$40 To Park ... Hundreds To Sleep!

If long lines, bad traffic and high prices don't scare you, then you should be in Austin right now. More bearded men than a lumberjack convention and if you don't have a lanyard around your neck, you are nothing!

Texas, Texas, Texas ... hard to not have the state on your March calendar.. The biggest stars from Nashville are on the Texas rodeo circuit wrapping up this weekend in Houston and going a little longer in Austin. 70,000 a night for the Houston rodeo ... Texas huge!

The ACM is about to takeover Dallas in April. Texas music is in the air everywhere if not on the national radio.

Country is also in Austin!

All the national show biz trades, the consumer press, even Jimmy Kimmel have their sights on South by Southwest in Austin right now. (South By if you are cool...)

I was in town to see Willie Nelson at a rodeo and didn't doublecheck the events calendar ... Ouch! The $40 to park at 9a in the morning seemed high ... The traffic was over the top, even by Austin standards ... Something Nashville is matching Austin with now car to car ... Who can have the most traffic congestion?

The locals go to the longstanding Austin rodeo but boy, do the out-of-towners flood the town for the hip tech and entertainment gathering SWSX ... Hotels are sold out with some going for $1,000 a night! Uber, not taxi ... and Willie throwing a private party at his place is just one of the hot tickets. A Jimmy Kimmel ticket is close to impossible.

Austin and Nashville have many things in common ... The common links are too many to name! Both are "IT" cities with showbiz connections. Everyone can agree, the competing MUSIC CITYS are cities with BUZZ!

Nashville has its fan-oriented time, but this SXSW gathering is like no other ... Comic Con is close but it's small compared to the impact of this event. The whole area is buzzing. Several movies are in production and the hipsters are everywhere eating their healthy foods, drinking lots of coffee products.

Been reading any other the coverage? ...You should and it's too much to even try to summarize. One overall theme you get is the world and the tastes of the world are changing like at no modern time. The next phase of the new industrial revolution. The change is fast and the consequences are pretty severe for those losing jobs.

The high tech has nearly broken songwriters, newspaper people, magazines, record labels, book stores, Radio Shack ... now working on McDonalds and Coke. Soon we will live in a world run by Apple, Google and Amazon and have driverless cars. That is not as crazy as that sounds.

The future went from the shuttles becoming museum pieces to radio being pushed out of homes and now even cars ... SEE APPLE CAR PLAY and tell me radio stations with transmitters have a huge car future. TV stations with transmitters, too, for that matter APPLE TV leaks and how cable TV is about to be unbundled.

It is "do your homework" time, friends. The change is neck breaking; it really is. The folks are not crying wolf. Tech is taking jobs and not replacing them. One protest at SWSX this week was against robots. You need to Google and catch up if you have been Wildin' at Spring Break the last few weeks.

The next big thing ... a month away...

This ACM show at ATT Stadium -- Cowboy Stadium -- is going to be huge! When you add in the ACM's other events on Friday and Saturday at the Ranger Baseball stadium, it's hard to see how all this is going to work ... but it will.

A Texas-size event that will make the other award shows look kind of puny.

Texas is the place where Willie holds court and George plays golf! Several Georges ... pick one. Texas music from Ray Benson to Kevin Fowler and Dale Watson is addictive and so different from the Nashville Country. Better put on your jeans and boots and start reading your SWSX news reports and see what's going on ... It's exciting and scary all at the same time. It also can not be ignored!