Finally! The Yacht Rock Episode!

Tom Nixon (00:01.996)
Well, Curtis, we are going to finally cross the streams this week. This is the first episode in a long time. I don’t have to think of a clever way to shoehorn the yacht rock podcast into the Bullhorns of Bullseyes podcast because we’re actually just going to shoehorn.

John Nixon (00:05.555)
I see.

Curtis Hays (00:17.034)
You’re just going to do it. was just like, let’s stop talking about it and actually just make an episode about the podcast, the Outrock podcast, which you’re wearing the shirt I see out of the main into the main. Are we going to get into the branding behind that? What it means?

Tom Nixon (00:26.999)
Yes.

Tom Nixon (00:33.964)
Yeah, we will. It’s the product of a rebrand actually, which may be relevant because we were originally called just the Yacht Rock podcast. Just the name. You know, it is what it says on the tin, as they say. So that was by intent early on, which we’ll get into because we wanted to get discovered and we wanted people to know what it is that we were doing. And that evolved. So I know you love storytelling, Curtis. The whole reason you wanted to do this podcast was to do some storytelling. So I thought

John Nixon (00:39.041)
yeah.

Tom Nixon (01:03.458)
This is a good story to tell because not only is it fun and it’s a hobby of mine, but I think it translates directly to why we do what we do, whether it’s podcasting or other forms of content marketing. And it’s all about identifying an audience, serving that content or serving that audience with content that they either need or want. Then things naturally happen from there. You don’t have to constantly be selling your products or pitching your wares. And so as listeners are listening in today, try to think of everything.

that we’re talking about for this fun, stupid, silly, outrock podcast and apply it to your business. And I think people will get some value out of it. What do you say, Curtis?

Curtis Hays (01:39.166)
I thought this was going to be Kenny Loggins meets Kenny Rogers. wait, that did happen. That actually did happen once. They did sing together once. So, hey, it’s not uncommon for some soft rock to meet country. So I’ve dressed the part here and I’m getting ready to get on my own boat. I don’t just have land legs. I have sea legs as well.

John Nixon (01:42.527)
you

Tom Nixon (01:44.578)
No.

Yeah.

Tom Nixon (01:50.861)
wow.

Tom Nixon (01:57.026)
That’s true.

Curtis Hays (02:07.338)
We’re headed up north here this weekend. So this is like perfect timing. I might even put some tunes on my playlist if you have some recommendations.

Tom Nixon (02:15.726)
I have a whole playlist for you. It’ll take you 13 days to get through it. Well, let’s bring on to tell the story. I thought we should have my co-conspirator, my co-host and my co-brother, who is my partner in crime in this podcast, John Nixon. Welcome to this other here podcast called Bullhorns and Bullseyes.

John Nixon (02:16.479)
Don’t ask him that.

John Nixon (02:34.227)
Yeah, also known as second rate first mate. He didn’t say that. That’s my nickname on the show. Right.

Tom Nixon (02:37.07)
That’s true. Yes. That’s right. And in life. Well, let’s get, I guess, right down to the storytelling, Curtis. So the whole thing starts probably, John. I don’t know. It predates the podcast. But what would you say? Like 10 years ago that you and I both sort of independently discovered this thing called the Yacht Rock and fell in love with it. I remember I sent you a text. No, you sent me a text that said, do you know what Yacht Rock is? And if so,

Do you like it? Do you remember that?

John Nixon (03:08.051)
Yeah, I do, vaguely. I don’t remember when it was. I remember I started slowly into the road probably in 2011 when I decided that it was time to forego looking forward into finding better music that I might like and just decided, you know what, there’s probably stuff along the way that I missed first time around and I am going to become a vinyl collector again and I’m going to buy records from the past that

I never really paid attention to. And the first one I did of that, as we’ve mentioned on the show, was Pablo Cruz, Worlds Away. So that was where it started, and that was probably 2015 or so. So it probably even predates our conversations.

Tom Nixon (03:50.828)
Yeah. And then that so I’m my origin story is what we hold it in episode Curtis on origin story. So maybe you have one that you could tell which is Tom hit me over the hammer multiple times telling me to get in the out Rock. So I find listen to it. But my origin story was I was sitting at a pool on a summer day and my friend is playing all these songs that I forgot that I forgot about like, my God, who is it? John Ford, Coleen, what England Dan? I really want to see you tonight. I’m like

John Nixon (03:58.451)
Mm-hmm.

John Nixon (04:20.319)
You

Tom Nixon (04:20.536)
What do call this? And he’s like, yacht rock, dude. And I’m like, sweet. Well, I think I’d love it. And then the following spring, I was down at spring break in Florida and my wife’s in the shower getting ready. I’m like, what do I want to listen to? I look out, I see the ocean, I see the sun, I see the beach. I’m like, yeah, rock. And then I got fully immersed from there on out. So Curtis, do you even have a yacht rock origin story?

John Nixon (04:38.579)
Ha!

Curtis Hays (04:46.162)
You you would be my origin story. I had no clue what it was until you told me you had a podcast about it and You similarly though. I knew the music. I just didn’t know it was called. Yeah rock and I had no clue. was actually as big as it is. there’s a documentary on HBO about it now I hear you guys provided a little insight to though. I think you guys should have been on the documentary itself

Tom Nixon (04:47.022)
Yeah

John Nixon (04:47.933)
Bye.

