When creating an evening-length show, you want to make sure that the audience listens to your story. The audience should retain their energy in the best way possible. I try to help my students construct the event as best as possible by sequencing their songs. It is because it’s a vital element of success in music education including online music education.

“It was weird because I drew up the setlist maybe months before we start rehearsing because we had to figure out what we’re going to do for all the filmed visuals. We never changed the setlist, which is bizarre because that always happens,” says Billy Corgan.

“I spent a lot of time finding a balance between the songs people would want to hear and the songs that I think would tell our story. Our stories, as fans know, is just as much about the deep cuts in the album as the singles.”

“There are different elements of the sequence among various artists. Some genres of music, like singer-songwriters and folk musicians, like to create intimacy by speaking to the audience. It is essential for some people. Sometimes, it takes the crowd down in energy for a dance artist or a pop artist.”

“We need to figure out where those energy pockets need to be put. Also, we should figure out where we need to burst out of that with an explosion. Taking all the songs that the class is working on, putting them in order, continually moving them around, and finding the best way to make it work is one workshop that we do in the class.”

“I change my setlist and the way that we’ll go about a gig depending on the vibe I’m getting from the room,” says Gary Clark Jr.

“Each artist has a different way of playing with the audience’s emotions. Where that comes from is you guessed its authenticity. It’s important to identify yourself to know what the audience likes about you and what you want to get to the audience.
For the most part, when you’re yourself onstage, the audience will love it. The other day, I was playing a show myself, and I tend to be vulnerable on stage. My true self is someone pretty, shy, and insecure sometimes.”

“We played a song. Then somebody said, you guys are good. I said, are we good? Everybody laughed. I created this space for everyone to enjoy this moment of vulnerability in a comedic way.”

“Some people might dislike it. Some people might say, oh, you can’t be insecure. It would help if you were confident. The truth is, creating that vulnerability with the audience is essential. It is because we want them to know that we’re in a safe space and that we trust them. This kind of energy exchange is significant.”

“For some DJs, it’s crucial to have an energy exchange. The more you put out, the more they give you back the ability to work in the structure of the night of DJ set-ups, and the downs-the audience wants to go on that journey with you.
We can kind of pull into live performance as well since there is a journey of the evening. If the audience is right there with you, they will experience all the ups and downs too.”

Tiffany Hardin tells us that in the past, musicians and actors were the only people who had this massive audience network, and it wasn’t necessarily available to them on their phones. Interestingly, when we talk about how artists and creatives become these influencers, we’re saying they have an opportunity to leverage these social platforms.

“[These musicians and actors] were influencers regardless of a social platform, but they have an opportunity to leverage this social platform to do more with their message,” she explains. As a talent, you do not have to rely solely on a label or some external gatekeeper to help you spread your message around. “If you are an influencer and have social currency through your work, it’s a lot easier for you to talk directly to your audience.”

“Now that I have your attention let’s get to it,” Cardi B responds. “If you [were] to have a chance to ask one of these Democratic candidates a question, what would your question be? What would you like to see changed in your community? What would you like to see changed in the United States? Me, if I [were] to ask my next president a question, I would like to ask what are we going to do about police brutality?”

Tiffany Hardin says that she found working with talent to be another communication channel, and she adds, “All communication channels are open to being interpreted.” They’re interpreted by whomever handles them. “Let’s say you’re an artist, and let’s say you have an album that you’re working on. You don’t want anybody to know about that album, so you don’t put it on social. No one knows about it.

“When you are ready to promote your album and let people know, you can do some really interesting things with that communication channel. You can do some takeovers. You can work with a partner, a brand partner, and do some interesting content activities on your channel. You can just leverage that however you want to so that your audience knows that you’re working on something that is exciting to you, that you want to see come out into the world and that you want their support in.

“Ultimately, I think any type of communication channel is simply for you to be able to let people know what you want them to know and to help create this narrative that you want to share. That narrative can change as many times as you want it to. I think what’s been interesting to see with a lot of artists is how they leverage their social currency as it relates to their identity. When we’re talking about talent, sometimes that can change album to album.

