All Sections. About Us. B2B Publishing. Business Visionaries. Hot Property. Times Events. Times Store. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options. Garth Brooks announced a new downloading and streaming service where you can purchase his music or the music of Ariana Grande, Miranda Lambert, Ed Sheeran, and many more. It's called GhostTunes and "allows artists to sell music any way they want to," Brooks said in a press conference in Rosemont, Illinois on Thursday, hours before his comeback show in Chicago.
Brooks refused to let iTunes sell his music as singles because songwriters and publishers rely on income from complete albums. As a matter of fact, you couldn't find Brooks hits online unless you stumbled upon them on Pandora. GhostTunes, in which Brooks is a part-owner, offers artists the option of selling albums only, individual tracks, downloading only, or streaming only.
According to Nielsen SoundScan , Brooks' album make him the best-selling albums artist in the United States during the SoundScan era which started tracking in While we wait, let's grab two pina coladas and enjoy the tunes of country music's biggest-selling superstar. Despite its promising start, Fresh Horses plateaued quickly, topping out at quadruple platinum — a healthy number for any artist, but a little disappointing considering Brooks' superstar status. He decided to push his seventh album, appropriately titled Sevens, very hard to confirm his superstar status.
Originally, it was scheduled to be released in August , when he would promote it with a huge concert in Central Park. Plans went awry when Capitol experienced a huge management shake-up, leaving many of his contacts at the label out in the cold. Upset at the new management, Brooks held back the release of Sevens until he received commitment for a major marketing push for the album. He went ahead and performed the Central Park concert, which received major coverage in the media.
On the strength of the concert, Capitol acquiesced to Brooks' demands, and Sevens was released in November Sevens catapulted to number one upon its release and quickly went multi-platinum over the holiday season.
The following spring, Brooks pulled his first six albums out of print and issued The Limited Series, a box set that contained all six records plus bonus tracks. Once all two million copies of The Limited Series were sold, the individual albums would remain out of print until their tenth anniversary, when they would be released only on DVD audio.
The Double Live set followed in late , and its sales were brisk but not quite as heavy as projected. In the spring of , Brooks unsuccessfully tried out for the San Diego Padres pro baseball team, a major indication of his growing desire to expand his success beyond country music. Once it became clear that professional baseball wasn't in his future, he became fascinated with film, specifically starring in The Lamb, a supposed thriller about a conflicted, tortured rock star called Chris Gaines.
He was determined to win the role, and he did after extensive lobbying. Sometime in the spring of , the film was given the green light with Babyface as a producer and Brooks as the star. During pre-production, Brooks decided the best way to prep for the role was to become Chris Gaines. He invented a brooding, leather-clad image and filled in holes in Gaines' backstory by inventing biographies and a musical history. The most important piece in the puzzle was a collection of Gaines' "greatest hits," since it would prime audiences for the big-budget spectacular of The Lamb, scheduled for late So, Brooks jumped the gun, recording a set of 13 songs — as Chris Gaines — that would fill in the fictional singer's history.
As the Chris Gaines album was about to hit stores, Brooks' new persona was revealed to the public. Since the machinations of The Lamb were only known to music insiders and fans who religiously followed the trades, Brooks' sudden re-emergence as a slimmed-down, soul-patched, shaggy-haired soulful pop crooner was utterly bizarre to almost every observer. There was a massive PR campaign to shed light on Chris Gaines, complete with a TV special, but the details were so convoluted that it couldn't be explained easily.
In the Life of Chris Gaines was released at the end of September , and although it entered the charts at number two, it was a major commercial disappointment; by the time Christmas rolled around, some major stores were offering heavy discounts on the record in hopes of clearing out unsold stock. Brooks kept a low profile through most of , as the disastrous marketplace showing of the Chris Gaines album scuttled plans for The Lamb, which was shelved.
His personal life was also in turmoil, as he and his wife announced that they were divorcing in October of By the time the divorce was finalized the following year, Brooks was on his way to retirement, choosing to retreat from music and concentrate on fatherhood.
He announced that his next album, Scarecrow, would be his last and it was released to appropriate fanfare that November, debuting at number one on the Billboard pop and country charts, but failing to generate a hit single bigger than "Wrapped Up in You," which peaked at number five.
After the release of Scarecrow, Brooks eased into retirement, spending the next few years quietly and not resurfacing in the public eye until Toward the end of that year, he married country singer Trisha Yearwood on December 10, but prior to that, he struck a deal with Walmart to become the exclusive retailer for his back catalog. The first release under this deal was a new box set called The Limited Series that collected all the albums he released after his first box set called The Limited Series.
This second Limited Series was released in time for the holiday season of and also included a new disc of outtakes called The Lost Sessions, which was later released as an individual disc in The Lost Sessions featured a duet with Yearwood called "Love Will Always Win," which climbed to 23 on the country charts in , a modest placing that was nevertheless his biggest hit since "Wrapped Up in You.
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