Tom Nixon (05:13.878)
Yeah.

Curtis Hays (05:14.256)
I you got hosed a little bit there. But, you know, for me, as you’ve talked about some of the songs, I’m like, I know that song, I know that song. And I think we even sang a song together, a few verses on one of the podcasts before. But wasn’t there… So your timing, does it line up to… I’ve seen on YouTube these guys who started making fun of the artists in the time period. I think that’s part of the documentary, maybe a little bit too.

Tom Nixon (05:28.961)
Yes.

Curtis Hays (05:43.408)
And that’s kind of where they sort of what helped explode it as well. Or they coined the term. Yeah.

John Nixon (05:47.84)
They coined the term initially. They came up with it. They sort of started the connecting of the dots. And they unfortunately, in my opinion, turned it into, like you say, some sort of clowning of those artists and shticking of those artists. And I think unbeknownst to them, a few years later, they couldn’t understand why suddenly this term yacht rock was getting traction again, even though they invented it. so I think to a degree, they tried to sort of put the toothpaste back in the tube and say, no, no, we were just.

celebrating these artists and you know we love them all and I think they wanted to be friendly with those artists again but yeah they coined it in 2005 but I bet you it didn’t really start to take off until 2016-17 something like that

Tom Nixon (06:35.468)
Yeah. And it’s had a more recent explosion since then. with around that time, so that John and I are getting into yacht rock, maybe, I don’t know, a couple of years later, John is a professional musician, as you might tell from his background. His are not merely props like they are for me, but so he had various projects going on. And one day, John, you decided that not only was there something called modern yacht, but that maybe you wanted to make modern yacht rock music. What happened there?

John Nixon (06:50.803)
Thank

John Nixon (07:04.415)
I was recording music with some guys that I was working with and we had a group called the overnighters which kind of was 60s 70s soul oriented. Two of us in that group had it kept bringing songs forward that we wanted to either cover or originals that we wanted to do that maybe sounded a little bit too mid 70s late 70s it kept feeling like it wasn’t really a genre fit.

And so the other guy that I became Page 99 with suggested, why don’t we just not force these into here and let’s start something new. And that’s when I launched the band named Page 99, which was sort of done in the style of Steely Dan in the sense that there isn’t a full band around it. It’s really me as the creative force and a few other key cogs. But that’s how it started, was it just didn’t fit what else we were doing.

Tom Nixon (08:01.996)
Yeah. And so now eventually then you’re going to start recording music and this is when it starts translating into the listener as the owner of the business or a marketer. So now we have a product to sell Curtis in essence, right? I’ve got page 99 music. I want to get it out to the masses. Hopefully make some revenue, certainly build an audience. But no one’s ever heard of page 99 before because it didn’t exist. So this is like a startup saying, all right, who’s my audience and how do I go find him? And how do I track them to us?

Curtis Hays (08:27.21)
Right.

Tom Nixon (08:31.694)
Sound familiar?

Curtis Hays (08:33.214)
It does sound very familiar, something many of our clients partake in. Come up with an idea. Maybe somebody else has done that idea, maybe they haven’t, but you got to figure out how to get it to the masses and help people understand what it is, what it’s all about.

John Nixon (08:38.653)
Hmm.

Tom Nixon (08:48.738)
Yep. And there were other bands that had done this. John discovered a band called Steak House that was very eerily similar to Steely Dan. fact, it thought, you know, aha, if they can do it and they had a following that I can do it, you know, this sort of like justified your rationale. Wasn’t it? John is like validated the idea. This is something that other people startups and, you know, go to market strategists have to figure out.

John Nixon (09:00.351)
They did.

John Nixon (09:07.614)
Yeah.

By the time I heard of them, they probably had three albums out. So they had, I’d been doing it a while, they had amassed an audience. They’re out of Sweden, which happens to be a hotbed for this kind of stuff. But I thought, okay, there is a place for it. I have a passion for doing it. And if nobody listens, I’m okay. ideally you want people to hear what you’re doing. what was the number I read?

Every day on Spotify, I think this was Rick Beato, every day on Spotify is 100,000 new songs. mean, how do you compete with getting seen amongst 100,000 songs a day? You know?

Curtis Hays (09:47.808)
That’s crazy.

Tom Nixon (09:54.573)
Yeah. Well, that’s again, a good segue. So before I put on my marketing cap to this whole idea, I actually had a dream, Curtis, one night where I dreamed a yacht rock song and I could hear the melody in my head. I was on a beach. There was this skinny burnout with long hair and a handlebar mustache wearing cutoff jean shorts and no shirts sitting on the beach. And he had a little transistor radio on his blanket. And I heard the song in my head and I woke up and I’m like, what is that song?

John Nixon (10:06.271)
Yeah, that’s right.

John Nixon (10:16.211)
Thank you.

Tom Nixon (10:24.782)
trying to place it. And I finally dawns on me that isn’t a song that exists. That’s a song that just came to me. So I decided to contact John. like, I know you’re doing this yacht rock project. I think I have a song if you want it, you know, I could rough it out. And John said, well, rough it out, but I’m pretty far along in this project. But why don’t you record it? Why don’t you just create your own project? And so my project, August Red was born. See all this pitching that we’re going on with shameless plugs.

