Why Country Music Television’s Ratings Continue to Fall (Opinion)

The Country Music Television Network is holding its annual awards show tonight. And they have had low ratings for several years now. There are several probable causes for it.

Music videos are aimed at a young demographic to start with. So you have to start with competition from other award shows. (Nickelodeon Kids Choice Awards, iHeartRadio Music Awards, Academy Of Country Music Awards, and the Country Music Association Awards). Too many award shows. Too much competition from your own music genre, in my opinion.

So, as they try to find somebody or something to pump up viewership, what they did last week wasn't it.

CMT tweeted out that they were supporting an event called "Wear Orange Day." Hmm.

According to CMT's tweet, more than 100 people are lost to gun violence in America every day. And they wanted folks to wear orange to raise awareness. Folks around here wear orange every fall. But that's to raise awareness that they need meat in their freezers.

The thing about being active on Twitter is that people can fire back at you in a public forum. And the initial 100 comments were overwhelmingly not happy with the tweet, according to the California News Times.

I don't know much about country music videos, but I know quite a bit about country music listeners, guns, and how adamant those listeners are about owning those guns. In some places dealing with certain topics like this would probably be a call for a great big protest. But with this particular group, I'm guessing that those folks just won't watch.

My first phone call after work today will be to my cable provider to remove CMT from whatever package I currently have.

It's not the gun. It's the person.