Kip Moore has never won a CMA Award or an ACM Award, and has only received a total of three nominations from either ceremony, his last in 2014. Not that he cares. The Georgia native says country music, and the genre's awards shows, do them a disservice by making the entire event about something other than country music.
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"I feel like we're desperate in a way and we don't need to be," Moore tells Taste of Country. "It's already such a powerful format, but we're like, 'Like us! Like us! Like us! Please like us!'"
Moore cites Nick Jonas as an example --although he makes it clear his statements are not about Jonas specifically -- as an example of a pop artist the genre uses to lure new people to the format.
"We're so desperate to get this look," Moore says. "But what they're missing — and I hope they're listening, I hope somehow somebody hears this ... (they think that) to get Nick Jonas to play with whoever, that that's gonna be more powerful than, let's say, before Cody Johnson became a really big star."
"If I'm them, I'm putting Cody up there even before he became (a mainstream name)," he adds. "Because Cody already had a killer fanbase."
Moore goes on to defend country music as a successful enough genre that it doesn't need the addition of pop stars, regardless of who they are, to lure other people in.
"That's where this town is too insular," Moore concedes. "They don't get it. They really don't understand that Nick Jonas, just because he's on the show, number one, his fans aren't gonna tune into the show. And then the people that really love country are going to be like, 'What is this? Turn it off.'"
Kip Moore's New Musical Chapter
Moore has a new album out, and it's his biggest one to date. The 48-year-old just released Solitary Tracks, 23 songs released on his new label home. Moore left MCA Nashville after his fifth album, Damn Love, came out in 2023. With a solid fanbase, Moore didn't necessarily need another record label. But he signed with Virgin Music Group, finding a camaraderie with their vision for his music.
"The whole time I wanted to at least get a distributor, because I don't want to fool with that,"Moore tells Billboard. "That's a headache, and even almost every independent artist has a label doing distribution. So I knew I wanted to team up with a label, but I needed the right thing.
"[I needed] someone who understood the international capacity, and that is where Virgin came in," he continues. "They had foot soldiers all over the place, so they wanted to pour gas on the international thing, which the Nashville labels are not as focused on that."
