Country radio is more regionally fragmented than its international reputation suggests. American country radio runs a tight contemporary format, heavily produced and closer to pop-rock than to anything acoustic. Classic country stations play the mid-century canon, which is a different genre in everything but name. And outside the United States the label attaches to traditions that are not American at all: Brazilian sertanejo dominates radio across a country of two hundred million people and gets filed under country in most directories, as does the Mexican ranchera repertoire.
Bluegrass sits adjacent and is usually tagged separately, with a further split between traditional and progressive bluegrass. The distinction matters: traditional bluegrass keeps to the instrumentation and repertoire codified in the 1940s and 50s, while progressive bluegrass, or newgrass, pushed the same instruments into jazz and rock territory from the 1970s onwards.
Production-wise, country is well suited to modest bitrates. Contemporary country is produced with the same loudness practices as pop and survives 128 kbps comfortably. Traditional country and bluegrass, which are acoustic and lightly compressed, benefit from higher bitrates in the same way jazz does, particularly on banjo and fiddle where the upper harmonics are the whole character of the instrument.