“It’s your responsibility to take the communication channels that you have at your disposal and allow yourself to iterate, to tell the story that you want,” Tiffany goes on. If you’re an artist, you should push a call to action. Especially if you’re an independent artist, your goal is to convert every follower on your channel to sales, meaning convincing them to buy your album. Get them to go purchase your merchandise, go to your show, go to your website. In essence, get them to go do something for you so that you know they’re not just a follower, but they’re also interested in your path as an artist. They’re also a fan, and they want to invest in your music and your career.

Music education needs to emphasize to future musicians that they should push for positive change using their social platforms. The same ought to be taught in online music education as well.

Use social media to help you drive more interest toward yourself and toward your work. You can do that if you have a sizeable social currency. If you’re highly respected and you have a large audience, you have an opportunity to use that platform to say anything. That’s exciting.

Joni Mitchell began as a folk artist but also incorporated different influences into her own writing and composition and performance.

In her song “Big Yellow Taxi”, she sang, “That you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone. A paved paradise, put up a parking lot.”

And she ignited a subgenre that we’ve come to call the singer-songwriter movement of the early 1970s. Overall, the wonderful era of the singer-songwriter was happening particularly in the 1960s and ’70s. As our country was going through a tumultuous time, and there was a lot of change, we had artists who were essentially in the midst of that and paying attention to all of it.

These artists were speaking to that situation. There was also this sense of freedom where there were many artists who had no problems picking up the guitar and creating and speaking what they did whether it was just them on the guitar or them with a band.

In the song “Something in the Way She Moves”, James Taylor sang, “There’s something in the way she moves or looks my way or calls my name. It seems to leave this troubled world behind.”

We were ready to hear a lot of singer-songwriters. We didn’t come from a period when it only had to be one artist who did this in the genre or who did it in the style. It was the 1960s and ’70s, and in terms of the music listening public, they were open and they were willing, and they were ready to hear a variety of things. And I think that for artistry, that results in incredible music.

From the song “So Far Away”, Carole King sang: “So far away. Doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore?”

One of the things I’ve seen happening recently is the return to this type of artistry. And when I speak to young artists, it’s one of the things I regularly speak about. Upcoming artists need to know that they have the opportunity now to create and to go outside of the norm. It’s a wonderful thing when artists go outside of the norm, and it’s important that it continue to happen.

Are you interested in pursuing a music education? Well, with online music education, you can learn much more about what it takes to build a career and find success in the music industry, and you can do it all without leaving the house.

Once you buy into this version of really pitching what you’re doing by going from “why, how, what,” and not “what, how, why,” and you look around at some successful examples of artists and companies, you realize that the ones that have this wide-reaching effect are doing exactly that. For a great orthogonal example outside of music, I love to look at a couple of technology ads from a while back.

What Can the Music Industry Learn From This IBM Commercial?

There’s a great ad from the ’80s with IBM, which was on top of the world then. They were making great products. But if you look at any of their ads, you’ll see that they’re talking about what they do constantly.

Let’s view this IBM commercial. You’re looking at a small portable computer called the IBM 5100. It’s helping a lot of different people do their work more productively.

From a real estate investor’s point of view: “Managing real estate investments entails many difficult decisions. Pay it now or later? What about the landscaping? Can we afford it? What about taxes? There are many, many difficult decisions to make.

“It’s really nice having a computer to help. It weighs about 50 pounds. You can plug it in anywhere. Bad weather, late deliveries, construction delays of all kinds. We need to find out how it is going to affect our schedule. Now we can find that out fast. The 5100 can help handle some very complex information.”

From a product developer’s point of view: “Jet fuel is expensive. At Simmonds Precision, we’re developing a product that’ll help the pilots save fuel. Flight test time is also expensive. But we do our flight tests right here in the lab on our IBM 5100 and save time and money. The capacity of the 5100 is about the same as some large computers a few years ago.”

From a life insurance agent’s point of view: “We’re a mid-sized life insurance company. If we want to compete, and we do, we’ve got to be flexible. We’ve got to get answers fast. This little machine will help us do it. The 5100 is easy to learn and simple to use.”

From a farmer’s point of view: “There are countless combinations of feed we can mix. What is the most economical for any particular herd? That’s what I’m figuring out now, and the cost of the 5100 is reasonable.”

