Bluegrass Today: The Daily News Source for Bluegrass and Acoustic Music
Bluegrass Today, at bluegrasstoday.com, is an online publication covering bluegrass and acoustic string music, launched in 2011 by Terry Herd and John Lawless and based in Nashville, Tennessee. It publishes daily news, features and reviews, maintains widely followed weekly and monthly radio airplay charts, and provides event listings and a directory for the bluegrass community — a full-service news operation for a genre that had previously been served mainly by magazines, newsletters and radio.
In 2017, the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) honored Bluegrass Today with its Distinguished Achievement Award, recognizing the site as a forerunner that had broadened bluegrass music's recognition and accessibility. Few genre news sites, in any style of music, have been so formally embraced by their own industry.
Overview
Bluegrass Today describes its mission in its own award materials as being a full-service source of news and information focusing on bluegrass and acoustic string music. Alongside daily journalism, it maintains the airplay charts that radio programmers and artists watch, event listings for festivals and concerts, and an advertising directory available to artists, venues, studios and other music professionals.
That combination — journalism plus industry infrastructure — is what distinguishes it. A bluegrass artist, label or promoter uses Bluegrass Today not only to read the news but to track radio performance, list events and reach the audience that buys tickets and records in a small, tightly knit genre.
History and Founding
Bluegrass Today grew out of an earlier pioneering website. In 2004, John Lawless and Brance Gillihan began The Bluegrass Blog, which published bluegrass news updates, album reviews and festival photographs. Lawless and Gillihan also worked together creating music instruction DVDs for AcuTab Publications, and the blog quickly became a go-to source for music news within the bluegrass industry; its creators were recognized with the IBMA's Print Media Person of the Year Award in 2007. In late 2010, however, Gillihan decided to pursue other ventures outside bluegrass, leaving Lawless unsure about the future of the blog.
At the same time, Terry Herd — founder of the Bluegrass Radio Network and host of Into the Blue, described in the site's history as America's largest and longest-running bluegrass radio syndication — had the idea for a website that combined up-to-the-minute news, advertising, directories and a weekly radio chart, all centered on bluegrass and acoustic music. Herd reached out to Lawless, who brought his writing experience into the new partnership. Herd and Lawless officially launched Bluegrass Today at the IBMA's World of Bluegrass festival in 2011.
Ownership and Business Model
Bluegrass Today is an independent, founder-led publication. Its two founders divided the work from the start: Lawless serves as content editor, writing multiple stories each day and supervising a team of columnists and correspondents, while Herd, as chief executive, manages the business side of the site, with a focus on marketing and sales, and coordinates the data for its radio airplay charts.
The business model follows that structure. Advertising is integral to the design Herd envisioned — the site carries advertising and maintains a directory in which artists, venues, studios and other professionals can present themselves to the bluegrass audience — alongside the audience value of its charts and daily news. In a genre of Bluegrass Today's size, being the central marketplace and the central newsroom at once is the commercial logic.
Coverage and Content
News is published daily: new singles and albums, artist announcements, band personnel changes, festival news, industry developments and obituaries of figures in the bluegrass community, an important record-keeping function in a genre that values its lineage. Features and album reviews appear alongside the news, and the site's archive stretches back through its predecessor, preserving more than two decades of bluegrass coverage in searchable form.
John Lawless's own byline illustrates the volume: the site's author archives run to well over a thousand pages of his stories alone, reflecting the multiple-stories-a-day pace the founders described at launch. Columnists and correspondents broaden the coverage beyond the editor's desk, covering regional scenes and specialist topics within acoustic music.
The Airplay Charts
Bluegrass Today's charts are its most influential product. From its launch plan — Herd's concept included a weekly radio chart from the beginning, and Herd himself coordinates the chart data — the site has published weekly and monthly airplay charts based on actual radio play logged for each period, ranking songs with their spin counts. For artists and labels, a place on the Bluegrass Today Weekly Airplay Chart is a measurable mark of radio success in the genre.
The chart family has expanded beyond the flagship bluegrass ranking. The site later added weekly charts for Grassicana — the Americana-leaning side of the genre — and a weekly Gospel airplay chart measuring radio play for newly released bluegrass gospel projects, alongside its longstanding weekly and monthly bluegrass charts. The charts remain current: the site continues to publish them on a weekly cycle, with the rankings updated from logged airplay.
Recognition and Industry Standing
In 2017, Bluegrass Today was among the recipients of the IBMA's Distinguished Achievement Award, presented at the IBMA Special Awards Luncheon on September 28, 2017, during the association's annual business conference and festival in Raleigh, North Carolina. The award recognizes those within the industry who have proven to be forerunners in their field, broadening the music's recognition and accessibility.
Lawless, accepting the honor, said there is no greater tribute than one that comes from peers in the industry. The award followed the earlier recognition of his and Gillihan's Bluegrass Blog with the 2007 IBMA Print Media Person of the Year Award — a decade-spanning record of the industry honoring its own online journalists, at a time when music industries were not always quick to credit digital media.
Audience and Reach
At the time of the 2017 award, Herd reported explosive growth in online readership since the site's launch nearly six years earlier: some 85,000 viewers visited the site each month, viewing more than 2.75 million pages of current and historical information each year, with nearly 50 percent of readership on mobile devices. He described the site as serving readers in all 196 countries, wherever they live or travel — a reflection of bluegrass's surprisingly global following, with active scenes in Europe and Japan as well as the United States.
The audience is the bluegrass community itself: fans, performing artists, radio programmers, promoters, labels and instrument makers. Because the genre is small and participatory — many fans are also pickers, promoters or broadcasters — Bluegrass Today's readers and its subjects substantially overlap, which explains its directory, listings and chart functions.
Notable People
John Lawless, co-founder and content editor, is the publication's editorial voice: a banjo player and writer who co-created The Bluegrass Blog in 2004, co-founded Bluegrass Today in 2011, and has written multiple stories a day for the site while supervising its columnists and correspondents. Terry Herd, co-founder and chief executive, brought the radio side: founder of the Bluegrass Radio Network, host of the syndicated Into the Blue, and coordinator of the airplay chart data that anchors the site's industry role.
Brance Gillihan, Lawless's partner on The Bluegrass Blog from 2004 until 2010, belongs in the publication's prehistory: the blog he co-created proved the audience for daily online bluegrass news and won IBMA recognition before Bluegrass Today existed.
Digital Presence
Bluegrass Today is a digital-only publication that grew directly out of the blog era. Its website carries the daily news flow, the charts, event listings and the professional directory, supported by a newsletter — the site invites readers to sign up to get it — and by social distribution of its stories and chart results. Its mobile readership, already about half its audience by 2017, reflects how completely a genre once documented in print newsletters migrated online.
Recent Developments
Bluegrass Today has continued its daily publishing and weekly chart cycle into the present, more than fifteen years after The Bluegrass Blog's successor launched at World of Bluegrass in 2011 — a milestone its own pages have recently marked with retrospective writing on its first fifteen years. Its charts have kept pace with the genre's evolution, covering bluegrass alongside Grassicana and gospel rankings, and its news pages continue to record everything from major festival announcements to the passing of community figures.
That durability is Bluegrass Today's significance. In a genre built on tradition, Herd and Lawless built its modern news institution: an independent, Nashville-based website that reports the news, counts the spins, lists the shows and was honored by the IBMA for changing how bluegrass reaches the world.
