We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Aaron Schilb. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Aaron below.

Hi Aaron, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

I started my business, Nashville Tour Stop, by accident actually. In 2018 I was performing in a band at a bar in the southern part of Nashville, Tennessee and the owners, fans of the band, asked us to book a weekly ‘opening act’ for each performance but wanted it to be a “show” of some variety. After brainstorming names, we settled on Nashville Tour Stop, since it sounded just generic enough to be able to work with anyone without relying on a single performer or band as the opening act.

Not long after it’s inception, the band broke up and its pieces were divided amongst the members, and I found myself with this thing called Nashville Tour Stop.

I rebranded the look and mission of the company and began working with multiple local concert venues in order to provide performance opportunities to songwriters who may not be able to get booked themselves. It was roughly nine months after the first Nashville Tour Stop show that word of mouth had spread and our shows were becoming quite popular that I was ~fired~ from my daytime job and I was able to bridge the gap between a regular 9-5pm job and working for myself.

Business ownership is always a mix of emotions ranging from pure joy, excitement, a dash of existential dread, and terror!

Despite the hardships, we were serving the Nashville songwriting and arts community in a way that it had not been served before. Live music has always been very single-sided from a venue’s perspective, especially in Nashville, where so many performers are hoping to play that they are all willing to perform for free just for a chance to be on stage – bars and venues have capitalized on this without offering anything in return to the songwriters.

Nashville Tour Stop’s mission early on was to create a sense of belonging and community to integrate newbies and lifelong songwriters and afford them all kinds of cool opportunities.

Nowadays we get to put on events for folks brand new to Nashville to help them get their feet wet all the way up to big sold out crowds!

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My background in the music industry started as a performer. I was given piano lessons from an early age and in middle school I began playing the guitar and writing my own music. These skills eventually put me into my first few rock bands through high school and college where my love of songwriting really developed.

After feeling like I had outgrown my hometown I set my sights on Nashville in 2017 and moved shortly after graduating from college.

Initially I had set my sights on being the artist on stage rather than working the industry from the business angle, but the level of talent in Nashville (songwriting, singing, playing instruments) is damning! Everyone is so talented that simply being “good” wasn’t good enough. I did, however, know I was better at working hard than most people so when my business began to pay my bills where my songwriting was not, I didn’t fight the shift in my life and my dream of working in the music industry didn’t end, it just evolved.

Nashville Tour Stop provides live music and entertainment booking services to hotels, bars, restaurants, and concert venues of all varieties. We work diligently to vet all of our performers and curate lineups to best fit the goals of our clients and match the performers with appropriate ambiance and atmosphere.

Finding out where a musician fits in is crucial to their success and oftentimes musicians themselves don’t have a concrete understanding of where they fit in, so we do the work for them!

I am most proud of the growth I have seen. Not in myself and Nashville Tour Stop, but the growth of the community around us. Seeing songwriters go from “this is the first song I’ve ever written” to “This is my first song to be recorded by another artist” is validating to know that the work we’re doing is working!

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

The biggest shift in my career was when I came to the realization that the dreams I had of being a “rockstar” when I was 17 were rather unrealistic. Not because of a lack of talent, but rather by my own physical limitations.

I began losing my hearing from an inner ear disorder called ‘otosclerosis’ when I was 10 years old and by my late 20’s I was completely deaf. Currently I wear a cochlear implant on my left ear and a traditional hearing aid in my right that help me hear and communicate, but severely hindered my ability to listen to and perform music.

All of this to say, when Nashville Tour Stop as a business began to take off, I was happy to have found a way to still work in the music industry even if it meant not being on stage. I can still be on stage to introduce the performers, hear the audience cheers, and watch the smiles on their faces when they’ve heard a song that speaks to them.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

Nashville Tour Stop gained brand recognition in the Spring of 2019. I would oftentimes attend other live music events and saw something missing – the names and contact information of the performers on stage. I couldn’t stay to speak to them personally so I would leave these shows loving the performer but had no way of knowing who they were.

When I rebranded the company in the Spring of 2019 I added digital assets to each location to promote the performers on in-house TV’s with their names, photos, and social media handles. It was a small offering to the performers on stage that made them feel seen and valued – none of my competitors were doing this.

Digital assets like these opened a whole new world of advertising that allows us to offering corporate sponsorship packages, ads to market our other events, and so much more.

What’s funny now is how I go to these same venues I would attend years ago and I see a cheap knockoff of my idea. I guess that’s why they say imitation is the most sincere form of flattery!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://nashvilletourstop.com/
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/nashvilletourstop
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/nashvilletourstop
• Twitter: https://instagram.com/nashtourstop