John Nixon (10:47.039)
Right.

Curtis Hays (10:48.648)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (10:49.438)
So now I had a product. Now I had skin in the game. That’s why I think it’s relevant. It’s like, you know, I could have wished John well, but I had skin in the game and I’m thinking, all right, where is the audience for this? Who would love this stuff? There’s other people like me out there who fell in love with the outrock and are mad about it. Like, where are those people? And it turns out that there’s a Facebook group called Yacht Rock and there’s thousands of avid listeners. I’m like, that’s who we need to go after. So I had the ideal client persona, right? Like

John Nixon (10:57.257)
How do we do this?

John Nixon (11:14.206)
Hmm.

Tom Nixon (11:18.956)
somebody who’s loved the outrock, somebody who’s active online. That’s who we need to go after. Probably somebody in their late forties to early sixties. So he honed in on and at the time I quit.

Curtis Hays (11:28.874)
You found community though. That’s the key is you found the community. You can create one or you go and figure out where they already are. Yeah.

Tom Nixon (11:32.664)
Yes.

Tom Nixon (11:36.556)
Yeah. So if we were to build up an audience for August Red from scratch, that would take forever. And I don’t know if I could even do it, right? But if there’s

John Nixon (11:41.759)
Well, even the YAROC group was small when we started. Remember that? Okay.

Tom Nixon (11:47.011)
Yes, we’ll put a pin in that as we say in our podcast. So, there was 5000 members in this group and like, alright, good enough. That’s like you said, a community like how do we get our word out there though? If we just start plugging our, know, hey, buy my music. Nobody’s going to care but I thought if we could serve them content about a topic of which they’re already firmly devoted, maybe they’ll tune in and then once we get them to tune in, then maybe we can convert some of them to

John Nixon (12:01.182)
now.

Tom Nixon (12:15.648)
listeners than fans and then maybe customers going back to that whole customer journey. Curtis again. So I’m familiar.

Curtis Hays (12:21.149)
Mm-hmm.

John Nixon (12:24.211)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (12:24.436)
Get them to know, and trust you.

Tom Nixon (12:26.58)
Exactly. So I sent John another text or this is the guess. John sent me the original text on a rainy Saturday and I said podcast all about Yacht Rock. Be afraid. Be very afraid. If you must have wondered what the heck are you talking about? Yeah.

John Nixon (12:41.16)
Ha ha!

John Nixon (12:47.699)
Yeah, I had no idea. I honestly had no idea. And you started to explain your wild idea to me. And I still was very skeptical about it until you kind of made the point that, one thing can feed the other. by being a Yacht Rock artist, talking on a Yacht Rock podcast made you an authority. But also by having this podcast, it gave us the opportunity to, you know,

tell other people about our stuff. it gave me an opportunity to say, here was what my pedigree is, I went to music school, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So people understood that I was doing something legit, not like the clowning of the original Yacht Rock guys.

Tom Nixon (13:33.327)
Right. Yep. Exactly. So Curtis, as you might have guessed, so I didn’t say, come over tomorrow. We’ll turn on some mics and we’ll just start recording and we’ll see what happens. I wanted to build the idea. So I actually spent that rainy Saturday writing the creative brief. What’s the, who’s the audience? What are the topics? What are we trying to achieve? What’s the voice? Are we funny? Are we serious? Are we nerdy? Are we clowning on the artists? What are we?

John Nixon (13:52.447)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Nixon (14:02.572)
And then started to map out a calendar of these are the first 10 episodes. And I actually wrote that if we could get in our dream world, the guest, that other band that validated John’s idea, they were called state cows. We’re going to shoot for the stars and we’re going to get state cows by golly my gum. And so that’s what we did. I sent that to John and he’s like, I think this makes sense. And then we started mapping out the conversation. So haven’t we seen some of our friends and peers just like

John Nixon (14:15.231)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (14:31.5)
dive in and just start recording and maybe buying equipment and then six months later, whatever happened to that podcast of yours?

Curtis, that was for you. Yeah. Yeah.

Curtis Hays (14:41.172)
that’s a question for me.

John Nixon (14:41.919)
Can you repeat the question?

Curtis Hays (14:45.366)
Rephrase it, because I thought that was a question for John.

Tom Nixon (14:48.224)
No, it’s just the whole process of why you would map out a plan and a strategy as opposed to just dive in, open up a mic. Yeah.

Curtis Hays (14:54.666)
Just going to do it? 100%. Yeah, I mean, you need to do those things like figure out who your target audience is, figure out what you’re going to talk about. And I think you can certainly start small if you need to, just like we did. Riverside is a few bucks a month. It now does all the editing for you. It’s super simple to use, but it’s all really just about creating content. But before you can create that content, you do need…

fundamentally some sort of strategy. And I guess, did you know to go and do that right off the bat? Had you worked on other podcasts or was the Yacht Rock podcast your first? Because now I know you’ve been involved in like a dozen.

