Luke Combs sat down with Steve Rinella and his team for an episode of the MeatEater podcast.
The question everyone wants answered though is “what’s next for Luke?”
They talked about life in general, how easy it is outside of playing monster stadiums, they discussed turkey regulations, how the music industry works and getting your kids into hunting. The conversation was pretty good.
While they didn’t address the the content of Luke’s new album during the podcast, Luke did let people in on the process for album #6, which is in fact coming along nicely and how he’s got a ton of songs ready for a spot on his new album:
“I’m at the point now, I’m about to go in the studio for the first session on cutting my next record. So I’m trying to cut probably, anywhere from like, in a worst case scenario four or best case six…I would say right now, songs that are in serious contention to make the record, I mean like forty to fifty? You got to whittle it down…
Then you’re getting into like, it’s like heavyweight fights because all the songs you really like all of them.”
Steve Rinella, who’s not aware of new trends in the country music industry (mainly because that’s not his job), was actually shocked at the number, saying he thought Luke would maybe have 15 to 20 songs in the can, which he’d take down to maybe 12 songs for a new album. He was in for a nice surprise on how many songs Luke was actually sitting on.
Luke responded by giving his own opinion on artists who are putting out insanely large records due to the new digital incentives given out by the streaming giants. He pointed out:
“15 would be finished… that’s one record. Now people are putting out bigger and bigger records, that’s been the trend as the streaming economy has taken off… now instead of selling a physical CD, right, back in the day you were limited by how many songs could be on a CD. If you start putting out a double CD, back then, you’ve got to start charging people double, because now there’s two discs in there that you’ve purchased and packaging and special cases and all that stuff. So, you feel like that will impact sales because the consumer goes “Well I don’t want to pay twice as much for this album.” So that limited people from putting too many songs on their record because they didn’t want to risk not selling as many…
I think country is the first genre that has really started putting out these BIG hit records where there’s a bunch of songs on them…[Wallen’s] next record is 37 songs I think…I think Zach Bryan did 36, you know, and it’s a brilliant strategy because your album sales are based off of stream equivalents.
Luke was actually a little off his assessment of how streaming numbers are equivalent and determined. He did say he was “gonna get crushed on this stat” though, he said 100,000 streams is equal to one physical album sale which is apparently not true.
As of now, Billboard and Nielsen use 1,250 premium (paid) streams or 3,750 ad-supported (free) streams to determine the equivalent of one physical unit sold. Something like that.
Of course none of this is really important to the listeners to be honest and the point of this blog…is you should probably just listen to their interview. Pour yourself a drink too.