Carly Pearce at Opry 100 red carpet: ‘When I was five years old I told my parents I wanted to sing at the Opry’
Carly Pearce at Opry 100 red carpet: ‘When I was five years old I told my parents I wanted to sing at the Opry’
- Country music is experiencing a surge in global popularity, particularly in Europe.
- The success of events like the C2C festival and tours by major country artists is driving the genre’s international growth.
- Industry experts believe country music has the potential to become a leading global music format.
Carly Pearce has imagined singing to sold-out crowds since she was 5 years old. But even the wildest daydreams of the Taylor Mills, Kentucky, native didn’t include a world of stardust waiting beyond the U.S. border.
“I never thought I would go somewhere outside of America where they would know my music,” she says.
The “Country Music Made Me Do It” singer’s international reach has grown. In 2022, her “29 Tour” made seven stops in Europe. By this February, her “Hummingbird World Tour” darted in and out of seven countries — Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Ireland — where tens of thousands of fans busted the seams of 15 theaters.
“All but two were new venues,” she says. “Whether we outgrew a previous tour or we had never been there, everything felt new. … Munich surprised me. I had never been there, and the fans went absolutely nuts.”
Every time Pearce belted into the microphone, she heard the audience shouting back lyrics.
“It was our first time in Sweden, and you don’t know what to expect,” she says. “Maybe English is not the first language, and then they’re filling these places and singing in English. It’s wild.”
More impressive was fans knew every word to her, at the time, unreleased songs like “If Looks Could Kill” and “No Rain.” They had seen snippets on social media.
“I’ve been to Europe several times, but I feel like in the last year or two, country music has connected there in a really impactful way,” she says. “The growth of my music over there blew my mind.”
Pearce may have returned to the states for the last leg of her tour, but she’s already planning the next European adventure.
“For sure, like sooner than later,” she says.
A global genre
While many artists in pop, rock, hip-hop and rap conquer the globe with their record-breaking tours — to name a few: Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Madonna, the Beatles and Elvis — country music should not be overlooked.
“The growth of the format has been extraordinary over the last decade,” says Marc Dennis, the chair of the CMA International Committee and Pearce’s agent. “There’s still a lot of room for growth, but we have a huge opportunity to be the No. 1 format globally, in my opinion.”
CMA is following three markets closely outside of North America. The first is the United Kingdom, where country music passed 2% of the entire market share in 2024. Out of 179.1 billion songs streamed, the genre made up 3.6 billion. While the number may seem small, it’s almost double the country music consumption from the year before. An important distinction CMA makes is these numbers don’t include Swift’s catalog, which performs exponentially well.
The most streamed country artists in the U.K. in 2024 were Zach Bryan, Luke Combs, Morgan Wallen, Shaboozey and Chris Stapleton.
Next is Germany. For the first time in German history, last year country music passed one billion streams without counting Swift. Country music streaming rose 77% from 2023 to 2024.
The third market is Australia where country music streams grew 28% in 2024. The genre is the fourth most popular for the land down under. Rock leads with 22% of market share. Pop and R&B/hip-hop are each tied with 19% and country music is 6%, but that’s up an entire percentage point from 2023.
Setting the world stage
Music streams help dictate where labels plan overseas tours. Zach Bryan, Hardy, Brett Young, Kane Brown, Kip Moore, Beyoncé, Post Malone, Dasha and Brandi Carlisle are some of the acts filling out the 2025 European concert calendar.
“You start with the go-to markets,” Dennis says. “In the United Kingdom that means London — obviously — Glasgow, Manchester and Birmingham. You start with those four and then there’s Germany, which is probably the strongest market in Europe right now. Berlin can be a difficult touring market, but it performs really well with festivals.”
Country 2 Country (C2C) is Europe’s largest country music festival held every March. And while photos now capture a sea of cowboy hats, the event was initially met with opposition. The resistance has dwindled over the years making room for fans who have found a connection with country.
“The first years nobody went over there to make money,” says Shannon Radel, the owner of Rising Star Travel. She moved to Nashville in 2005 and opened a travel agency that books millions of dollars in European travel for country artists. “It took a minute to catch on.”
When C2C launched in 2013, a roster of eight artists including Tim McGraw, Carrie Underwood and Vince Gill performed two evening shows in London’s O2 arena. Twelve years later, the event sold more than 100,000 tickets for three nights. And that’s before you include festival events held in Dublin, Oslo, Stockholm, Amsterdam and Berlin. March’s headliners included Lainey Wilson, Dierks Bentley, Cody Johnson and Shaboozey.
“C2C was a way to get the magic of country music out there and show the world it’s more than a twangy, kind of kitschy, genre or people,” Radel says. “There’s so much heart to it. People feel the music … and it’s good for us in the industry. Sometimes the shimmer rubs off when you’ve been doing this for a long time. Then you see how excited and exuberant fans are about country, and it reminds you how special it is.”
Demand is high enough that next year’s C2C early bird tickets sold out days within being posted.
Up to the task
“Country is a worldwide format, not just a U.S. format,” says Sarah Trahern, the CEO of CMA. “The future is moving to be more borderless. In the last two to three years we’ve seen such great expansion, particularly post-COVID.”
Trahern credits a few things on the upward swing: artists making the investment to go overseas, C2C growing year-by-year and relatable lyrics. Love is universal. So are heartbreak, family bonds, devotion to faith, letting loose at honky-tonks, drinking wine with the girls, patriotism, blue-collar struggles and personal growth.
“While certainly there’s beer and pickup trucks everywhere in the world,” she says, “when you go to a broader more centralized subject matter for folks that don’t necessarily work in the rural lifestyle, strong stories with universal themes translate well across the pond.”
CMA has assembled task forces over a number of territories including the Nordics, Germany, Canada and Australia.
“What we do through our task forces and what we have done systematically for decades is we listen to the industry leaders in each market,” says Meredith Goucher, the director of international relations and development for CMA. “We talk to people on the ground to better understand what’s happening in the net market like what style of country music are they leaning toward. And then we talk with agents, labels and promoters to feed the pipeline.”
Where to go?
While country music roots burrow in Europe, Australia and North America, where to next?
“Asia is difficult,” Dennis says. “If you have a country artist that has crossed over into pop culture, they can connect with that audience. But country artists that aren’t straight up mainstream pop are going to have a tough time there.”
Other potential markets for growth include Latin America and South America, specifically Brazil.
“I’m excited about Brazil. I think it’s a huge opportunity as well as other countries down there,” Dennis says.
This story has been updated.
