NHT Blog

Five weeks from tomorrow I will fly to Anaheim, California, for the annual NAMM Show.  The massive tradeshow centers around the music products industry.  Think guitars, drums, sheet music, retailers, manufacturers, artists, and an extensive list of attendees of more than one hundred thousand.

I am approximately two months away from hitting the eleven-year mark of my weekly “Now Hear This Entertainment” podcast.  That’s a new episode delivered on-time, every week since February 2014.

It’s a regular occurrence in the music world, but that doesn’t make it okay and mean that you just accept it.  After all, a student failing a test in school happens frequently but that isn’t the green light to just haphazardly go through their studies and shrug off not passing.

I’m referring to quitting the band that you’ve been playing with, whether for six months or six years.

Two days ago, I returned from Nashville, where two of the newest spots on Broadway in 2024 belong to Eric Church and Garth Brooks.  On a street where tourists and bachelorette parties are plenty, there’s live music in each and every honkytonk.

In that city and others, however, it’s the venues that have closed that, sadly, are just as notable and deserve to be talked about.

At a time when many A-listers are pricing some fans out of going to stadium or arena shows, the options to go to a local music joint are dwindling at a noticeable rate, unfortunately.

If you’ve been listening to my weekly “Now Hear This Entertainment” podcast, or, heck, following its official Instagram account, or even reading the weekly e-newsletter, you know that tomorrow I head to Nashville for five days.

That means that today, of course, will be quite a busy day.  However, that should not be my motivation to check lots of things off my To Do list.

It’s a holiday today in the United States.  Schools, banks, the post office, and other government entities are closed, and there are likely even some businesses that you should think about calling before heading over to today (verifying if they’re open or not).

It’s days like today when you sit and realize that you have so much you could do, that you often end up deciding to do none of it.  That’s caused by being overwhelmed and I heard some advice a while back that for those instances “just do the next thing.”

I got an email in which someone was advising public relations professionals that if they had bad news to announce (about their own company or on behalf of a client), today is the day to do it.  The thinking, of course, is that it’s just going to get lost in the noise of all news outlets focused squarely on tomorrow being Election Day.

Even though it was more than six years ago, I can clearly remember sitting down for an on-location interview recording for my weekly “Now Hear This Entertainment” podcast.  After finishing and having hit the Stop button, I asked, “With the huge social media following that you’ve gotten, do you actually (have time to) look through all the likes and comments that you get?”

I remember long ago on this site posting a blog titled, “Don’t Put All Your Eggs in the Facebook Basket.”  Heck, without even looking it up, I’ll bet that when I wrote about TikTok’s thin ice (relative to potentially being banned in the U.S.) I probably referenced that old post and cautioned not to ‘bet it all on TikTok,’ to do a takeoff on a popular gambling expression.

In my 24 years of living in Florida, last Wednesday night was the scariest weather episode.  Yet here I am back at another blog post, less than a week after Hurricane Milton ravaged not only my beloved Tampa Bay area but much, much more of the Sunshine State.

It’s tough to have to “move on,” or get back to work, after you’ve been so close to something so devastating.