Garth Brooks Talks Starting GhostTunes with Songwriters in Mind

Over a nearly four-decade-long career, country icon Garth Brooks has had to pivot to keep up with the ever-evolving landscape of music distribution.

In a recent episode of Amazon Music’s Country Heat Weekly podcast, the star sat down with hosts Kelly Sutton and Amber Anderson to discuss everything under the Nashville neon, but most notably, how he’s navigated so much change in the music industry and kept songwriters at the forefront of the decisions he’s made.

It’s no secret Brooks has had a long-standing partnership with Amazon. The company’s streaming platform is the only place the country star’s music can be streamed. It is a partnership he cherishes, stating in the episode that it saved his career.

“It’s meant everything to me,” he told the host of his partnership with the streaming platform. “Try to remember that we went home to raise our kids and in that time you watch these technology companies come up and totally just use the music to sell tech pieces. … Your only home in the 2000s was the big box retailers because they were the only ones still selling music, so the songwriters could get paid.”

It was at that time that Brooks developed his own strategy to make sure songwriters got what was owed to them during the ever-evolving early days of streaming. “We created this thing called GhostTunes,” he continued. “It was the only place digital for us because we wanted to pay the songwriters.”

During the streaming boom in the 2010s, GhostTunes became a way for Brooks and other artists to have control over how their music was distributed digitally.

GhostTunes was absorbed by Amazon Music Unlimited in 2017 when a deal was struck between the artist and the platform. “GhostTunes wasn’t going to stand a chance against the big boys, but you bring in somebody like Amazon, they changed my path and saved my career.”

Elsewhere in the episode, Brooks discussed co-hosting the ACM Awards with Dolly Parton and shared details on several forthcoming projects, including his duets album.

Photo by Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images