One of the most important parts about this online music education class is understanding what your story is and being honest about it. You know, for me, I grew up in Ohio as a queer woman with a mustache. This story for me hasn’t really changed. It will always be my story.

Now, we have to look at what your story is. We have to find what will never change for you. Where did you grow up? How did you grow up? Writing your first song is usually telling this story to your audience and finding a way to integrate that story into your body for your performance.

It’s important to do this storytelling without the music at first. What I usually do is have my students write down their story. We go through the beginning, middle, and end, and figure out what the real narrative is. Then we develop that into a song, writing out the lyrics and figuring out where they fit. What does the bridge become? And how do we end it? Are we still moving forward? These are important things to consider in music education.

Let’s start by writing a story of our lives. First of all, who is the main character? What do they wear? What do they look like? Where have they come from? Let’s figure out the beginning of that story, the middle of that story, and the end of that story. And this can be any kind of song you want — a ballad, an anthem, a dance track, anything. But we need to figure out where each part lies within the framework of the song and figure out how we move forward in our career in the music industry once this story is written.

Many emerging artists don’t like to think in terms of genres or classification. They think associating their music with an existing category is impossible. It’s like being put in a box.

If you’re looking for discovery, however, genres are important. Consider streaming services — when you upload your music to a streaming service, you’ll have to put in a genre. While you can start your own “new” genre, there are advantages to sticking with established categories.

Casting a Wider Net

The biggest reason to pick a pre-existing genre is that it helps fans discover your music. Once you identify with a specific type of music, the streaming platform could potentially recommend your song to people listening to that genre.

Online music education teaches us that it’s important to be as honest as possible when classifying your own music. You don’t want to upload a country song to a streaming platform and say that it’s hip hop. In this case, an unsuspecting listener might hear 15 seconds and immediately turn it off. They may then never want to listen to any music like that ever again.

Important for Emerging Artists in the Music Industry

“At least trying to figure out what elements of your music fit into a specific genre can potentially help you to open the door to being discovered in that early stage of your career,” says hip hop artist Ryan Leslie.

According to Leslie, you want people who enjoy music in your specific vein to be able to discover and fall in love with what you create. If you refuse to “put yourself into a box,” then you have to understand the challenges associated with that. It may take you a little bit longer to find your audience. You’ll need to put forth some extra effort to find the relationships and people who want to go on your journey.

Leslie started out making R&B records and felt specifically attached to that musical style. When he did his “Les is More” album, which included a collaboration with Kanye West on a song called “Christian Dior Denim Flow,” that all changed.

“(Kanye) said, hey, make a rap album,” Leslie said “I did a rap album. And now I’m doing a hybrid. I got a new EP. We did a hybrid on that. So really for me, I’m still living in a world of music that I love.”

Even though Leslie “reclassified” his music, he said he still enjoys having artistic freedom. He can utilize his music education and make a straight piano ballad one day and then later decide to work on a hip hop track with some heavy sub bases with trap high hats.

“When you have artistic freedom and you build the audience that’s willing to go with you wherever you want to go, then you have a little bit more latitude,” he said. “I believe at the early stages of your career, though, when you’re looking for discovery, choosing a category of music that allows for you to be discovered in the algorithms on the streaming services is a prudent move to make.”

The great story of creativity and business in the music industry in 20th-century America has to do with understanding that recorded music is not just a performance art. In your online music education, you’ll develop an understanding of the technology and process of recording music, too.

A great example of how technology changes content is that, when the first records were made on wax cylinders and the early 78s, they came with a time limitation. You could only record, at best, up to three minutes. So, a lot of the jazz bands of that era sped up their performances, playing in double time in order to make their piece fit on the record. Hot jazz, that really fast jazz that people all over the world grew to love, is actually a byproduct of the technology of the time. That wasn’t necessarily how those bands sounded in clubs, but it was how they sounded in the studio.

The reason that that’s really important is because this byproduct of a groove had a huge influence on late-20th-century music. One of the great musicians of the mid-20th century was a guitar player named Les Paul. His name often pops up in music education because he invented and created a very famous electric guitar called a Les Paul.

An interesting anecdote is that Les Paul, one of the great guitar players — sort of the Eric Clapton of his day — had a very bad car accident, and he broke his elbow. They put his elbow in a cast, which was standard practice at the time. Because of this, when his elbow healed, he could never extend his arm the way he did before. So, being an engineering genius as well as a musical genius, he invented a contraption that would let him double-track his guitar lines and sound as fast and as agile as he did before the accident.

