Europe A Pot Of Gold For Artists

There isn’t as much euphoric Nashville talk about a country music conquest of Europe, Asia and South America these days, but the movement’s foremost exponent among the Tennessee capital’s record executives indicates progress is steadily being made.

Bob Saporiti, the Nashville marketing vice president of Warner Bros., says there are now 22 country performers with viable international careers, “which is more than we had five years ago,” and Saporiti’s employer expects to add another couple of its own to the list within the next several months.

German record executives have become so enthralled with Faith Hill, he says, that they are initiating an expensive “major TV, totally pop marketing plan, positioning her as a great singer who happens to be from here.” He says Hill will go to Europe in November for a media tour preparatory to a 1997 tour there, and will tour Australia in ‘97 as well.

A second Warner artist, New York-rooted singer-songwriter Victoria Shaw, who hasn’t fully broken through yet in the United States, so charmed Europeans in a recent tour with Travis Tritt that she is returning in September to open a month-long, sold out, 21-performance jaunt for Don Williams. As a result, Shaw may well become a major trans-Atlantic star before she does in the United States, Saporiti says.

But what’s the pot of gold overseas? Why try to do all this international traveling?

“The reason you try to do it is that 70 percent of the world’s record sales are outside the United States,” Saporiti says. “And it (the international market) is getting bigger by the day as the Third World - like Brazil, Africa and China - come on line. And Eastern Europe is a major player now, whereas that market used to be nonexistent because of Communism. It was all state-run, and you couldn’t sell (American) stuff there (until the fall of Communism). Now you can.”

Saporiti, perhaps the most active member of the Nashville-based Country Music Association’s international committee, mentioned several stars recording for rival companies who are having notable international success of one kind or another. He said he understands that Capitol’s Billy Dean has sold 100,000 records in Thailand.

Others doing well on foreign soil include Mary Chapin Carpenter, Lyle Lovett, Steve Earle, The Mavericks, Trisha Yearwood and Warner Bros.’ own Dwight Yoakam.