Alan Jackson photo courtesy of SonyBMG Nashville.
May 13, 2008 — Alan Jackson is not the biggest fan of the Internet. His associates say he refuses to use e-mail, and Alan says his biggest reason for being online is to find old cars or auto parts.
His slow-to-accept-it view of technology influences one of the songs on his latest album, "I Still Like Bologna," and it was part of his humorous 1999 hit "www.memory." As it turns out, Alan is so uninterested in the web that he was stunned when disc jockeys started asking him in interviews about his MySpace page.
"They asked me what I thought, and I said, ‘I didn’t even know I had a MySpace,’" he told The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "I had to go on [the Internet] and look at it. But somebody had set it up, and then my fan club got involved and took it over."
The record business has complained for a number of years about the loss of album sales to online downloading, but Alan figures he’s a bit lucky since many country fans still want the physical CD in their hands. People who do download music often just buy just a single or a few tracks, instead of an entire album, and that’s hurting the sales for a lot of artists in every genre.
"The thing about country music is there are a lot of people who still buy the albums, and they’re less likely to download," he said. "But I think for really young people, that’s just the way they access music. My kids don’t download illegally, but they listen to all styles of music, and they don’t go out and buy CDs. They just download the songs they like. And sadly, that’s what’s affecting all the record sales that drive the business."
Whatever it’s doing to music sales, concert ticket sales in country music are going gangbusters. Alan’s next slated appearance is June 7 at Nashville’s LP Field during the CMA Music Festival. He’ll be joined on the bill that night by Trace Adkins, Rodney Atkins, Craig Morgan, Kenny Rogers and Little Big Town.