Before you arrive at the venue, it’s great to have your set list already planned out with your band. This is a key part of your music education. You can always make changes later, but it’s good to think about the sequence of songs before you show up to the venue to make sure that you really add dynamic to the show. Perhaps you decide to juxtapose a slow song with a fast song for the most drama.

We ask Mick Jagger, “When choosing a setlist for the Rolling Stones, there really aren’t too many bad ideas, are there?”

The Rolling Stones front man, who has nearly 60 years of music industry experience, replies, “I’m sure there are. Let’s just say that some ideas are better than others. Like for instance, I believe that the opening number is kind of important. We did try ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ in some cases. And a lot of those shows in Europe were in the daylight, so I didn’t like doing that number in the daylight opening. It didn’t work, so I dumped it.

“I think it works as an opener in the dark when you’ve got full lighting,” Jagger continues. He goes on to explain that in the dark, that song really reads and works to create a mood. “So we’ve got all these kinds of factors to take into account when we’re doing set lists,” he concludes.

A set list is a list of songs that you’re going to perform that night. Everyone has a different amount of songs depending on how much time they have allotted to them on stage. This is one of many aspects of your career to consider as you continue your online music education.

The visual pillar of performance is probably the most fun. Sometimes, as musicians, we forget about this part of our artistry. That it really comes from a deep feeling.

We want to paint. We want to touch. Sometimes, with music, we don’t get that sense. We don’t get that motion. When we’re creating electronic music.

Get students to feel comfortable getting dirty. You want them to feel like the energy they’ve put into creating a set or creating costumes is going to give back to their audience. Like it is going to make them feel more connected with the work that they’re doing.

What is the story you want to tell? You must make sure that you are wearing the costume of that story, of that main character. What is the character of the set? Is that a sun setting? Or is it people in a protest?

If you never bring up the idea of people in a protest, but you’ve got images behind you of people in a protest, it evokes a feeling from the audience. It’s these subliminal messages that we’re giving to the audience that make them feel connected to what we’re doing.

There are many ways to do this for a performance with a track. For example, to feel more alive, one of those is through movement and choreography. Another one of those is creating or combining a live element with your track. Sometimes, people add live drums, and they’re not even miked.

The idea of moving their body along with the rhythm of the music is something that the audience can really connect to. They feel, oh, they’re moving. I want to move too.

That’s what we must look at. Like there’s really a mirror right there. What you are doing is what the audience feels OK to be doing back to you. If you’re dancing, they’re dancing. If you’re introspective and looking at the ground, they might be too. Decide what you want your audience to do, and they’ll mirror you.

One common question music professionals get is “how does a manager in the music industry get paid?” Historically, a manager typically gets between 10% and 20% of the gross. However, that number changes depending on what the situation is. For example, a female solo artist or a male solo artist may be paying 20%, but if you’re a rock band of five or six guys, for a manager to make 20%, they’d make more than any individual member of the band. Generally, any manager who’s smart and wants to have a good relationship with their artists is going to take less than that.

Some managers make less than touring based on a touring history, but 15% to 20% is a general rule. Any manager who’s worth their weight and has a great history and good experience is going to want 15% to 20% of the gross of everything that you make. It’s not an unreasonable amount of money because there are many times when a manager is working hard on your behalf. They aren’t making any money during the times that you’re dormant, recording, etc.

It’s hard to talk about the music industry without talking about some of the pitfalls of the business. Because there weren’t music education programs 20, 25 years ago, all of us who grew up in the music industry made mistakes and learned by either making those mistakes, getting ripped off, getting screwed over, or getting somehow cheated, unfortunately.

Thankfully, things are different today. However, the pitfalls still remain the same. That is, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Don’t fall for the hype. Don’t go for the quick buck. Instead, go for the long term. So, why do I say that? Many people think that fame equals a career, but that’s not the case. The list of one-hit-wonders, flashes in the pan, people who had their short moment in the sun, is significantly longer than the list of those who have had a real career.

