Jason Aldean shuns streaming, tops charts with his new album
NASHVILLE — Country star Jason Aldean rarely has time to be a tourist when he’s touring, but during a recent trip to New York, he and his wife, Brittany, found some downtime to walk around the city. The crowds afford the Georgia-born singer a little anonymity that he doesn’t always get back home.
“I can go wherever here and you just kind of blend in with everybody else,” said the reigning Academy of Country Music’s entertainer of the year. “When there are a hundred people walking down the street, you just kind of slip on in there.”
A couple of nights later, Aldean and Kid Rock headlined a doubleheader at Fenway Park in Boston in front of tens of thousands of fans.
Despite his star status, Aldean still holds onto his everyman qualities. He isn’t a big TV star like some of his country music peers, but he regularly sells out stadiums and arenas and is the first country artist this year to top the Billboard 200 albums chart with his seventh effort, “They Don’t Know,” released this month.
The title track is an anthem to Aldean’s core audience, the small town working class.
“People work hard just to be able to go out on the weekend and have fun,” Aldean said of his fans. “They are not flashy. They aren’t working on Wall Street. They are just simple people.”
“Instead of people paying $10 an album, they are paying $10 for a million albums,” Aldean said. “You can only split $10 so many ways until there is really nothing left.”
Although he says he understands why music fans are drawn to streaming, he said the practice has devalued music. He removed all of his music from Spotify for a year, but he felt like he was the only artist in Nashville to take a stand.