When 2/3 of your new releases are ripoffs of songs from other genres...I'd say its dead. Either that or all country bands are cover bands...
You know what they say about opinions...Yours and mine...Looking at all the newly built 60K sq foot home in and around Nashville, I would beg to differ...
Aside from the undeniable health of the country music industry as a standalone genre, he had it completely backwards to begin with. Every note, stanza, composition or song written in the rock 'n roll, pop, top-40, Southern rock and other genres have at least half of their roots firmly planted in country music. The other half of the root-ball of modern popular music, in America at least, comes from black gospel, jazz and blues influences. In other words, modern genres "ripped off" country artists, not the other way around.
Modern rock music could not have artists like Phish, Widespread Panic and a host of other jam-bands without the invention of the genre by The Allman Brothers Band, and the ABB could not have created that genre without the influences of Coltrane, Miles Davis, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Elmore James, Jimmie Rogers, The Carter Family, Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie and so many other lesser-known jazz, gospel, blues, country and folk artists that were all thrown together in a pot and stirred and stewed to create a whole new genre. That's how it works. All music comes from other music. There's not an original note to be had in music, only original ways of putting it together and combining instruments can create something new.
The lineage described above concerning the genre the Allmans created are repeated in every other modern genre of the 20th Century up through today.
Bottom line, in American music, there is really only one kind of people responsible for the unique original genres we are known for, and that's country folk. Whether it be the old black spirituals coming out of the cotton-fields during slavery that evolved into modern jazz, gospel and the blues, or the white farmers from all over the country who bowed cheap fiddles and strummed cat-gut-strung guitars and sang through their nasal passages instead of their diaphragms, all wholly American music is deeply-rooted in country/folk music.
Blues