom is for sure: Record company institutions don't make trends; they resist them -- then eventually embrace them. Study the careers of Elvis, Beatles, Garth Brooks ... those three changed the business. Changing the business rarely gets an endorsement of the business. The business is changing again. Now.

Look this week at Newsweek. Look at the liberal newspaper The Tennesseean endorsing Romney.

The times they are a changin' ... again and again.