Longtime listeners of the Tom Woods Show will have noticed that I abruptly gave up on something:

You haven't heard an episode on music in a long time. That's because the download figures spoke for themselves.

So I decided: vox populi vox Dei, and I discontinued them.

But:

There are still some valuable business lessons to be learned from certain musicians, like Marillion's Steve Hogarth (whom I interviewed on episode #110), who pioneered the crowdfunding "money bomb" concept more than a decide before Ron Paul raised millions with it.

The band is somewhat niche, and not being millionaires, they told their fan base that to create their new album they needed some upfront seed money. So: we'd like you to buy the album before we even record it. We'll list you in the album sleeve as thanks.

So 14,000 people did.

On another occasion, they built a massive mailing list by telling people: there's a second record that accompanies this current release and all you have to do is ask us for it.

(Give "Afraid of Sunlight" a try, by the way. It's the first song I ever sent my wife. At first it sounds like nothing. Just wait.)

Yesterday I wrote to you about a different Steve, Steve Hackett, whom my daughter Regina and I are seeing in Orlando tomorrow night. Hackett was the original Genesis guitarist, from the period when Peter Gabriel rather than Phil Collins was the singer.

Hackett left the band nearly half a century ago. Most musicians at that point would have wound up teaching guitar at the local arts center and telling bored teenagers that "real music" had peaked in 1973.

Hackett did something smarter.

He realized he already possessed a treasure chest of assets -- music he helped create, techniques he developed, sounds he pioneered -- and he did what any savvy entrepreneur would do: he repackaged what he already had.

That’s exactly what his Genesis Revisited tours are. Sure, he has his own material, too. But he’s giving a specific, passionate audience exactly what they want: material they loved then, presented with the skill and polish of someone who understands it better than anyone else living today.

Hackett took those concerts and parlayed them into a solo career that was something of a slow burn: in 2024 his latest album of solo material hit #9 on the UK charts, and he joked to audiences that after 47 years he'd become an overnight success.

What strikes me as I write this is how many people have the equivalent of Genesis material in their own lives -- skills, experiences, knowledge, stories -- that could be repackaged into something valuable if only they knew how to turn it into a real offering.

That’s why the replay we posted yesterday resonated so much with people. We walk through, in under 30 minutes, how someone with ordinary skills and no tech background can take what they already know and turn it into:

-- a business concept,

-- a business name,

-- a lead magnet,

-- a landing page,

-- a thank-you page,

-- a welcome email sequence, and

-- a lead-generation strategy.

The same way Hackett took material he created decades ago and turned it into a thriving second career, modern technology lets you do something similar.

If you're already in business but aren't using this model, it is a massively helpful addition to your arsenal, and will help you bring in leads and sales in a more automated and hands-off way than you're probably following now.

But the replay is only up only until tomorrow. (People always assume they'll "get to it later," which in real life means never.)

Hackett will be on stage tomorrow night playing music he helped write before many of the people in the audience (myself included) were even born. There’s something satisfying about that -- the idea that your past work can keep paying dividends if you know what do to with it.

So if you’d like to see how easy this actually is, and I insist you are going to be flabbergasted, here’s the link:

https://www.tomwoods.com/30minutes

Tom Woods