Tom Nixon (15:35.459)
No, cause yeah, I had started, it had found some success for clients building a, let’s call it a podcast consulting practice, at my former agency and they were all super niche B2B. I created one podcast for a guy talk about saying, I don’t know if anyone will listen, John. He actually told me, I don’t care if anyone listens. I have 20 customers. I just need to get them onto my podcast, have a conversation with them. And in the first month he went from writing six deals a month.

to 18 deals a month. The only thing he did different was this podcast. I’m thinking every time I’ve tried this, it works. And it’s not like you’re trying to create this huge revenue generator like a Joe Rogan with millions of listeners and you’re selling ads to Coca-Cola. We make very little money. Yes, we’ve tried to monetize it. We have some supporters that support us monthly. We have advertisers. We sell merch, but none of that amounts to a whole lot.

John Nixon (16:18.441)
Mm-mm.

Tom Nixon (16:31.106)
Then again, going back to mapping out strategies on that wasn’t really, I never said, I have an idea to get rich. Right? I said, I have an idea to maybe get your music out in front of people.

John Nixon (16:39.015)
You kept sending me dollar emojis though. No, but seriously. Yeah. You had a second part of the target or second part of the strategy was inviting people on that would then go and share our podcast out because they were excited to be on a show. So they were maybe a level above us at the time, but still they were trying to get seen. So, what was the first one you got right? Miami, which is a radio station down in Miami online.

Tom Nixon (16:41.614)
Yeah, well my finger got stuck on it.

Tom Nixon (17:02.498)
Yeah, we started.

John Nixon (17:07.191)
and they started sharing it around. of course, now they syndicate our podcast on their station. So, you know, bring people on that wanna then share it around. They help you share it.

Tom Nixon (17:18.818)
Yeah, we.

Curtis Hays (17:18.9)
Well, and Tom, what did Mark Schaeffer say about storytelling the other day? It’s great if you could tell your stories, but it’s even better if other people do the storytelling for you.

John Nixon (17:28.031)
Have I said that a lot? Yeah.

Tom Nixon (17:29.006)
Yeah, he actually riffed it ripped on our our brand a little bit. He said, don’t just grab a bullhorn. He said, sorry guys, but hand the bullhorn to somebody else. Right. And let them tell your story. So we did that. We also invited the I wanted to get to who started this Facebook group with 5000 members. Maybe he should be a guest. What’s he going to do once he’s on the podcast? Right. Blast it out to the 5000 members. And so. Yeah.

Curtis Hays (17:40.532)
Yep, that’s the quote.

John Nixon (17:48.511)
That’s right.

John Nixon (17:54.335)
And he syndicates us now too.

Tom Nixon (17:57.007)
And so we started creating this this platform. These listeners started coming to us. And then what was interesting along the way is, you know, I hesitate to use the word influencer about myself. But in this community, we became like a center of influence. We got branded the Yacht Rock Brothers. People are like they knew us by name. The Nixon Brothers are the Yacht Brothers and the Bald Avengers. Yeah, one guy calls us that. Yeah, one guy.

John Nixon (18:09.983)
Mmm.

John Nixon (18:16.392)
Mm-hmm.

or the Bald Avengers.

John Nixon (18:24.229)
One guy. Yeah.

Tom Nixon (18:26.696)
And and it hasn’t caught on which is cool. but then this thing really started to snowball going back to like should we try to build our own audience or can we tap into an existing audience? The 5000 members that were part of that Yacht Rock Facebook group are now what’s the latest number you saw John? How many members in that group?

John Nixon (18:29.203)
Yeah.

John Nixon (18:45.823)
180,000 something like that.

Tom Nixon (18:48.046)
180,000. We are early sort of adopters and early voices and now we don’t have to get 180,000 people to follow our Facebook page. We have 180,000 captive listeners already and so as that grew, the numbers on our podcast grew as well, which then enabled us to get steak cows as a guest. They came on gladly because now we have an audience, but the best thing is we’re serving great content up.

John Nixon (18:49.715)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (19:16.878)
you know, red meat to the audience again saying you want to get to know this artist where we’re to interview them on our show and then you’ll get to learn all about them. And so now this is getting some momentum where it’s probably chapter two, right? Yeah.

John Nixon (19:30.931)
Yeah, that was pretty early on that they came on though. I think they saw the wisdom in it, but it’s also grown my music, you know, the amount that I’ve been able to sell and stream. I’ve seen that go up a lot.

Tom Nixon (19:41.913)
Well, yeah. And so by the time the album comes out, we’ve already probably several episodes in, and now you’ve done the thing. You’ve tapped into the audience. You’ve nurtured some of them as fans as part of your tribe now. And then you’ve, like you said, you’ve legitimized yourself as not just some fly by night guy trying to figure out how to make you out.

John Nixon (20:00.959)
Yeah, and there’s a lot of spoof acts out there doing yacht rock cover bands mostly, and I wanted to separate myself from them. So that allowed me to do it as well.

Tom Nixon (20:06.552)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (20:09.473)
Do you guys find, I think one of the biggest things I’ve found with the podcast thing though is the amount I’ve learned in that process. So what’s your evolution been as an artist since doing the podcast and interviewing all these other artists?

John Nixon (20:25.245)
man, we pick their brains all the time and I put all that stuff into action. know, when we’ve been able to talk, I don’t know if I’m able to reveal time, we had Kenny Loggins on and that was probably our biggest get. But being able to tap into what they know and we just, we have to study in order to do things. We do episodes about techniques, we do episodes about history of artists, we have to study all this stuff. And so that’s all knowledge we can use.

