One of the best parts of Luke Combs is his willingness to just sit down and openly talk about the insides of the music business.
During a recent episode of theMeatEater podcast, Luke sat down with Steve Rinella and crew to talk turkey regulations, how simple his life is outside of playing monster shows, the ins and outs of the music industry, getting your kids to hunt, and all the other general talking shop that comes along with a podcast.
We’re approaching the one year mark since Luke’s last album.was an evolution for the “Beer Never Broke My Heart” singer, showing just how influential becoming a father two times over has been on his life. His sons, Beau and Tex, have become the focus of his life and judging by how he spoke during this episode, there’s nothing that will ever matter more than ensuring they have a proper childhood.
All of that is well and good, great even, but he’s still an artist so the burning question everyone wants to know is “What’s next?”
While the content of the album wasn’t addressed, Luke did let us know the process for album number 6 is underway and he’s got atonof songs ready to battle it out for a spot on the record:
“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, someone extremely well versed in hunting and fishing issues but clearly unaware of the new trends in the country music industry, was shocked at the number, saying he thought he’d be at around 15 to 20, which he’d take down to about 12.
Luke responded by talking and giving his opinion on artists putting out insanely large records due to the new incentives given by the digital streaming era:
“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… [Morgan 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 then gave an admittedly incorrect assessment of how stream equivalents are determined. While confessing that he was “gonna get crushed on this stat,” he said 100,000 streams is equal to one physical album sale which is simply not true. Currently, BillboardandNielsen use 1,250 premium (paid) streams or 3,750 ad-supported (free) streams to determine the equivalent of one physical unit sold.
While his number were off, the idea was correct. Providing people more choices gives more opportunity for songs to stream which in turn increases the number of equivalent units.
He goes on to say it’s a “brilliant” strategy but that it is exactly that… a strategy. It’s not necessarily an artist putting out the best, most cohesive body of work. I’m very against these enormous albums, they just water down the overall product, but money talks and no one is going to actively go against their need to make money, especially not the people who are tied to the industry at large and need to support enormous teams of people recording, promoting, and doing whatever else is required to make a Luke Combs figure possible.
That being said, Luke’s largest album hasn’t even eclipsed 20 songs yet, excluding deluxe editions, and his last record only had 12. I’m not inclined to think that we should expect 30+ on this next record either, but we’ll see… it’ll be tough to turn down the prospect of mega-record given that everything Luke touches turns to gold.
This part of the conversation happens around the 1:40 mark of the podcast.