That invention was essentially the multi-track recording studio. Les Paul sort of used this as a crutch — almost literally. He used it as a utility. But other people, particularly in the early 1960s, started to understand that the music studio had become an instrument in and of itself.

The first major person in the music industry to understand that was an eccentric man named Phil Spector. He had a storied past, including a murder conviction, and recently passed away while incarcerated in California. However, as a musician, he was a true genius, and he had a genius engineer named Jack Nietzsche.

Together, they somehow stumbled on the fact that the way things sound when played back from a recording is not exactly the way they sound when your ears just hear them. So, they started double-, triple-, even quadruple-tracking instruments, particularly bass and drums. They created this gigantic sound that people called the “Wall of Sound.” That was the first level of the studio becoming, in effect, an instrument.

Then, Spector had two important proteges: Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, and The Beatles. In the mid-’60s, these artists elevated the recording studio into a more important instrument for the creation of music than the guitar, the drum, the keyboard, or anything else that anybody played.

And at that point, they transformed music from a performance medium into a constructed medium. George Martin, who was The Beatles’ producer, had a great way of explaining what happened. He said, “Before us, recorded music was like photography. After us, it was like painting.” What he meant was that the technology of the recording studio allowed people to be artists and to have full control over their work.

There are lessons for musicians to take from the story of Instagram. A lot of people don’t know that Instagram did not originally launch as a company called Instagram. They launched as a company called Burbon, which was sort of a geolocation check-in service similar to Foursquare, if you’re at all familiar with them. And really, the concept was that since people finally have GPS on their phones, maybe it will be fun to be able to go to a restaurant or somewhere and check in.

The one little extra feature they had that made it unique was that if, for example, you wanted to take a picture of the cocktail you ordered, they had these fun little lenses that you could choose from. They looked at the data and noticed that no one really cared about checking in. Nobody was checking in, but everyone loved taking random pictures, even of things outside of where they checked in and using these fun lenses.

So what they did was shut it all down. They looked at Burbon and decided they were going to pretend it never happened. However, knowing that people loved the camera part of it, they decided they were going to relaunch their product as a thing called Instagram. It looked to the world like it was a new company, and it looked to the world like it worked overnight.

They basically went through this whole workshop of a failed product that people didn’t want and relaunched with only what they did want. It was a pivot. And you could argue that they almost make marketing irrelevant. Their marketing happened via the failed product and the feedback that they got.

There’s really no correct way or timing to do this, but you do want to think about when in the process of making music you want to do it. For example, is it important to get a lot of feedback before putting it out, and make it look like it’s perfect when it comes out? Or do you go the other route, and have the confidence in the music that it’ll just work? There’s really no universal right answer. Instead, it’s up to you to make the right call for your project.

Online music education is a good way to find out more about effective ways to approach putting out music, and a wide variety of other topics related to the music industry. If you’re like many people who may not have the resources for other forms of music education, you would be wise to consider going the online direction.

The blogosphere, as it was built, really influenced music journalism. I believe this is because people gravitated toward the blogs because they had a different sense of voice than what a digital publication might have. There was not only a playfulness with these blogs but also a sense of perspective that people really grew to appreciate. And that came in a lot of different forms across a lot of different blogs.

Overall, though, I think there’s a reason why the blogosphere was influential and, to some degree, still is. There is that voice. There’s a kind of perspective that makes you want to engage over and over again, and not just with one piece of content. You want to return to getting that perspective and getting that sense of self you might not necessarily find on a major digital publication.

To me personally, any article that is compelling is a good music journalism piece. There are so many different ways to tell the story of an artist, or a song, or an album, or a trend in music. There are also so many different voices. For example, some of my favorite writers who focus on music sound completely different from some of my other favorites, and I believe that’s because they have a developed voice.

Not only does a great piece of musical journalism need to be persuasive, but it also needs to be compelling. There have been times when I’ve read something that I completely disagreed with, but I ended up loving it because it shed some new light on a topic that I hadn’t previously considered. It was able to add a different sense of perspective, and I always appreciate that as a reader, as an editor, and as a writer myself.

I think that a compelling piece of musical journalism needs to grab your attention. That’s what I mean when I say compelling. It needs to be able to differentiate itself from the sea of coverage, of stories, of posts and of links that make their way online.