Tom Nixon (20:51.884)
Yeah, that evolution started. I’ll never forget the day I got an email from a publicist and they were pitching me to come on the podcast and this is a band called Firefall that had many albums, many hits in the 70s and early 80s and I’m like what they’re gonna they’re pitching me to come on my podcast like I would have never dreamt of reaching out to them because I was afraid of the rejection that was obviously gonna come but then

They came on and why did they come on? Because they’re like, here’s a conduit to the same audience that they wanted to serve, right? They wanted to get the yacht rock faithful back buying their albums again on vinyl and stuff. so that

John Nixon (21:31.411)
Yeah, the same was true for Cross, the label.

Tom Nixon (21:34.457)
Christopher. Yep. Yeah. So then we got pitched by Orleans Christopher cross. They approached us and they wanted to see if they could buy sponsorship on our podcast because some new label had acquired Christopher cross’s entire catalog and they were reissuing it and doing fun ways. And so not only were they pitching us, they were like, can we buy my way under your show? Okay, right. And then ultimately Kenny logins. But so

John Nixon (21:57.472)
Mm-hmm. Sure.

Tom Nixon (22:03.614)
And you know, we’ve interviewed members of Toto. I know everyone knows that the guitar player from the Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan. What’s that? Yeah. Chicago. Yeah. One of the lead singers of Chicago. So and then get this Curtis. So not only are we meeting these people, but John’s came up with another. Well, I came up with all the other brilliant ideas. John finally contributed one and said, what if what if I got Bill Champlin to sing on one of my records?

John Nixon (22:08.265)
Chicago.

Chicago, Pilcher Amplin.

John Nixon (22:25.149)
yeah?

John Nixon (22:28.575)
yeah.

Tom Nixon (22:29.886)
So how did that thought process go? remember that’s another text. You said, hey, how much would you spend investing on your business or that?

John Nixon (22:36.859)
Yeah, a flyer, man. I was thinking about a guitar player that I wanted to have play on my stuff and he wouldn’t answer my texts. So I thought, well, I’m covering a song that Bill Champlin did originally with a group called Sons of Champlin. said, well, maybe I had a beer or two in me. I said, I’ll send him a message and see if he wants to sing on it. And yeah, he came back with an offer that I was willing to pay. It was worth the investment.

Tom Nixon (23:05.494)
It’s so imagine these yacht rock nerds here in bill Champlin, who is there held up like on the Mount Rushmore singing on a new yacht rock record. And they’re like, I gotta have it. Right. Further legitimizing not only his, his, you know, rightful place in the yacht rock community, but then bringing on a whole new audience. And back to your point, John, like, who was it? I think it was Steve Baccaro, who was the keyboard player in, Toto.

John Nixon (23:11.912)
Yeah, he is.

John Nixon (23:29.435)
Hmm. Totally.

Tom Nixon (23:32.428)
We interviewed him and he put it on his fan page, which had like, you know, 80,000 fans following him on Facebook. And the whole thing just blew up and went wild. So telling the story, not to brag and not to have fun. Well, I mean, it’ll have fun, but Curtis help us connect the dots here for your clients. What is applicable to what we just told you?

John Nixon (23:46.758)
I’m having fun.

Curtis Hays (23:52.983)
Well, first I got to ask, is Chicago then YAROC? Are they in that genre?

Tom Nixon (23:56.096)
No!

John Nixon (23:58.464)
First things first, yeah. Not really. Bill is by himself, is a solo artist.

Curtis Hays (24:01.399)
Okay.

Tom Nixon (24:04.29)
So just the reason you, what’s that? Peter’s Tara.

Curtis Hays (24:04.555)
Peter Cetera.

John Nixon (24:06.687)
No. Bill Champlin is his name. He had solo work. He’s close friends with David Foster and, all those cats out there. So he is considered Yacht Rock.

Curtis Hays (24:08.599)
Who is Esolo? Bill Champlin. Okay.

Okay.

Gotcha. I was a big fan when Karate Kid came out. I think Chicago was a big part of that album, maybe another album too. like, because a lot of this is like, it takes me a lot of this music takes me back to obviously early 80s, my childhood, a lot of movies and just nostalgia. I had older siblings, you know, so they were listening to this kind of music. So it’s like flashbacks as you guys throw out names and songs and stuff like that, you know.

Tom Nixon (24:19.8)
But you asked a dreaded question.

John Nixon (24:46.121)
Yeah

Tom Nixon (24:48.152)
So you’re stuck in stage two of the five stages of yacht rock that I coined with John’s help. So stage one is discovery. So you, when I kept mentioning yacht rock, like, is, what is yacht rock? And I at the pool in John before being right. so stage two is then, nostalgia. That’s where you’re stuck. Like, it brings back so many good memories somewhere along the way. When you’re listening stage three hits you, which you’re like, wait a minute. This is actually

Curtis Hays (24:53.26)
let’s go through those real quick. Yeah.

