"As a country artist, you can really keep your audience for 20 or 30 years," muses Chely Wright. "That's how I was with the country music artists that I liked. They didn't have to still be on the radio for me to buy their records. If they had me at any point, they had me for life."
Related: Readers' Poll: The 10 Best Country Songs of 2014 So Far
That good karma is coming back to Wright as she preps her next album. The singer-songwriter took the increasingly popular step of funding the project through a Kickstarter campaign. Soliciting donations from her loyal fan base not only guarantees contributors a copy of the record once it's available, but it also means Wright is able to properly promote the album upon its release, effectively becoming her very own record label. It's a method that allowed Jo Dee Messina, one of Wright's country contemporaries, to release her own most recent album, Me, earlier this year.
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