From a printer’s point of view: “Paper, ink, size, waste, overhead, and don’t forget the shipping costs. Estimating a printing job is not so easy. Our estimators handle 50% more work since we got the 5100. We do it faster and a lot more accurately. And our customers really love it.”

The commercial tells us that the IBM 5100 is bringing the advantages of the computer to more and more people. IBM —helping put information to work for people.

You’ll see that they’re just talking about what they do constantly. They’re saying, this thing will help you. This thing has this much processor power. Blah, blah, blah.

In terms of who they’re choosing to associate with, which is a big part of building your image, they’re associating with, honestly, not the most exciting walks of life. They’re associating with people who are bored with their jobs, people who aren’t excited about what they do. These are people who might say, “I’m unhappy with what I do. This IBM thing will kind of help me.” That’s what we’re left with.

Contrast that with a very famous ad that Apple ran around the same time. It was called the “think different” campaign, and they took a completely different approach.

For Apple, It’s the “Why,” Not the “What”

“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes, the ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them, because they change things. They push the human race forward. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

In this ad, Apple doesn’t mention their product once. They only talk about their “why” and what they believe. On top of that, in terms of building their image, they’re associating with some of the greatest human beings of the past couple hundred years. They have video of Gandhi. They have video of Martin Luther King Jr., Amelia Earhart, people that dared to challenge the status quo and believe what Apple claims to be believing.

We’re left, at the end, not really knowing anything about the computers they make, but knowing that, if I think what they think, maybe I’ll go check it out. Maybe I’ll go see what this Apple computer is all about. And so that’s a great example.

How Can These Two Examples Contribute to Your Online Music Education?

When you look around at any marketing, anything from what you see in the supermarket to your favorite band, ask yourself: “Are they aligning with my beliefs, or are they just trying to impress me with what they’ve made?” Because what they’ve made is going to become increasingly less important, in this time of so much supply. For example, on Spotify, I have all the greatest music of all time. Just the fact that you’re telling me your song exists isn’t enough for me to take the time to listen to it. You need to resonate with what I believe, to win the trust that I’ll go and listen to it, and hopefully love it.

After considering these commercials, we need to ask ourselves, “What does IBM believe, based on their commercial? What does Apple believe based on theirs?” I’ll leave it to you to answer. They sort of speak for themselves. What I’m getting at is that we need to think about broadcasting our values when we’re actually communicating what we’ve made. Because even though you might think, “My values, those have nothing to do with promoting my band,” the truth is, all this stuff comes under the heading of trying to win trust, so people will take the time to check out what you’ve made.

You know, there’s no shortage of great stuff. You need to win people’s trust before assuming you’ll be listened to. When you’re broadcasting your values, even though your values might not resonate with every person you meet, there are 7 billion people on the planet. And a lot of people will resonate with your values. They’ll think, “That person believes what I believe. I am going to take the time to check out what they’re saying.” And if it’s someone who might love what you’ve made, but they don’t resonate with your values, that’s OK. They might find your stuff later.

Music Education and Learning To Market

An important thing to remember is an idea called positive exclusivity, meaning that not everybody is supposed to love what you’re doing. More importantly, when you’re starting out, if you’re trying to market to everybody, if you want everyone in the room to love you, most likely no one is going to love you. That’s because people need to feel like there’s some sort of spotlight shown on them. And that’s where broadcasting your values is this tactic to reach people who feel like, “Gosh, I never hear an artist talk about X, Y, Z, that I really care about.” It could be something that has nothing to do with music. But that’s a moment when you can win trust.

I like to point out that this is very different from how we normally think about exclusivity in a negative way. Right? This is not about purposely leaving people out. I’m not saying, “Anyone who is X, Y, Z won’t get to hear my song.” I’m shining a light on people who are normally ignored. I’m saying, “Anyone who loves X, Y, Z, this is for you. And the other people can come check it out, too.”

This is our beachhead to get things started. When we tap out that market, we expand, and we open it up to everybody.

There are a number of other players that may fall into an artist’s orbit that are crucial to long-term development and career management in the music industry. They range from a publisher to a business manager, an attorney to an agent, and perhaps a digital marketing manager, or even a publicist.

