NHT Blog

I’m sitting in my hotel room with the famous HOLLYWOOD sign staring back at me when I look out the window.  Is it cool?  Sure, of course it is, and especially when you live 2,500 miles away.  I imagine that if I lived here and saw it all the time it might lose its luster.

And that’s exactly the point of this week’s blog.

Congratulations, indie recording artist.  Your new song is out in the world and people can now hear what you have created.  All the time you spent writing, recording, maybe re-writing and/or re-recording, and then getting it mixed, mastered, and distributed was worth it.  It’s okay to take a step back and admire your work. 

It’s fitting that I returned home from a songwriters festival yesterday – the very weekend that Pensacola Beach Songwriters Festival (PBSF) co-founder Jim Pasquale passed away.

The National Football League’s 2021 preseason got underway this past weekend.  Technically you could say it was the week before, as the annual Hall of Fame game was played.  But all teams were in action starting with games last Thursday night and running through this weekend that we just finished.

In the music business there is an ongoing struggle to get fans to purchase downloads, if not CDs (remember those things?), instead of just streaming songs on platforms that pay only a fraction of a penny to the artist each time a listener clicks Play.  This is nothing new and it’s a battle that indie artists fight constantly.

“The best place to start any transformation is education,” said Thad Bullard (a.k.a. Titus O’Neil of WWE fame). Artists often look outside the box for inspiration for lyrics or melody, but what about for transformation of their craft or career?

There’s an expression I heard years and years ago that I really liked and have held onto all this time.  “It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice.”  It kind of goes hand-in-hand with treating other people the way you’d want to be treated.  Those both also play into what I wrote about on this site last week.

Last night I returned home from Nashville where never more was it so evident that we all need to embrace the message that we seem to have been given over the last year-and-a-half.  You’ve heard the expression before about ‘meeting people where they are.’  While I’m a real networker, it doesn’t necessarily have to be taken in its literal sense, meaning, traveling to wherever someone is.  However, if the pandemic has taught us nothing else, it’s that life is precious, and you don’t know what someone is going through.  So always lead with kindness (which, sadly, we shouldn’t have had to endure these trying times to learn).

So many people want to get interviewed today.  People have a business, a product, or a service that they want to get the word out about, and they know that being a guest on a TV show, a radio show, a podcast, and other media is a great method for promoting.  They are singers and musicians, actors, entrepreneurs, authors, inventors, comedians, spokespeople/experts, podcasters, and more.  But too many of them are going about it the wrong way and, as a result, are wasting a lot of valuable time.

I know there’s going to be pushback on this – perhaps a lot – but it’s overdue to be pointed out.  Sure, the timing feels awkward since yesterday was Independence Day here in the U.S.  But maybe that makes it even more relevant that this finally gets addressed.