Hasta La Creative!

Two of the three finalists on NBC’s "The Voice" are country acts, so the genre has good odds of producing a winner when host Carson Daly announces the results tonight. But that would only be the latest sign that country music, which brought in $1 billion in sales last year and is drawing the increasing attention of Madison Avenue, is on the move in media and marketing.

Country singers are appearing in a wide range of ads, not to mention their own TV show in ABC’s “Nashville” and a prominent presence on "The Voice," where country star Blake Shelton is a coach. Even New York City, about the last place you’d expect to find fans of songs about pickup trucks and drinking beer, christened its first country radio station in 17 years in January. More than a quarter of U.S. adults now call themselves country fans, according to to Scarborough.

And its fans are willing to spend. While sales of R&B, alternative and pop dropped in 2012, country sales jumped 4.2% to 44.6 million albums out of 316 million, according to Nielsen SoundScan. It was the only category to show an increase other than rock, which edged upward just 2%. Only 13 of Billboard’s top 100 songs last year were country, but four of the ten top-selling artists came from the genre: Taylor Swift, Jason Aldean, Carrie Underwood and Luke Bryan. 

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