Tom Nixon (25:17.836)
really, really good music. It’s complex. It’s sophisticated. It’s well produced. It’s well written. my gosh. Which leads you to stage four, which is immersion, which is you’ll go through a period if you get there where you will listen to nothing but rock exclusively almost all day because you can’t get enough of it. It John’s. Like you said, we’re now discovering old music, new music to us. That’s actually old. And it was hiding beneath the surface all along.

John Nixon (25:41.023)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Nixon (25:45.239)
stage five than is despair because you realize that the music that you’ve been listening to only existed in the past right so they can’t make more of something that’s 30 40 years old and then you’re gonna run out but you gotta push past stage five because there’s a hidden stage six which is rediscovery or exploration and that’s what John was doing where you’re going out you’re trying to find more whether it’s existed in the past or there’s artists now

John Nixon (25:49.171)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (25:58.07)
you

John Nixon (26:07.966)
you

Tom Nixon (26:13.878)
John is one of probably 30 or 40 artists that are doing modern yacht today. mean, I’m just guessing what the number, what would you think that number is?

Curtis Hays (26:19.959)
Sounds like the funnel. Sounds like you got a framework here, Tom.

Tom Nixon (26:23.68)
Yes, which gets back to again. So connect the dots for our listeners who know nothing and care nothing of Yacht Rock. mean, I see what I did what I did because it’s sort of in my DNA to say, okay, hold on. We’re not just going to fling a product out there. We need to figure out who’s the audience, right? How do we get to them? What do they care about? You know, it’s not going back to flipping the funnel. Maybe this is a good segue to you, Curtis. It wasn’t our why. Our why was we wanted to sell Yacht Rock or we wanted to get noticed.

It was our audience that’s why, which is, man, we love this stuff and we can’t find enough of it.

Curtis Hays (26:57.143)
Yep, yep. I think the other thing I’ll take away, I know I’m not directly answering your question, but this is a realization I’m coming to recently is we’re starting to get more esteemed guests. We’ve got some New York Times bestsellers and some people actually teach marketing and those types of things who are coming on the podcast. And those guests don’t come on unless you ask. It’s like, you have to make this happen. It’s not going to happen for you.

John Nixon (27:21.043)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (27:25.333)
Right? So it’s one thing to step into it, start creating content. If you’re going to do a podcast, you know, start getting guests on, but you’re not just going to start up a podcast, throw it out there and people are to be calling you and emailing you saying, I got to be on your podcast. You’ve got to go out and ask them. And what I’ve come to find is most people love it. They’d be happy to. So.

Tom Nixon (27:45.528)
Yeah. Yep.

John Nixon (27:46.439)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (27:48.51)
you know, you got to step into it and actually be proactive about it. And I think what’s been really helpful for us is to bring Claudia into the mix, because that’s a lot of work and just say, you know, okay, let’s identify the people we want to ask and let’s have somebody who can do the work to set those things up for us. And that’s been huge. I mean, we’ve gained a lot of momentum in the last couple months just by bringing her into the mix.

Tom Nixon (28:11.31)
That momentum is important and sticking to it can be difficult at times because the returns aren’t always immediate and obvious. But we had a conversation with John, why don’t you tell the story of how we got to Tony Guerrero and what that led to, to Curtis’s point.

John Nixon (28:28.035)
okay. Well, so I was working on a song for Page 99 track and I wanted it was a nice mellow tune. I wanted to have, I thought trumpet solo at the end or something jazzy and I’d have enough songs that have sax on them. So I thought what else could it be trumpet? So I just went to one of those online sites where you can hire freelancers. Sound Better was one of them. So it’s kind like a fiverr kind of thing. And I found this guy and he had the sound I was looking for and

He even went so far as to say, you’re looking for a screaming trumpet player, which is probably what most people are looking for, he said, I’m not that, I’m more like a mellow flugelhorn player in the style of Chuck Mangione. And I thought, that’s exactly what I want. I hired the guy, he does absolute perfect work. He said it was the second take that he did, that, I wanted it to be just natural and not overly thought out. Anyway, it was so good, I said,

I gotta find out more about this guy. can’t be this good and just not be known. So I go and I find, of course, he’s got a big Wikipedia page. has been on, I think he’s got 12 records of his own. He’s been on like 20 different albums from people like Brian Wilson and Jane Lynch and Wayne Newton and…

He’s just he’s huge. He plays in like the Grammy Orchestra bands when they have the live music at the Grammys. He does. He ran the music at Saddleback Church out in California. This guy was a big deal. So now that he’s played on my record, I just sent him an email and said, hey, remember doing this? We’d love to have you on the podcast and explained to him what our podcast is. And the beauty of it is I was going to say you don’t have to have, you know, think about

10 great guests. If you get one or two, right, Tom? Excuse me, I’m getting dry here. If you get one or two, then we were able to say, look, we got Kenny Loggins and we got Mark Jordan on, you know, it legitimizes it. We didn’t need to have 10 to show. So Tony’s like, yeah, I’ll come on, that’d be great. And we had a wonderful conversation, he’s great.

Tom Nixon (30:37.389)
Right.

Tom Nixon (30:43.532)
Yes. So, in the course of the conversation, back to your point, so through this, the momentum and the snowballing, how things, one thing leads to another, we’re just near the end of the conversation. He’s like, I got a Yacht Rock connection for you. He’s like, yeah, I’m really good friends with David Pak. David Pak is like my, what, one of my top five dream guests, but someone that I would never reach out to like Kenny Loggins because why would they come on my podcast? And

John Nixon (31:01.279)
comes hero.

