Music

This year’s Country Music Assn. Awards will be held Nov. 19, keeping the 59th edition of the show in the same late November slot it occupied last year.
The CMA Awards ceremony was moved two weeks back from its usual early November time frame in 2024 to distance itself from the general election. The move also avoids any potential conflict with the World Series, in case the baseball series goes to game seven as it did in 2016 for the CMA Awards’ 50th anniversary. “Even a number of our board members who are Cubs fans went to the game and skipped the awards that year,” CMA CEO Sarah Trahern says.

Last year, “when we tested being out of that early window because of the election, we felt good,” Trahern says. “The ratings were strong. Also, ABC used to have another award show in that space where they no longer have it. So, getting through all of the end-of-the-season shows that tend to finale in November gave us a little bit of a window right before Thanksgiving. It was a good tune-in window, so we’re going to try it again.”  The move also gives the show two extra weeks after the final nominations are announced for set up and pre-production. The show will air on ABC and Disney + Nov. 19 and then on Hulu starting the day after.

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The move could become permanent, Trahern says, “if the window continues to do well for us. Every year, ABC might make up their mind based on other competitive programming situations, but I think we’re feeling pretty good about that third week.”

The CMA has also examined its voting procedures and made significant changes this year to reflect the broadening reach of country music.

“One of the things that we’ve really spent the last year on culminated in some membership category changes to impact this year’s voting,” Trahern says. “It has to do with broadening the reach of some of the categories and being able to make folks [at] the coastal labels eligible to vote because more people are actually in the country music space.”

Though the changes weren’t implemented until this year, Tiffany Kerns, CMA senior vp of industry relations and philanthropy, stresses that discussions on how to incorporate New York and Los Angeles executives working in the country music space began a few years ago as artists like Zach Bryan, Warren Zeiders, Koe Wetzel and Megan Moroney began to emerge.

“We always have to look at not only the artists, but the teams that are behind those artists and what is preventing them from being engaged with us, because it is more than just voting,” Kerns says. “We need them to understand, especially if [they’re] not familiar with how we interact or what our voting process is.”

As the CMA had those conversations with coastal companies, they realized that many of the executives weren’t eligible to vote. It wasn’t because they didn’t meet the professional voting criteria of working full time in music and earning their income primarily from the country music industry, it was because there wasn’t room on their company’s voting roster. To maintain the integrity of the voting process and to avoid bloc voting, the number of voting members any company can have, whether it’s a label, management company or booking agency, is limited.

But Kerns says the need to expand was crucial, as long as it was done in the right way. “We need to make sure that we are not just thinking of preserving what we have but being inclusive and thinking about what we don’t. We have to be forward thinking. We have to be the membership organization that is helping drive the future of country music,” she says. “[We had] conversations with the label heads to make sure that they were on board with us, but we also wrestled with it a bit too. We want to make sure, again, that we’re upholding that integrity piece, [and] making sure when our current members see the changes, they’re not concerned.”

That meant reassuring the current members that the criteria to be an individual voter had not changed, only that the number of voters any label could have on its roster expanded. Previously, an eligible voter on a coastal label had to be included on its Nashville-based counterpart’s voting roster and often spaces were already filled. Now, coastal labels that work directly with country artists can have their own voting roster that is proportionate to the number of country artists it works with.

Kerns says that around 70% of CMA’s 6,468 voting members live in Tennessee, with the remainder largely coming from Texas, California and New York. “Texas was a really good model for how we needed to approach the coastals, because they have also operated really siloed from Nashville as well,” she says.

Kerns and her team also “got under the tent with all sorts of different businesses” to make sure they had appropriate representations on committees and voting, Trahern says, calling it the biggest membership realignment in at least 20 years. “The industry has changed so much so we want to make sure that not just for voting purposes, but for everything else we offer our members that we are reflecting the way the country music industry shows up today.”

The expansion for the coastal voters will not significantly alter the overall number of voters, Kerns says. “I don’t anticipate it having a big impact this year. There will definitely be a few 100, but the coastals are not going to provide 1000s of members,” she says. “If you think about a coastal [company] adding three to four, you’re not going to see this giant impact. We didn’t do it as a tactic to recruit or have a certain number of members. It was more about who is not able to participate right now that needs to be and then making sure that we are evolving to support that.”

As a way of further supporting and recruiting members, the CMA launched the Member Ambassador Program in April. The program empowers a selected number of CMA members to help recruit new members and answer questions any potential new members may have.

“There is going to be no better way to educate and inform potential members and or current members than by their peers,” Kerns says. “I think for us, we wanted to identify individuals that are eager, ready, comfortable and confident to essentially be extensions of the CMA staff.”