Those people should be added to your team as needed. For example, you don’t need an attorney if there aren’t any contracts to negotiate. These people get paid in different ways and should be added at different points. So let’s talk briefly about what they do and what role they fulfill to help you determine when you need to add those people.

What does a publisher do? As part of your online music education, you should know that a music publisher does a number of things. In addition to collecting revenue and income from sync fees, setting up co-writes, and also pitching your music for opportunities, they are an important part in developing you as a writer.

A lot of young writers say, “Oh, I really want a publishing deal.” Publishing deals are really well-suited for artists that have a number of things bubbling under or are showing a lot of potential. Or they may have a number of songs that have already been placed with a number of artists that are being released so that a publishing company can actually collect on your behalf and propel you forward to get other co-writes, to get other opportunities, using their network and having access to their staff.

Publishing has historically been a great asset for many artists. The deals worked very similarly to how record company deals work. They pay in advance. They collect on your behalf. You get a royalty. And they recoup that money.

Publishing entities have been tremendous assets for performers who perhaps no longer want to perform, or aren’t as interested in touring anymore, but still possess a great skill for songwriting and also on the flip side have been true champions of up-and-coming writers and have really helped develop and propel their careers. They represent the writing and the writer, the songwriter, and pushing the song forward.

An attorney negotiates deals on behalf of the artists, oftentimes serves as a confidant or a mentor to an artist, and works closely with the manager. They generally get paid 5% of the deals that they negotiate. That could range from anything like merchandise deals to licensing deals, record deals, publishing deals, and other things of that nature.

Again, none of these numbers are set in stone. Different deals work in different ways, depending upon who the person is and what the circumstances are.

Agents collect money on live shows. They generally make 10% of the gross on your live shows. Artists generally book their own shows until such time as they can no longer do it. Agents are extremely effective at routing tours, booking shows, and help determining what the right venues are for that artist to play in particular cities, both domestically and internationally.

A business manager generally makes 5%. A business manager is an accountant. They oftentimes handle your entities, meaning your touring entity and your label entity. They handle payroll for tours, for your crew, for your band, sound, lights, and other such aspects.

Again, a business manager comes in very handy once you are in a situation where you have a number of different businesses that need to be managed. A publishing entity, a label entity, and a touring entity are generally the three different lanes that a business manager helps coordinate and files taxes on your behalf.

Digital marketing managers are great to add, especially if your audience primarily comes from social media. Publicists are also an option if you’re more of a traditional TV, radio, or magazine type of artist. Publicists can come in very handy.

But record companies also provide many of these services. They have publicists. They have digital media entities as well as business development people.

But all of these people work in concert with your manager. The manager is the closest, most important business relationship you will have in your career. It’s the manager’s job to interact with all members of your team.

So think of it like a football team. As the artist, you’re the owner of the team, and the manager is the quarterback. They’re on the field, calling the plays and running the ball on your behalf.

It’s an important lesson in music education that you have a great relationship with your artist or manager. It’s important that you’re honest with your artists and with your manager. And it’s important that you feel that your manager represents you, your brand, and who you are out there in the world. Because 99 times out of 100, they’re going to represent you long before you ever get into the room.

When you’re planning to perform music in a show, one of the most important things is being able to sketch your performance ideas beforehand and then bring them to life on stage. To achieve this, it can be really helpful to get a look at the stage you’re going to be performing on and then build something from what you see.

Everyone can draw at least a little bit. Some people don’t think that they can, but the truth is, even they can draw a stick figure, and that can be enough to create your vision. One workshop I do with my students is having them look at the stage in front of them and then sketch out the ideas that they have for a show that would use it. This really helps them to envision ideas that they may have thought impossible—but in reality, they’re entirely possible.

It’s important that we look at a blank piece of paper the same way that we look at a stage: as a canvas for us to experiment. The blank stage is a canvas for us to create our wildest dreams—the blank stage can be anything that we want it to be. So, what are your wildest dreams? I want you to think about not only what you’re capable of in your performance next week but also what you’re capable of in the performance that you’ll be doing at Madison Square Garden.

