SALES OF THE DIXIE CHIXKS IS WAY DOWN...
The dixie chicks have one course left that is to switch to rock. They are finished as a country band.
In the half-week of charting after Maines' sermonette, the Chicks dropped on Nielsen Soundscan sales charts: their current album Home dipped 22,000 copies in sales, although it's still No. 1 on the Billboard country album chart. The video sales of the Chicks' live An Evening With the Dixie Chicks dropped by 3,000 copies and the single release of "Landslide" dropped by about 1,200 in sales.
They also lost at least 15 percent of radio spins for "Travelin' Soldier" and it dropped from No. 1 to No. 3 this week on the Billboard Hot Country Singles and Tracks chart.
And another lingering question is: how much of a steadfast country audience base have the Chicks actually built? A look at the Chicks' career suggests that much of their audience pull has been teenage girls, whose musical attention span traditionally has not been long and which certainly does not translate into the long-term loyalty that country artists have enjoyed.
Further, in looking over CMT.com reader polls over the last few months, I see a decided lack of support for the Chicks. In the most recent poll, on March 15, in response to the question, "How do you feel about the Dixie Chicks following Natalie Maines' comment regarding President Bush?," 68 percent of respondents said, "I don't like them at all." Even back on Feb. 21, when CMT.com asked readers if they would attend any of the Chicks' shows on their upcoming tour, 69 percent answered that they would rather stay home. On Feb. 8, a CMT.com poll question said that the Chicks' Home was selling well and asked readers if they had bought it. The response? "No way, I don't care for them," said 53 percent of respondents.
http://www.cmt.com/news/display/1470672.jhtml Chicks' manager Simon Renshaw suggested, in an e-mail that the Chicks' label Sony Music sent to country radio stations,
that the protest against the Chicks was orchestrated by the Free Republic, a right-wing Web site. The Free Republic certainly had -- and still has -- its share of anti-Chicks postings.
But I also have read literally hundreds of Chicks postings the last few days on a number of Web sites across the political spectrum, and they show a genuine consensus from country fans saying that Maines in effect filed for divorce from country audiences.
FR has organized a lot of other protests without the assistance that came forth on this one. It is great that FR is getting noticed but actually FR is getting too much attention/credit here.
FR is only being mentioned because they seek to defuse the protests ("you protestors are only shills for the VRWC at FR!").
The same media that keeps pointing out FR's connection to the protest of the Vichy Chicks ignores any ties of the anarchist-socialists and communists to the "anti-war" movement.