When in 2014 Garth Brooks He decided to return to country music after 14 years of leaving the industry to raise his children. He found a world that was markedly different from what he knew.
The singer-songwriter released mega hits like “Friends in Low Places” and “The River” in the 90s, and announced his retirement in 2000 when he was at the top of his game. A few years after the spotlight, after caring for three daughters in her hometown in Oklahoma, Brooks moved to Nashville after her youngest child decided to attend Belmont University in the city.
When he arrived he found it Music City It has been transformed into a “gutted town.”
Garth Brooks gave up on being “the planet’s biggest superstar” to raise children in Oklahoma
Garth Brooks will perform at the ASCAP Centennial Awards at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City on November 17th, 2014. (Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Ascap)
As Brooks wrote in his new book, Anthology Part V, after him and his wife, a fellow country superstar Trishire Wood“We found out that over 80% of the songwriters were lost. We found out that they were gone,” he returned to Nashville.
He continued, “When you become a songwriter, it was a gutted town. And, sorry, try feeding the world without farmers. Songwriters are the farmers who feed the music, and they are gone.
“As much as much as I love songwriting and a love for publishers who push songs independently, what happened to songwriters is technology.”
Brooks once again touched on the same topic in another part of the book, saying that Nashville was “stolen” once more when he returned from Oklahoma. He wrote that he had seen before “How songwriters made a living and how their dreams came true,” but in 2014 he wrote, “It was everything we lost.”
Garthbrooks will appear in Penny’s Parade on January 1, 1989 in Nashville, Tennessee. (Beth Gwinn/Getty Images)
When we discuss him later in the book Comeback album And that title track, “Man Against Machine,” detailed what changed over the 14 years he left: Technology.
“As much as much as I love songwriting and love publishers who push songs independently, what happened to songwriters is technology,” the singer-songwriter explained. “For 14 years, music has become a victim of technology, so I watched it from the sidelines.”
“The iPod comes out. This connects to smartphones. And I made the mistake of backing up music to technology, because the threat it created was:
He said, “The music flashed, Bam!, they gave the technology the price of their products. And what I can say, can you believe it? “Hotel California” Is it worth just 99 cents? …I understand that technology is taking over music, and while it is thriving, it is ultimately choking music. ”
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Garthbrooks became a massive country superstar in the 90s, then retired for 14 years and raised three daughters in his hometown of Oklahoma. (Bob King/Redferns)
Brooks had a hard time navigating the changes in the music industry. I also addressed all the changes of moving from Oklahoma to Tennessee and his last child and leaving the house (he admitted that “the empty nest hit me far more violently than I had dreamed of”) – he said the idea of streaming music might be hard to take my head off.”
It has come from a time when fans had to buy physical copies of albums and singles, and has entered a new era in which so many things in digital products have admitted he had “not seen the path.”
To combat the problems he saw with digital music, Brooks launched his own digital music store, Ghost Tunes, in September 2014. In 2017, Ghost Tunness was absorbed by Amazon’s music, but as I wrote in Anthology Part V, he doesn’t consider it to be a failed business venture.
Garth Brooks will speak to the media at a World Tour press conference held at the Allstate Arena on September 4, 2014 in Rosemont, Illinois. (David Banks/Getty Images)
“No one who calls Ghost Toons a Miss can see the writing on the wall. The technology is beyond music. At this point, the Genie is far from the bottle. I don’t want to make anyone mad. I have no love for art. There is not at all. I love things that can sell hardware and software,” he explained.
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Also, in September 2014, Brooks began his Garth Brooks World Tour – the first time his previous world tour was rapped in 1998. He said, “It’s scary — the less nobody shows up,” when he first announced a new concert and ticket queue was set to the first show. In Chicagohe told the team he was happy to see 100,000 people waiting to buy tickets online.
By the time tickets were on sale, more than 300,000 people lined up.
Garthbrooks will perform at the All State Arena in Rosemont, Illinois on September 4th, 2014. (Daniel Boczarski/Getty Images)
Brooks added a show to meet demand, and ultimately performed 11 concerts in Chicago alone. Regarding the decision to start a tour of the city, Marci Braun, program director for US99, a Chicago radio station that will help promote the tour, said, “Place Garth’s first comeback show in Nashville. Put it in Oklahoma. That’s Garth’s story.
Ultimately, the comeback tour lasted for three years, closing with seven Nashville shows in December 2017. “We’ve come back much bigger than when Garth left,” said Randy Bernard, one of Brooks’ managers.
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In 2016, Brooks won the Country Music Association Award Entertainer of the Year Awards – He won four times in the 90s, but what he pushed for the band and crew in 2016 was, “We were doing things that no one had done before. They were killing it. I mean killing it.”
Brooks won the award again in 2017 and 2019. In 2020, he announced that he is no longer there I wanted to consider it For honor.
Garthbrooks won the Entertainer of the Year Award for the Country Music Association, winning a record-setting seven times, and then removed himself from permanent consideration of the award. (Getty Images)
As a celebrity, Brooks believes that the work he and his team did during that long comeback tour ultimately made his return to music such a great success story.
“No one can take it, no one else controls you, Live“He shared. …It’s about passion. It’s all on the line every time. You just go straight to people.”
Brooks continued: “Live music may go back further before the radio, before the records, perhaps even further than any of us believe. Melodies and rhythm Another: I speculate that if there was love, and certainly there was sex! – There had to be music. Something like the streaming era isn’t strong enough to take it away. Live music wins every time. When I think about this, when I really think about it, I stop worrying about the future of the music business. ”