At Billboard, that’s what we try to offer every day. We try to offer voices not only within our analysis and our essays and our persuasive pieces of content, but also in terms of our in-depth coverage and our reporting. That can take the form of a reported piece with multiple sources you trust because of the brand name of the writer and the publication. Ultimately, a good piece of musical journalism might come in any of a lot of different boxes, but I believe that overall, it just has to be compelling in some way.

If you’re interested in learning more about music journalism and the music industry, give online music education a try. It is far and away the most accessible way to attain the music education that you desire.

When it comes to music, following the artist is an important area. We follow the song to begin with. We follow the money of the song. And now we’re going to follow the artist. And what is there to follow, you may ask?

I can’t tell you the number of times an artist comes into my office, comes to talk to me about management or comes in looking for an opportunity and they’re talking about their team. They’ve got their lawyer, their manager, their agent, their publicist, their digital marketing, all of these things. And what I’ll say is, “That’s great. Now, where’s the music?”

We’re going to talk about the right time to find those people to help you out in your career. And we’re also going to talk about what those people do and how they surround the artist. I like to call the artist the orbit because if you think about the globe, and you think about the artists in the middle of that globe, all of the people that are satellites around that globe are the people in the artist’s orbit and the people who are responsible for different areas of the artist’s career. Hopefully, you add those people at the time when you actually need them, as opposed to collecting people’s work for you when there really isn’t anything to do.

First and foremost, the most important member of that team is ultimately the artist’s manager. Now a lot of you are probably wondering how you can know when you’re supposed to get a manager. The answer is you get a manager when you realize that you no longer have time to manage all of the things that are happening in your career. That’s the time to get a manager and not before. If you can do it yourself, then you should do it yourself. If you can’t do it yourself, it’s time to get a manager.

That means when you’re generating income, when you have shows, you have opportunities, when income is coming in and you actually have something to manage. Many artists make the mistake of putting the cart before the horse and getting a manager when there’s nothing really to manage. Once you know you need a manager, the next question is how do you know who the right manager is for you?

In my estimation, the right manager is the most experienced person, and the one who’s the most excited about what you can do and get. In a nutshell, when you have something going on, managers will come to you. When you have nothing going on and there’s nothing to manage, you’ll have a very difficult time getting a manager.

Ultimately, the most important person in your deal is your manager. This is because he or she is the go-between for you and the label. It needs to be a manager who really understands the music business. The manager is the person who wants to turn the artist’s career into ten times more than what they actually have seen. The manager is the one who’s going to be the go-between, the liaison who makes everything run smoothly between the artist and the label, or the artist and Spotify, or the artist and title, or just the artist and everybody.

The artist should be truly focused on making great music. The manager should never want to do that. The manager should just be thinking that they want this artist to be the biggest thing going on in the world and that they’re going to do whatever they can to make that happen. If, as the artist, you don’t believe that someone is going to be that person for you, then that means it’s time to find a new manager. What it ultimately comes down to is that the manager needs to believe in the artist. If they don’t, then they’re just somebody looking for money, and as the artist, you’re going to get screwed.

Online music education is a wonderful way to learn more about what makes a good manager, how to find one, and many more great lessons on finding success in the music industry. And what could be better than a quality music education from the comfort of your own home?

The music industry uses a lot of terms that might sound particularly foreign if you’re not familiar with the business. For live performers, one important term is “tech rider,” which includes a stage plot and input list. The stage plot is a picture of all the instruments on stage, the monitor placements, and the names of the people in the band that are taking part in the performance.

That stage plot also includes an input list, which specifies all the different inputs the front-of-house engineer needs to put into the system. These inputs would be anything creating audio from the stage that you want the audience to hear, such as drums, bass, guitar, vocals, keyboard, drum machines, synthesizers, or anything else that makes a sound. Each instrument on the input list should be numbered; this lets everyone talk about each one by its number.

A tech rider includes all of the proper amplification needed for a show to take place. Many people have subwoofers on their tech rider, but they might also use a certain amplitude of speakers and monitors; all of it is meant to help them make sure that they have a professional environment for their show to take place in.

Secrets of the Tech Rider

When a performer is on stage, there are speakers that point back at them. Those speakers play a mix of all the instrumentation that they are most comfortable with while performing. This monitor mix is actually a really cool thing that most people don’t know about unless they’ve pursued a music education; it lets the performer hear their instrument or vocals at their preferred volume level. It makes the performer comfortable knowing they can choose whatever they want their mix to be.

