Music

If the Academy of Country Music Awards were a game show, the music event of the year honor would be the bonus round.
Appearing in that category on the ballot can make a huge difference in the top nomination totals, and the 60th annual awards — slated to be presented May 8 in Frisco, Texas — are a prime example. Three of the top four nominees — Ella Langley, with eight nominations; Cody Johnson, with seven; and Morgan Wallen, also with seven — had their totals boosted as finalists for music event. That’s also true for seven of the top eight nominees.

In fact, the only artist among the top eight who’s absent from music event is seven-time nominee Lainey Wilson, whose ACM experiences were eventful each of the last two years.

“I think she has done her due diligence on music event,” ACM head of artist relations and awards Haley Montgomery says. “She won for ‘Save Me’ with Jelly Roll. She won for ‘wait in the truck’ with HARDY.So I think she’s just giving us a one-year break.”

Trending on Billboard

In another era, music event felt a little gimmicky. The category often contained songs that were non-singles or charted tracks that never made the upper reaches of the list. But in the current era, hit collaborations are more plentiful, in great part because there is a larger volume of titles from which voters can pick.

Collaborations “used to be a lot tougher to do,” recalls Brad Paisley, who won vocal event (as it was then called) with three titles: “Whiskey Lullaby,” with Alison Krauss, in 2004; “When I Get Where I’m Going,” with Dolly Parton, in 2005; and “Start a Band,” with Keith Urban, in 2008.”We used to scream at the top of our lungs to labels, ‘Please let us do these things.’ “

Now that streaming has expanded the ways in which music is consumed, former concerns about disturbing marketing plans for two or more acts at radio are far less an issue, Paisley reasons. So artists work together more. Backing Paisley’s point, he appears on Kane Brown‘s The High Road album and Post Malone‘sACM-nominated F-1 Trillion. He has at least two other collaborations in the works, and Chris Young sent him a song recently with hopes that Paisley would play guitar on it.

“Whether or not that ever comes out, I don’t know,” Paisley says. “But that’s what music should be.”

In some ways, the music event field represents the heart and soul of the current awards-show ideal. Producers of every televised awards ceremony look for artist matchups that they can promote as special events that may not happen anywhere else. Chris Stapleton‘s collaboration with Justin Timberlake at the 2015 Country Music Association Awards is perhaps the most impactful example.

“The audience just really loves seeing different artists collaborate together,” says Fusion Music founder Daniel Miller, who co-manages five-time ACM nominee Riley Green with Red Light artist manager Zach Sutton. “Certainly this category has been around for a long time, and some of the most historic songs come from that category. But I think more than ever, they just love the collaboration.”

The total impact of a collaboration goes beyond the music event category. Three of this year’s five music event nominees — Langley & Green’s “you look like you love me,” Post Malone & Wallen’s “I Had Some Help” and Johnson & Carrie Underwood‘s “I’m Gonna Love You” — scored additional nods for single, song and/or visual media of the year. In fact, four of Wallen and Post Malone’s nominations are tied to “I Had Some Help,” while six of Langley’s eight nods and all five of Riley’s derive from “you look like you love me.”

“Riley’s career was certainly taking off in a big way [already], and Ella was starting to be discovered,” Miller says, “but [the duet] was exponentially beneficial to both of them when you add them together.”

With that potential impact, aiming intentionally for a music event award might seem like a good strategy on the surface. But Paisley, Miller, Montgomery and Johnson all caution that collaborating for creative reasons is more likely to succeed than targeting trophies. Johnson, in fact, took issue when his team started sketching out a marketing plan for a possible collaboration with Wilson even before the song had been finalized.

“Everybody’s like, ‘Well, we need to get with her camp about when we’re going to release this,’ ” Johnson recalls. “I said, ‘Hey, I just want to record this. Let me record the song, and then y’all can do all that later.’ “

Landing a music event nomination has an extra bonus for artists who produce their own work at the ACMs, since the organization gives those acts separate trophies for the performance and the production. Carly Pearce, who co–produced her Stapleton collaboration “we don’t fight anymore,” and Kelsea Ballerini, who co-produced the Noah Kahan music event “Cowboys Cry Too,” both doubled up on nominations in the category. Not every awards show provides a second trophy for artist-producers.

“Overall, it’s really important to recognize who we think are pivotal in the background of what caused these moments to happen,” Montgomery says. “And when you’re talking about a music event, bringing two people together, producing that collaboration — speaking as someone who does a very small scale of that, just trying to put together honors compilations or small performances at after-parties — it can be really complicated, so we see value in recognizing the subcredits of who made this magic moment happen.”

The right music event can certainly help an artist pile up nominations, but ideally the nomination isn’t the goal. It’s the result of a performance developed for creative, or collaborative, purposes.

“You could point to this category and say, ‘This is the reason awards shows are watched, because of music events,’” Montgomery says. “So it’s a really interesting one. I don’t see it going anywhere anytime soon.”