Charley Crockett Compares The Nashville Country Music Machine To The Moneyball Method In Sports: “It’s Money-Guitar”

Charley Crockett has never shied away from taking on the “Nashville Machine.”

The Texas native is coming off the release of his new album Dollar A Day, which happens to be the fifth album that he’s dropped in just a matter of two years. That’s just another example of Crockett doing things his own way, and every project that he puts out being a melting pot of country, blues and his Gulf country sound.

And you know what he pairs with his signature sound? Lyrics that often aren’t afraid to call out Nashville and the current state of country music. Charley Crockett has no issue at all crafting songs that are inspired by his real life business dealings in the Nashville area (see “Music City U.S.A.,” “Hey Mr. Nashville,” or “Game I Can’t Win.”)

As of late, Crockett has also taken that forwardness to social media, calling out other artists – without naming any names – which consequently sparked a feud with fellow country artist Gavin Adcock. He touched on that in his recent interview with Rolling Stone’s Nashville Now podcast… but the more interesting thing that stood out from the conversation was Crockett’s analogy comparing Music City to Moneyball.

In yet another example of Charley pulling back the curtain, he first laid the foundation for his comparison by explaining his experience – and the non-acceptance he felt – when he first got to Nashville:

“I do have to tell my story, and all these people that were buying and selling me, they don’t get to be the good guys necessarily. It’s not their story. They’ve evergreen, because there is always another young cowboy that they can buy and sell.”

And that last line then birthed even more thoughts on how the Nashville music industry treats new artists.

Charley Crockett chose to make a sports world comparison, and likened the treatment of up-and-coming artists trying to prove themselves to how the Moneyball approach works in sports. For those that haven’t ever read the book or watched the movie starring Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, it’s basically just the art of relying heavily on statistics and data to build a winning team on a limited budget.

According to Crockett, that’s how it is with the Nashville machine (although what Crockett describes doesn’t exactly sound like the same thing):

“In my own way, in being misunderstood by a modern music business system that I would kind of equate to Moneyball in professional sports. (It’s) money-guitar. (They) seed 10 or 20 young artists, and the one or two that pop off pay for a lot that don’t.

That’s not a new model. That’s what major labels have been doing for decades. The difference in Nashville… they were running the same model, at least when I showed up, just with far less money and resources. It was just a micro-version of the major label system.”

Those “seeds” that are planted aren’t all expected to blossom, and Charley thinks that’s an intentional part of the process. In a way, that’s just the “money-guitar” system doing what it’s supposed to do, and as cutthroat as that can be, Crockett doesn’t necessarily blame the big wigs in Nashville for treating the music business like a business:

“All the while, they’re not really putting much money into you, and they’re still hanging you out to dry on two-year record cycles. No development at all. And I don’t necessarily blame them if you are looking at it purely from a business standpoint. That’s the safest move for them to make based on the way things are now. 

It’s like Bob Dylan’s song ‘Who Killed Davy Moore?’ We’re prize fighters, and that’s a dangerous game. You’ve only got so many fights in you, you’ve only got so many records in you. And even if you can make 150 records like Willie, you can only be younger (for a short period), and that’s time.”

Like I said, not exactly the same as the Moneyball system, which used advance data and statistics to find the kind of players who could win a World Series on a low budget (spoiler alert: the  Oakland A’s never won a World Series during that time). But Nashville labels are certainly trying to strike gold without investing a ton of money (or sharing a lot of it)… so they definitely share that comparison. But overall, it sounds like the music business is a little more like horse racing than it is Moneyball.

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