Always be open-minded. Always be thinking about where you want to be in five or 10 years. Don’t be thinking about how to get as many ‘likes’ as you can today. Think about how to get as many followers as you can long-term. If you think about even the arc of Facebook and how it was used, in the last five years it went from the number of followers being the most important thing to followers no longer amounting to excitement, interest, or passion.

So, if I were a manager, I wouldn’t really care how many followers you have. Instead, I want to know how many people are talking about you. It’s a very different dynamic. It’s a very different algorithm. But ultimately, having real fans is what it’s all about. Don’t go for quick fame, and don’t confuse fame with a career, because they’re two completely different things.

Another important thing is, don’t make the mistake of signing contracts without having them looked over. Standard music industry contracts are not usually in the artist’s favor. And honestly, it may never be completely in your favor; however, it should always be within the confines, norms, and boundaries of what’s acceptable among artists.

When you hear those horror stories about old artists being ripped off or selling their music, or when you wonder how Michael Jackson owns part of the Beatles catalog, that’s because artists were signing bad deals at the time. Fortunately, that’s easily avoidable now with good advice. Remember, just because somebody asked you to the dance, it doesn’t mean that’s the only person who wants to dance with you.

If you’ve got ‘the goods’ and you’ve got things going on, you don’t have to take the first deal that comes your way. Be patient and wait for the right deal to be presented to you. If what you’re doing makes a lot of sense and people really like it, there will be more than one company, one person, one bit of interest in what you’re doing. There will be a lot of it.

If you’re interested in learning much more about concepts like these surrounding the world of professional music, you should seriously consider exploring online music education.

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.

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.

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.

Coming from a performance art background, I can see a lot of times how my music students aren’t really giving themselves the opportunity to work in a more conceptual or abstract direction in regards to their performances. And what I try to discuss with the students is the possibility of creating an entire world on the stage that is different than how they ever imagined it could be in the music industry.

Elements to Consider

Where does the audience sit? Are you on stage? The lighting, the stage, the costumes — all of these elements can be put together during a music performance to create a piece of art in a way that tells a much deeper story than just the songs. For example, somebody like Sia, who doesn’t want herself to be seen on stage, is really creating a new persona using collaborators, such as choreographers to create dance performances, and wild set design with crazy costumes and video.

All of this is leaning towards a more artistic context of the work. And I think it’s really important that students at least try to experiment in this direction once in their career as they continue their music education.

Billboard has been around for 125 years. It started in 1894. It was focused on outdoor advertisement. That’s where the word “billboard” comes from. It moved to live entertainment, mostly carnivals and circuses. When music and vaudeville started, it began to produce sheet music. You started seeing some charts in the magazine based on the top-selling sheet music in big-city stores.

This went on until our first national chart in 1940 and continued from there. What’s kept us around so long? Any industry needs an independent voice to help spread the word, and Billboard’s been there from the inception of music. We have been tracking it and acting as an independent voice to lend legitimacy. Originally, charts were based on store-based sales. Somebody at the store would tell you what the top sellers were.

Somebody at the radio station would say, “Here are my 40 biggest songs in rank order.” There was a formula behind where they ranked, how big the store was and how big the radio station was. It was a weighted system, so a radio station in New York would be more of a voice than a station in Detroit, for example. It was the same way for retail- the bigger the store, the more weight they had. So it was really a reporting-based model with an honor system.

As with any honor system, it’s not always so honorable. Generally, it was a system that worked, because at the time there were checks and balances. It wasn’t that easy to smell out a fake, and that’s what people did. That’s why they had a position they had. In 1991, we moved to electronic monitoring of radio stations and over-the-counter sales. So when you bought a CD, they would scan it. That UPC number would click, and we would know for the first time ever exactly how many units of an album were sold in a week.