Curtis Hays (31:10.475)
But you got to stop thinking like that, Tom. That’s what I’m saying. You got to… Yeah.

Tom Nixon (31:12.46)
Well, exactly. So for those of you don’t know, he was the original lead singer in the band at Brogia. They had some quote unquote yacht rock hits. They were called yacht rock at the time, but just a fantabulous singer. And he said, you know, he might want to come on the show. Why don’t I ask him? And so we get about 30 minutes after hanging up with him and we get a text that says they would be happy to come on the show. Here’s his booking agent. So there you go. So here’s what I guess going back to the takeaways for the listeners, because there’s anyone still listening.

Hi mom. is it doesn’t have to be a podcast. So this is not a, an episode that tried to convince you into doing podcasting. Although I absolutely, I’m a big believer in it. It’s if you follow this roadmap, if you want to gain favor, get the attention, establish authority of an audience, two things. One is you don’t have to start by building your audience from scratch. think so find out where the community is. There’s probably people who already talk about like.

John Nixon (31:42.879)
Hello.

Tom Nixon (32:12.024)
follow the subject matter of which you are going to be the expert. Two is develop a content strategy that is not about you and what you sell, but more about that audience and what they already love. Because then anything you ever do is never going to feel like selling. And then three, just keep whatever that strategy is, keep consistent, keep at it. And over time, you’re going to go from no offense to state cows, but you’ll go from state cows level to Kenny Loggins level and

whatever that means for your business, you want to be there when that group of 5,000 gets to 180,000. You don’t want to try to get into the group of 180,000 and kick in a door where the rooms are always super crowded already. And you’re just one small voice. So what did I leave out? Curtis, anything that resonate with you?

Curtis Hays (32:58.721)
Well, I think a podcast too, just specifically talking about podcasts is it is gives you the ability to create a mass amount of content that you can take a 30, 35 minute episode and you can turn that into a newsletter. You can turn that episode into a bunch of shorts. You turn it into a blog post. it could be just other, you know, social posts and those types of things. So if you look at the

Tom Nixon (33:18.006)
video.

Curtis Hays (33:28.571)
If you feel like creating a podcast seems to be overwhelming, just think about how overwhelming it is to create content. And that this is the ability to have do one production. Basically, the production value is what I’m getting to the production value of the podcast can turn into so much more. And you have all this content to use from a single single episode. And that content, much of it lives in perpetuity. It’s

John Nixon (33:56.649)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (33:57.366)
on Spotify, it’s on YouTube, people can discover that content years down the road and come in versus just being in your feed for two or three weeks, like it might be on LinkedIn or Facebook or wherever and then it’s gone. So I think that’s the really cool thing about podcasting and I was not a fan, I would say. I was probably anti-podcast for a long time. And then…

Tom Nixon (34:11.746)
Yeah, that’s a great point.

Curtis Hays (34:26.709)
was coming around to it before we started ours. And that’s why when you said, Hey, let’s, let’s do a podcast. It’s like, you know what? We probably should this, this, I thought it was a fad and it sort of went away for a little bit and then came back. And it’s like, no, this is here to stay for sure. And as we’ve talked about before, it’s one of those mediums that AI can’t really touch. It, it, it can pretend it can touch.

but it truly can’t do the personal experiences and storytelling and those types of things like we’re doing today.

Tom Nixon (35:00.142)
Exactly. It’s real people. the one plug I will make from podcasting, other than echoing everything that you just said is what other form of medium do you have the potential to get the undivided attention of people in your audience for 30 to 35 minutes? You can’t even do that for 30 to 35 seconds in most forms of media. But if you get if you’re truly serving up content that serves an audience is already a fan of something that you will have their undivided attention. And we didn’t spend 35. We hardly ever plug our stuff, do we, John?

John Nixon (35:17.055)
you

Tom Nixon (35:29.656)
I mean, we probably don’t do a good enough job of it, but people find it.

John Nixon (35:32.999)
Yeah, that would probably be guilty of not doing it enough. And it’s easier than it seems because, you know, the equipment is minor. Like you said, Curtis, you know, especially with a platform like this. then, you know, all we did was seemingly follow the next logical step. know, Tom had it mapped out in his head, but some things just came away and we said, OK, well, that appears to be next. And we just went with what was next. It wasn’t we had this five year strategy we had to follow, you know, by rote.

Tom Nixon (35:59.407)
Right? No, you do that. I think the creative brief and the early content calendar to get the ball rolling. Curtis, we found the same thing. And then we’re sort of like you hit your stride in a it gets a lot easier because people start contacting you and we’re getting pitched for people to want to come on our podcast now, correct? But you could keep it somewhat fluid and it can be easier than some people make it out to me. And I think like that escape velocity sometimes freaks people out. Like, do I have time for all this? Do I have the expertise for all this? And if you don’t, you can find somebody who does. That’s for sure.

John Nixon (36:05.043)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (36:29.846)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Nixon (36:31.266)
All right. Well, final question or thought, Curtis.