When it comes to using sketching in music education, one thing I really try to help my students understand is that there’s always something that you can afford to help create your vision. For example, you can get sheets on Amazon for only $12. You can color them with paint that you get from the hardware store for $5. These things can help your show have a more defined and original fingerprint, which your audience will appreciate. By the end, they will be thinking, “you did all of this work for me, and I will forever love you for that.”

Keep in mind that online music education can go a long way towards giving you the tools that you need to find success in the music industry.

Mark Plotkin is an American songwriter and award-winning artist, a Grammy shortlisted producer, Bloomberg Businessweek Top 25 Entrepreneur, and a professor at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. He’s existed both in the music industry as both an artist and a musician. He’s also been in the tech startup world. He’s excited to bring all those experiences together in music education and online music education.

One really important concept to digest before studying a lot of music marketing is the idea of orthogonal thinking. Orthogonal is a word that comes from the math world. It basically refers to where a right angle meets two lines. It’s a really helpful visual because one of the problems in music marketing is that we all sort of become lemmings and just kind of copy each other.

Orthogonal thinking says, “Let’s look at something that is directionally the same as what we’re doing but is actually in a completely different lane. A great example is if you’re in a band, and you think about who you’re musically inspired by. It’s not crazy to think that you might want to do the marketing things that that band did. However, the reality is that you’re probably existing in a completely different era from them. You’re not the same people as them. There’s a million variables that are different.”

An example of a model that is more similar to what you’re doing might be, let’s say, a technology company. Maybe you think that your band and Snapchat have nothing in common. However, if you started your band the same time as Snapchat, and your fans exist sort of more in that ecosystem than on MTV like the band you’re modeling yourself out of, it makes a lot more sense to study what Snapchat does from a marketing perspective than who you sound like. Plotkin has many examples outside of music. That’s where the orthogonal thinking challenge is going to keep coming up.

Often, an artist in the music industry will approach a producer and look for assistance in having the songs that he or she wrote translate to an audience. And they have to translate over a really strange medium, which is this recorded-music medium. You can’t see the person. And you can’t really get a feeling for what they’re wearing or what they look like. There’s no other information other than what you hear, their music. And making that translation could be quite difficult. It could be quite tricky.

So, the first thing that a producer would really do is try to get to know what the artist is all about, what the artist is trying to express, what the song is trying to say. This is a key part of music education. How can we do that through sound alone?

Everyone is fighting for attention right now, because there is so much music. It’s all accessible. If you have any kind of access to a streaming service, you can listen to millions and millions of songs and so many different types of artists. So, it’s really hard to market music simply to get someone’s attention or simply to have somebody pay attention. It’s interesting, because on the one hand you have fewer gatekeepers actually getting your music out there.

If you want to publish music, you have fewer barriers to overcome. But, on the other hand, because everything is so accessible, it’s hard to really market that and have not only writers and music journalists pay attention to that music, but also consumers — having people really figure out what your aesthetic is, what your reason is to pay attention to you.

It’s difficult. It’s something that those who market music, those who position music, are increasingly trying to figure out. Social media is incredibly important to what we do. It’s interesting, because 10 years ago you would be in a situation where you had to pay attention to Twitter, you had to pay attention to Facebook. Now, in this year, you have to position articles, videos, anything really that you produce, with social media in mind. You have to understand how a tweet should function when thinking about linking to a cover story, linking to a video, linking to an essay or a news story.

You have to think about Facebook, and especially Instagram, as Instagram becomes increasingly more important. You have to embrace the role that social media plays as a gatekeeper. And obviously that extends to search and optimizing your stories or your content for search engines. But social media is such a key component of what we do, because it’s a means of discovery, more than anything. If you want to have something read, it needs to be able to be shared. And the way that happens now is social media.

Coming from the artist side, digital editorial coverage and social media is massive. Social media is the easiest way for you to get in front of millions of people without having to be on the radio, without having to physically go places to play these giant arenas and things like that. It’s not easy to reach this amount of people on social media, but it is possible. There are platforms like YouTube that have broken huge stars, Justin Bieber. And Vine, which is no longer an app, played a big part in Shawn Mendes’ career.

