Radio companies and industry experts insist the stations aren't picking on the Chicks. Instead, in an industry driven by research, they're making hard business decisions.
Translation: liberals in the music industry and media are doing their best to prop up the Chixie Dix but they're getting pimp-slapped by the free market. Sympathy awards, a movie (which is tanking badly), and good press do not make up for the fact that the current album sales are only 1/12th what they were in 1998 and the Chix can't sell out a stadium holding 12,000 people when they were routinely selling out gigs in stadiums that hold 30-40,000 back in 1998.
The media can try to put a happy face on it all day every day, but the 10,000-lb pink elephant in the room is that revenues are down drastically. The media can paste on a smile for the public but the business analysts know that that the Chixie Dix's music career has one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel.
If this was only about snotty comments toward GW Bush, nobody would've cared a week after it had happened. Natalie put the Chix's career in the dumper when she said publicly that country music fans are just a bunch of dumb rednecks and that she's glad they're leaving because she'd rather a small core of hip fans who "get it". In other words, bye bye to the '87 pickup truck/Joe-Bob's Bar crowd, hello to the 2005 Land Rover/Starbucks crowd.
You got what you wanted Natalie, and now you have to live with it. Retirement is just around the corner.
It's had delightfully abysmal receipts: less than a million in 7 underwhelming weeks. The ever-shrinking coterie of Chixie Dix fans must be saving their shekels to make payments on their Land Rovers.