For example, some music performers don’t like to hear their own vocals, but others want their in-ear vocals to be loud. The monitors allow the performer to have the mix that they want separately from what the rest of the venue hears.

In addition to those monitors, there are also in-ear monitors that perfomers can wear like headphones. They’re controlled with a fader system by a mix engineer that’s off to the side of the stage.

What About Backlines?

Another word that you might encounter in your online music education is “backline.” A backline is a list of instruments and gear that the venue offers you when you arrive. This can include mic stands, keyboard stands, amplification devices, guitar stands, microphones, and many other things that the performer may need.

Most venues have a backline section on their website that indicates the things they have available for use by the performers. It’s best to double-check that section before visiting a venue. It’s also a good idea to email the venue before arriving to make sure everything is still on track for the show. It’s always good to have a backup plan in case something goes wrong, as you never know what is going to happen.

Many bands don’t even bring a crew on tour; it’s just them. They do everything themselves. As you start to get bigger, though, you might need someone to sell merch for you. You might need someone to run the sound at the front of the house, or someone to run the monitor mix. As you continue growing bigger, you might need a wardrobe person. You might need a production assistant, a production manager, a tour manager. All of these people are very expensive to hire.

So, these are really some things to think about as you start to gain momentum in the music industry. For the most part, your manager is going to help you with this. As for needing a manager, you don’t need one until you need one. If you find that you can’t handle everything by yourself, that’s when you need a manager. At the beginning though, I recommend that you try to do it on your own.

Obviously, selling tickets for your show can benefit you financially. In some cases, though, you’ll really only be making money from alcohol sales at the bar, or from a guarantee that the venue has already given you. This is typically a certain amount of money that you’re guaranteed to receive after the show, no matter what. For instance, a venue may give you a $500 guarantee to play a show, and if they do, it won’t matter how many people are in attendance—you’ll receive the $500 regardless.

Another way that some venues might do it is to give you a guaranteed amount, plus a percentage of ticket sales after a certain amount of money is made. So, for example, after you’ve already made $1,000, you would receive $500, plus ten percent of ticket sales. You might get offered a deal like this as a way to incentivize you to promote the show and bring along as many people as possible.

Ultimately, creating a successful performance or tour is about the following things: finding your true, authentic self, creating your intention, telling your story, finding your audience, and creating a visual element that will evoke a certain energy from the crowd. So, in that vein, there are a few things you really need to focus on deciding, and they are who you are, who you need to bring with you on your music journey, and what kind of story you want to tell. In many cases, exploring online music education can help you get started on the right path.

One of the essential things about authenticity while making music is knowing yourself. That self-awareness can come from all kinds of self-help books but also exercises where we can look at ourselves in the mirror and project exactly what we want to see. Looking in the mirror is one of the most critical elements about learning how to perform well and perform authentically.

Each day, you must go to the mirror, and the first thing you must do is confront yourself. It means you’re looking in the mirror, and the moment that you’re about to say, “Oh, my eye, oh, my hair, oh, my face, oh, I need to…,” you must confront all those things. Even when you’re standing there, and you’re thinking, “This is silly. I don’t know why I’m doing this;” you must observe. It would be best to observe all those things. Understanding your inner self should be taught as part of music education also in online music education.

The idea is to see who you are, and you begin to observe them and pay attention. Then, you’re comfortable within yourself. At that point, when you step on the stage, you’re able to make that connection. Do you know what happens? You connect with the audience, and the audience feels your authenticity. It’s essential that they feel your authenticity.

As an artist, you are working through who you are and what you want the audience to feel when you are on stage. That connection that you’re trying to make with the audience, you must do some work where you understand who you are, why you are, how you are, and the purpose of you being that artist. The only way that that can happen is if you have and learn to have that intimate connection with yourself.

One of my favorite authors, Brené Brown, talks about authenticity a lot. I find it to be helpful to look at one of her examples. She often uses the phrase, “Don’t puff up. Don’t shrink down.” Sometimes when we’re in a tense situation, we try to make ourselves more confident than average. Or we try to make ourselves smaller because we feel like we’re acting. We’re taking up too much space.