Social media is helping these artists grow, and it helps them connect with people, whether you’re a new artist connecting with new people or a huge artist connecting with people on a day-to-day basis. I feel like I know some really big people because I see what they do on their Instagram stories every day. With digital content and articles and stuff like that, the process of picking up a magazine to find new artists is very, very different. I used to find artists by the small lines in CD catalogs.

It was, like, “Thank you so and so,” and that’s how I used to find new artists or people I didn’t know. But now we have things like “related artists” on Spotify and these playlists. You can be on “new music Friday” and you could have hundreds of thousands of plays just being a new artist, if you get that great placement on a playlist. So, there’s a lot of new aspects to the music industry with Spotify, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, especially.

And just like with all these different blogs and stuff, you can find new artists and you can help cultivate those artists with all this new digital content.

As producers, one of the most important jobs we have in music is to preserve an artist’s voice. This is done by maintaining or exposing the idiosyncratic nature of a particular artist’s voice. This could be their physical voice or the voice of their message. An artist is the last person to know what they are all about. So often, in a creative sense, the people around the artists understand them before they understand themselves. It’s our jobs, as producers, to keep them in a place that is representing what the artist wants to represent.

The Voice of an Artist Is Very Complex

An artist’s voice, their inflection of speech, and the timbre of sound coming from their throat all contribute to the sounds that the microphones pick up. These are just a few of the many small pieces of music that people can be sensitive to hearing. The average listener isn’t even aware of the sounds that they are sensitive to. We do our best to help the artist express all of these small things through pronunciation, timbre, vocal-through phasing, and even vocabulary.

Timbre

Timbre is defined as the combination of elements that make a sound. For example, if you take all the harmonic and amplitude aspects of sound and combine these components, you will get a unique sound. Timbre is the composition of all the elements that make sound resonate in your ear.

Throat-singers can perform with different timbres of their voice by doing various actions. These variations come from the way the singers open their mouths, the way they clench their jaws, the way they open or close their throats, or the way they breathe. This is similar to the way that we yell “help, police!” versus the way we say “I love you.” When you cry for help, the timbre of your voice lets people know that something is wrong. When you tell someone you love them, the timbre of your voice lets them know that they mean something to you. Believe it or not, there is an entirely different set of harmonics coming out. We are reacting to those harmonics subconsciously. We don’t know that they are harmonics or amplitudes of overtones, but it is what’s happening.

Phrasing

Phrasing has to do with how a vocal artist or counter melody from an instrumentalist plays a passage or theme. Is the melody marked staccato or legato? It’s how they release the rhythms with accents and stresses. Vocal phrasing can alter how we understand the narrative or story that the singer is singing, rapping, or talking.

Think of the way that Sia sings the song “Chandelier:”

I’m gonna live like tomorrow doesn’t exist.
Like it doesn’t exist.

What I like the most about this is that it’s unpredictable. For example, sometimes Notorious B.I.G.’s sentences are long, and sometimes they are very short.

In the Notorious B.I.G song “Hypnotize,” he raps:

Dead right, if the head right, Biggie there ery’ night
Poppa been smooth since days of Underoos
Never lose, never choose to, bruise crews who
Do somethin’ to us (come on), talk go through us (through us)
Girls walk to us, wanna do us, screw us
Who us? Yeah, Poppa and Puff (hehe)

Paired with an instrumentalist and a solo, vocal phrasing can express urgency. It can direct a sense of legato or relaxation with many different emotions. It is also incredibly important how vocal phrasing affects rhythm by hitting or dancing around a downbeat.

Cadence

Different rappers are known by their cadences, and this is really how they dance around the rhythms. Rhythms are going to be the quarter notes: “tack, tack, tack, tack.” What is the rapper doing around those quarter notes? How are they stretching or truncating their lines and phrases, so we get both narrative and sense of motion?

Here is an example by rapper MF Doom called “That’s That:”

Cornish hens switchin’ positions, auditionin’ morticians
Saw it in a vision, ignorin’ prison
Ignoramuses enlist and sound dumb
Found ’em drowned in cows dung, crowds flung

MF Doom will have entire bars that rhyme. The entire setup bar of this song rhymes every syllable in the punch line bar. That is incredible.