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The Hookblast Podcast (available everywhere) is a weekly, ten-minute show where we discover a few new catchy songs together. I only play the hooks, so you never have to sit through an entire song if you’re not loving it. You add the ones you do love to your streaming playlists, or just subscribe to mine (I don’t judge). You rock out all week, and the following week we repeat.

And that’s it.

It’s not a complicated relationship.

I’m Mike McCready, the guy who introduces himself at the beginning of every episode of The Hookblast Podcast…

…and I have ambitions of becoming an average, pretty good, excellent, the very best podcast host in the whole history of podcast hosts… in any language, including Irish. I mean, after all, this podcast started as a hobby an agreement to lock myself in my office the guest bedroom for a few hours each week to give my wife a break from my awesomeness “some goddam space” during the pandemic.

That said, the show is taking off and finding success (jump on the bandwagon by subscribing to the podcast and to the show’s email list) so I had to make it all professional and everything. I committed to a weekly publishing schedule, set up this website, involved a few other people to curate & edit the show, and handle the song licensing. Yet, despite all that polish and professionalism, I still manage to be really cool each week. I know. It comes really naturally for me.

All the other podcast hosts ridicule me and make jokes about how I didn’t go to a fancy top-tier podcast host school, but I do know a lot about catchy songs, and you’d think that would be reason-enough to ridicule me. But I guess I’m showing them! I have spent much of my nearly 25-year career in the music industry harnessing new technologies to identify high potential songs and talent. I was a pioneer of Hit Song Science and I have helmed Music Xray, a company I co-founded, since 2010. Some of my work in the field was documented in a Harvard Business School case study, widely discussed in the media, featured in documentaries, and inspired fictional plot lines in television shows such as CBS’s Numb3rs and NBC’s Studio 60 On The SunSet Strip, which is really super impressive.

I could go on and on but modesty my wife dictated this is a good place to stop.

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