The truth is that if someone dislikes you for doing either of those things, you’re going to feel worse about yourself. If they dislike you for being who you are, you’re still going to feel good about exactly who you are. The critical idea is to walk out of that situation and know that you didn’t try too hard to mold yourself into what you think someone would want you to be. We want to sit with ourselves in precisely the space that we are.

I speak about not the space of when you think you’re putting on. That’s the mask you wear so that people know you as this when you step out. We’re talking about when you’re alone and you’re standing in front of that mirror. You’re looking at yourself, and you’re taking in all the voices that are inside your head.

Staging and costumes are all about the way things look. As part of your online music education, let’s go back to Art History 101 to learn about composition. What is most pleasing to our eyes? What colors work best when you want to create an intimate atmosphere? Do you want warm colors like red, or cool colors like blue? This is all a trial-and-error process, but it’s best for us to see how the characters from earlier in the story fit in with these color-blocking ideas and the composition of the canvas as our stage.

Staging Philosophies
In the same way that we think of instrumentation with a song, color-blocking is a good way to impose splashes of color onto a stage that look good next to one another. Sometimes the juxtaposition of these colors can create a really interesting tone in itself. Using lights, we can really make them take on a whole different shape. So, for example, if you have a red light onstage and a blue backdrop, it’s going to change color as it’s turned on and off. The ability to see color and the way that it plays a role within the stage setup is important to know as you continue your music education.

Creating a conceptual identity for your product is something a lot of people are doing nowadays. Some people decide that they want to be a monster in another world. When you walk into this venue, you want to feel like you are a monster in another world, and you’ve never met someone else that is a monster from another world.

So how do we make that happen? What does the set design look like? How do we implement these ideas in the performance of our work? Do we speak to the audience? Do we start on the floor? Do we perform from the audience, with the audience themselves on stage? Original interpretations of what everything means and flipping the script on yourself is a really incredible way to understand yourself better as an artist.

My art teacher in high school used to say, “Do you belong to the school of squint?” And this helps me all the time when I’m thinking of visual elements for my live performance. What she meant by that was, if you squint and you see just the outside of everything and the composition of the larger pieces in color-blocking, you’re going to be able to see what it looks like from far away. This is what’s important for us as performers because it should look just as good in the front row as it does in the back row.

About Costumes
We want to create costumes that have really great profiles. We want apparel that makes us look the way we want to look, and that creates a color that pops out from the set itself and gives the audience something to be excited by. We can create so many different stories with costumes. They can be abstract shapes. We can reimagine our bodies as other-selves in this moment. But when it comes down to it for us, the entire conceptual performance is really focused on how to bring the costume, the set, the songs, and the choreography all together in wondrous harmony.

A costume doesn’t have to be some crazy Halloween thing at all. It’s just about what you put on that day that is your work outfit. And for some people, that’s going to be jeans, a T-shirt, and some Converse. And for other people, it’s going to be an evening gown, some makeup, and an up-do. But the truth is that you should always be wearing something that’s really comfortable to you that screams, “This is my authentic self.”

What we put on our bodies and how we present ourselves can shape the way we feel about our performance to a great extent. We want to be comfortable. We want to feel safe. This is all the puff-up, shrink-down thing again. If we act like something we are not, we are not going to be comfortable. We are not going to relate to our audience the best way that we can.

Another use of the costume is that it’s a personal prop. Being able to use something that you wear on your body as a through-line of a story that you tell on the stage is really important. We see this with James Brown with his cape. There are so many ways in which that cape means something more than just a piece of clothing. And his performance with this cape is something that I return to over and over again with my students in order to explain how to use props and how to use your body onstage in order to tell a deeper story.

How The Knife Uses Staging and Costumes
One of my favorite bands is called The Knife. They’re a Swedish electronic band. And every performance they do is wildly different from the one before. Creating this new world for them to live in is something that the audience loves. This is why people keep coming back; because they know that what they’re walking into is going to be a whole new world than the last time they saw the band.

Their last performance included choreographed dances with around 12 bandmates on stage. The lead singer wasn’t always even the one singing during performances. They had costumes and instruments they built themselves, plus new technologies around percussion instruments and wind instruments. Everything about the night was an experiment in pop music performance and what an audience is.

The opening band was an aerobics instructor. They got the crowd up and moving. It was a great way to create an amazing story throughout the night. It was new and different, and the audience is shocked to experience it. These are the kinds of performances we remember. They also make an impact on us in the world of music.