There’s been a trend in the pop/rock world to have collaborative recordings and singles hit the market place – often at the same time when each artist has their own current projects – where the audience then decides which songs are true hits. From the sheer amount of ‘guest’ singers now appearing on hit pop/rock/R&B records, it’s a trend that developed through hip-hop, thanks to the rappers need to have a singer sing the ‘hook’ of the song (songs remain memorable with a repeated hooks – or choruses).

In country music, such trends have usually been avoided except for cases where artists team up for a duet or two and then the duet is released between singles released by the artists (for example Tim McGraw and Kenny Chesney). However, in some cases, a duet between artists who are friends and often work together may never get ‘official’ single approval because of record label red tape. It’s the reason that Tracy Lawrence’s “Find Out Who Your Friends Are” was released as a solo track while the version with Tim McGraw and Kenny Chesney eventually found its way into the hands of radio and despite objections from big labels to radio to not play the “Featuring” version of the single, they played it anyway. It made the song a #1 hit and an award-winning collaboration.

This all brings us to a new situation that’s developing in country music right now. That is the dualing current albums from Miranda Lambert (Four The Record) and Pistol Annies (Hell on Heels).  The latter group features Miranda Lambert along with her friends Angaleena Presley and Ashley Monroe.  The Hell On Heels album has continued to cause a buzz with critics (online and in print) all over the country since being released in late August. In fact, it became the first exclusively digital release to hit #1 on the SoundScan Top Current Country Albums Chart (also the Billboard Hot Country Albums chart) with over 42,000 in sales that first week out.

It was such a remarkable success for the group that retail wanted a piece of the action and to date the record, which is primarily been promoted online with a few TV performances like last week’s ACA Awards sprinkled in, has sold over 175,000 copies with nearly 1/2 of those being physical copies. The situation between the success of this group of headstrong women and Miranda Lambert’s fourth solo album Four The Record is simply unprecedented in a genre which hates cross-pollination (as evidenced above). Miranda’s album is doing slightly better, with over 100,000 more copies sold since November 1, the street date for the record.

What seems to be happening – and we think it’s about damn time – is that music fans do not care about whatever politics there may be about an artist working as both part of a group and as a solo artist at the very same time. What matters to fans, more than anything, is that the music is good and that’s really what Miranda and her Pistol Annies cohorts care about the most: making good music.

Fans want great new music from artists they like and it’s simply the Pistol Annies and Miranda Lambert giving fans what they want. Sure, there may be some fan somewhere confused with the ‘dualing’ albums but in general, as stated in the last paragraph, they just don’t care.  Fans also will consider a song like “Hell On Heels” a hit if their local radio station (or Sirius XM’s “The Highway” is playing the tune. This hasn’t changed since the days of localized regional radio station lists.

Quite honestly, this would’ve never happened if Miranda Lambert hadn’t made it happen telling her manager, Marion Kraft of Shopkeeper Management (also home to Chris Young), that she wanted “to be in a band and this is who is in it” and then following up later saying she was “very serious” about the band. So, quite literally, it is Miranda Lambert changing the way Nashville’s record business sees and view things and while this is likely an outlier of a side project, who’s to say that some other artists won’t do a similar project.