Jason Aldean Cover Story in Billboard Magazine

He’s signed to Nashville independent label Broken Bow, and four albums in, Aldean has racked up 11 top 10 singles on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart (including five No. 1s), and his third single from current album My Kinda Party, the boundary-pushing “Dirt Road Anthem,” is rising quickly up the charts. Previous single “Don’t You Wanna Stay,” a duet with Kelly Clarkson, is now making noise on the Adult Top 40 chart, a rare crossover for a male country artist.

Jason Aldean Live Q&A: June 6 @ 4:30PM ET

All four of his Broken Bow records have cracked the top 10 on Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart — Party spent eight weeks there. Aldean has sold nearly 5 million albums in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan, along with 10.5 million digital tracks. But the best heat indicator is Aldean’s box-office success. In the most competitive year in memory for contemporary country music headliners, Aldean, booked by Buddy Lee Attractions and promoted this year by Live Nation, is blowing out shows all over the place in 20,000-capacity venues.

Aldean’s growth during the past six years has been steady and sure, but prior to that the going was tough. After signing a songwriter deal with Warner/Chappell in 1998 (giving up his Pepsi delivery-truck gig in the process), Aldean moved to Nashville that fall. But, even with what must have felt like an endless parade of showcases, label after label either passed outright or failed to bring a deal home for Aldean. It was downright scary for the Macon, Ga., native: He had a wife and new baby daughter to support.

“It was like, ‘Yeah, we love it, let’s talk, we’ll come see some more shows,’ but nobody ever pulled the trigger,” he says. “I’m not somebody that gives up . . . easily, but it was getting to the point where, not that I didn’t think it was going to work, I just didn’t know what else to do. You start thinking about, ‘What else can I do?’ This was my backup plan.”

Being called “humble” is de rigueur for a country artist, but manager Clarence Spalding of Spalding Entertainment (Spalding’s Chris Parr handles Aldean day to day) says Aldean found humility the hard way. “He’s had the shit beat out of him,” Spalding says. “He almost packed his bags and went back to Georgia. And without Benny Brown he would have been there.”

Broken Bow owner Benny Brown is plain-spoken. An entrepreneur. He’s successfully added record labels and publishing to his other business endeavors, which include a string of California-based car dealerships. When Aldean came to Brown’s attention in 2003, Craig Morgan was the top artist at Broken Bow. Brown wanted to see Aldean showcase in front of “regular country fans.” It was set up at Nashville’s Wildhorse Saloon. “After it was over, I told some of my staff, ‘This kid has something special. I think I’ll sign him,’ ” Brown recalls. “Everybody thought I was crazy.”

The circumstances surrounding Broken Bow signing Aldean to a seven-album deal were unusual, to say the least. Though he’d been playing music since he was 14, Aldean was, for country fans, a brand-new artist, steadfastly committed to an unproven producer in Michael Knox and sporting a rock-tinged sound. And he wanted to use his road band on the record. Brown and Broken Bow’s approach with Aldean “took huge balls,” Spalding says. “Think about it: ‘We’re gonna sign this kid, we’ve got a guy over here who’s not a proven producer, and, hey, let’s take his road band in to record with him.’ It wouldn’t have happened anywhere else like that.”

Broken Bow then did the drill: introduced Aldean to country radio. “As an independent with a new artist, you kind of take what’s given to you, which meant . . . doing a lot of free shows to promote their stations and the songs,” Broken Bow senior VP of operations Rick Shedd says. “It was a long, hard battle to moving up the charts, like it is for a lot of companies.”

But 12 weeks after Aldean’s debut set was released (July 2005) Broken Bow had its first gold album with Aldean, driven by debut single “Hicktown.” Though the song peaked at No. 10 on Hot Country Songs, its mud-slinging, hell-raising video cast the die for Aldean’s sound — and his fans. The song “was a polarizing single, different from what was going on at the time,” Shedd says. “But when people . . . were turned on by it, it sold a lot of records. It set the tone.”

A key cog in the machine has been distributor RED, which, though traditionally more active in non-country genres, has a history with country dating back to Kenny Chesney’s debut on Capricorn in 1994. Broken Bow began working with RED in 2003 when Morgan’s first record came out.

“They made a compelling argument as to why they could handle the country business, and as Broken Bow grew, they grew with us,” Shedd says. “They came with stronger sales reps and more aggressive marketing so they could service our needs, and it has continued with the growth of digital. When the digital thing started taking off, they had one person in place. Now they have 15.”

RED senior VP of product development Alan Becker says, “With Broken Bow we saw this fierce determination.” He adds that RED works closely with the label on “every important initiative,” including digital/mobile marketing through RED’s digital marketing division, Stache Media.

Aldean’s self-titled debut album has moved 1.4 million copies, and follow-up “Relentless” is at 829,000, according to SoundScan. His Wide Open album, on the strength of mega-hit “She’s Country,” went platinum, and “Party” is heading into double-platinum territory. “If you ship too many albums out into the marketplace and they don’t sell, retailers are quick to return them and you have to buy them back,” Brown says. “Our rate of return on Jason has been exceptional; almost zero.”

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