Death of the Award Show, Or Network TV in General?

Award shows on a great night sell talent and product. It’s why they’ve lasted so long. They’re great vehicles for exposing the latest movie, song, fashion, whatever … a great town meeting.

Battle Stations … Battle Stations … Network TV is in trouble. The only kind of show getting a rating is sports.

More than 10 million watched Alabama at Texas at 11 a.m. (CT)! “Sunday Night Football” got nearly 19 million.

Those are big, healthy numbers, but everything else? Anemic! The Emmys dropped another 25%, drawing five million. (Up against “Monday Night Football” – deadly.) One of the networks is talking about giving back to local the 10 p.m. (ET)/9 p.m. (CT) prime time hour. Streaming is killing the big four networks. They can’t compete against these billion dollar miniseries on Prime and HBO.

Mergers are forcing them to fire 30% of their sales staff, hundreds from Warner Bros. Discovery.

Labels and radio have been there done that … years ago. Streaming nearly killed the music business, but now the bosses are happy with it. Songwriters are still sick, victims of change.

Country music has morphed more and more to the Pop side. Blurred lines, but now more odd than just new. Look at what’s selling. What is the common thread? Can’t find one!

Lainey Wilson is on a roll. Carrie Underwood and Miranda Lambert are at the top of the mountain. A few others are swinging and getting on base. Still, the “women in Country” issue is still an issue.

The from the top, woke-pushed artists are not taking flight. Any of them.

The modern generation men are screaming hot, Morgan Wallen and Luke Combs leading the pack. Singing Country guys are everywhere, some with gold chains and mullets!

Some good people are leaving radio for other careers, and filling positions with fresh talent seems to be getting harder. The radio business is mostly voice tracked outside mornings, and new folks are not being groomed.

The acts like Garth Brooks and Brooks & Dunn and a dozen other ’90s/early 2000 acts are doing very well to great.

Trying to paint a picture of the business today, September 2022, is very difficult.

“CMT Giants: Vince Gill” had a big name brand star turnout this week. The show premieres on Friday, September 16 in prime time. Vince is one of the greats and deserves this tribute.

The award shows are trying to be all new folks, and new folks don’t draw TV /network audiences. The non-cable, non-streaming folks don’t know who these people are, so they don’t watch. They know the older stars who will skew the audience older. Trouble is, the audience listening to those new acts aren’t watching network TV. Thus, you have bad ratings for award shows.

Bring out all ages of TV stars for the Hollywood shows and all the stars for the music shows. Stop just pushing what the labels want to showcase, or more doom is on the horizon.

For the Grammys show in 2021, the audience was eight million. In 2020, 16.5 million. The Oscars went from 23.6 million to 9.8 from ’20 to ’21.

The studios, the labels and the networks are flying these shows into the ground with everything from too many commercials to way too much new talent/films/TV shows.

The format is boring, the hosts are silly and the on-camera star power dim.

Too much of every ingredient that’s a turn off. Politics is a cool to the far left or far right, but the rest don’t want to hear it.

Big changes are needed in these big infomercial shows, or like telethons they will soon be gone. Gone will not be good!