Curtis Hays (36:34.717)
Well, you guys said you don’t really pitch your albums on your own podcast. So I have an idea. You know, we have some silly track that’s at the beginning and end of our podcast. Could we take one of your tracks or maybe one of yours, Tom’s from your album and one of you, John and bumper? The our episode.

John Nixon (36:55.551)
Absolutely, as far as I’m concerned.

Tom Nixon (36:56.718)
Yes, alright. OK, well flip a coin to see who gets the intro and who gets the outro, because I’m afraid at the outro everyone’s going to be like, tune this out. Yes, I have just the thing. John, you pick a song from your catalog and send it over. But yeah, good idea. So I guess we should pitch it again. Then the podcast is out of the main. So just out of the main dot com or look it up on podcasting platforms. We have a YouTube channel as well.

Curtis Hays (36:58.251)
Maybe we should do that. What do you think?

Curtis Hays (37:22.552)
You didn’t tell us where that came from though, out of the main. I asked that question in the beginning.

John Nixon (37:25.207)
yeah?

Tom Nixon (37:25.888)
Well, so like most products and brands, we had to go through a rebrand along the way. we were originally the yacht rock podcast. Couple problems with that eventually was, we did that on purpose. Like I said, I wanted people to know what this was. It’s clearly a podcast and we’re going to talk about yacht rock out of the main would have been like, Hey, what is, I’m trying to figure out what the, don’t even understand it. Right. So, but I wanted to make it super obvious to the audience. We were trying to curry favor with it. We are for them. So, but once we matured,

Not only did we decide we didn’t want to focus exclusively on just what’s technically yacht rock, because that shoe horns you in. And there’s all sorts of adjacent types of music that we love for all the same reasons that might have literally nothing to do with yacht rock. So we wanted to sort of uncouple ourselves from specifically yacht rock. Two is you mentioned those founders, the people who invented the term, they had originally for a long

number of years had a podcast where they would go and they they established the criteria for what is and what is it? Yacht Rock. So when you asked the Chicago Yacht Rock, I had to cringe because this creates more divorces and more inner, you know, country warfare than anything else. Maybe religion accepting, deciding if things are. Yeah, it was called the Yacht or Yacht. I don’t know what it was called back then, but when I did the research, that’s what it is not. That’s what it is now. The Yacht or Yacht podcast. But when I

John Nixon (38:28.905)
See you.

Curtis Hays (38:39.095)
Like hot or not, it was yad or not.

John Nixon (38:40.573)
Yeah, pretty much. Yeah.

John Nixon (38:45.055)
Yeah.

Curtis Hays (38:45.526)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (38:46.286)
When I was trying to figure out what the brand for us was going to be, I looked up, is there a thing called the Yacht Rock podcast? And that had been dormant. And so was able to get the URL, Yacht Rock podcast.com. I was able to get the Facebook handle, the Twitter handle. I’m like, all right, this is Greenfield. Well, eventually they came back and they wanted to establish their podcast again. And so I was like, hey, they did ask to buy our domain. Yeah, we do. We do. We still own the domain, which is for sale.

John Nixon (38:57.791)
you can have.

Curtis Hays (39:03.413)
And you sold that to them for a hundred grand.

John Nixon (39:05.375)
That was the price I put on it though.

Tom Nixon (39:15.502)
But yeah, so we’re like, we need to rebrand and this is one of my favorite things to do is come up with brand names and puns. If I can do it at the same time. Awesome. And out of the main just hit me because for one part of what we love about this music is that it has been out of the mainstream for so long and it’s being rediscovered. Well, it just so happens that the main is a nickname for what? The ocean. The seas. So we were came from the sea, came from the yacht rock world, which we are now coming out of.

John Nixon (39:38.175)
I yes.

Tom Nixon (39:45.164)
which led to the tagline, Born at Sea, Raised on Radio. So that helped us emerge. It It solved a lot of problems. We were no longer confusing ourselves with the founders of the term, and we were able to now because now we do episodes on ELO. We’ve done episodes on Boston, right? And so we don’t have to be technically out.

John Nixon (40:00.297)
you

Curtis Hays (40:05.345)
Right. That’s cool.

Tom Nixon (40:07.97)
All right. Anyone got a final thought or final question, Curtis? If not.

John Nixon (40:13.087)
Well, I was gonna say what you were saying, Tom. The funny thing is that we had gotten all we needed out of the term yacht rock. We’d squeezed everything out of that stone by the time they came along, didn’t want us using it anymore, so.

Tom Nixon (40:25.218)
Well, risk of going too long there, but that’s an important part because the whole reason it worked at the beginning is we were willing to niche down to not just try to serve all music lovers, even though that’s who we are. And this is my other piece of advice. Niche down as small as you can until the point where it’s almost painful for you to niche down any further because you are going to get better immersion with a more engaged audience than you will for trying to serve the masses. So that is my final thought.

John Nixon (40:37.631)
There’s a lot doing that.

Tom Nixon (40:54.338)
I’m going to turn it back to my co-host, co-brother, co-everything, co-second-rate first mate. Do you know, Curtis, how to end a podcast that’s all about Yacht Rock? We end all of our episodes with two words in what are they, John?

John Nixon (41:10.377)
Ahoi Ploi.