In the past, it was really speculation and the gold and platinum certifications that were accumulated over time. So that was a big change in the early ’90s, and the industry was a bit taken aback at what reality showed. What it did show was that Country was a pretty big genre, and Hip Hop was a pretty big genre. Where those titles might have struggled in the past, now we knew. All of a sudden, we had NWA albums debuting at number one and Garth Brooks albums debuting at number one.

It was a whole new world for everyone, and it made the charts much better. Over time, it’s continued to evolve in the digital landscape to where we are today, with streaming being the main mode of music consumption. Being that independent voice, lending legitimacy as to what is happening, over the past 25 years, we’ve aligned ourselves with great data partners whom we trust. This includes Nielsen music, which has tracked our sales and radio and streaming data since 1991.

We work with the industry to make sure we have the right data sets coming in. If there’s a big streaming service out there, we want them in. Thankfully, as these services started to rise, which also goes back to retail stores and radio stations, they want to be part of what we do. It adds legitimacy to their business. They know that if they’re part of the Billboard charts, then they have some cachet with the labels and the artists and managers as well.

Their business is going to be reflected in what we do. So we have a great system working, and we work hard to cultivate those relationships and to make sure that everyone feels like they’re a part of what we do. Just continuing to evolve the charts. We moved from a pure album sales chart to one that incorporates streaming in 2014, and it was pretty much the right time to do it.

It was right on the cusp of where sales were really starting to decrease and streaming services were really starting to increase their usage and their pay subscribers. Billboard is quite thankful that people still look at our charts as the standard in the industry. Record labels, artists, and managers work very hard in mining the right avenues to create noise, to do well on those charts. We hear about it every week. We’re involved from the production to promotion level, as people try to understand how the charts work, and what they can do to fare better on the lists on a week-to-week basis.

We hear from artists and management all the time, when their artists get to number one, about how happy they are, and how it means the world to them. Billboard has been around for 125 years, and the fact that we’re still standing here today. We mean so much to so many people, which is really something that we take great pride in. We’re not resting on our laurels, we’re continuing to innovate what we do. I can tell you, in the past 10 years, what we’ve done in terms of data and chart measurement has just been incredible.

That’s just due to how music consumption has changed over that time. For decades it was pretty simple. You bought a song, you bought an album, or you listened to it on the radio. Those are your only options. So it’s a pretty simple thing to do. How you bought it might have changed, and we adapted how we did that, but it was a pretty standard set of data.

Now, with streaming and social and how things continue to evolve, we’re constantly trying to evolve with the times and adjust the methodology to how people are getting their music today. We just try to be where the music consumer is, and we’ve done a really good job over the past 80 years in doing that. So we want to continue to evolve and continue to grow with the music industry, and more importantly, with the music consumer. Billboard is a big name in the history books so remember our contributions as you continue your music education.

Today, we’re going to talk about the philosophy behind production. Of course, we first start with the song. The song is the reason why we’re all here. The song is the reason I have a job, and it’s also the reason why music education and music industry people such as attorneys and record company executives and so forth all have jobs. It all starts with the song.

As a producer, I oversee how that song gets arranged, finished and recorded as well the colors that accompany that song, such as the instrumentation, the emotions, and the performances. I help the artist guide that song to its proper place by finding out what the artist means, who the artist wants to speak to, and the emotional intention behind the song. The process involves having the song and the artist inform me, followed by me guiding that artist through the process of coming up with the best possible version that represents everything they want the song to represent to their public.

Producing music, records, and any sort of multimedia always starts with the song. If you ask 10 different people what a producer does, you’ll get 10 different answers because it’s so ambiguous. Every artist and every song needs a different treatment and help in different areas. Some need no help at all. Some need you to just stay out of the way and pay the bills. Others need intense help with song structure, such as songwriting, arranging, recording, and performance. The song, the artist, the artist’s audience, and the song’s goals define our role as producers.

Music has always been sourced from a variety of different places. When I started out, I would stuff physical envelopes with CDs and handwritten notes. I would try to make them stand out by putting them in bright pink or purple jiffies in hopes that they would somehow make it to the top of the stack. I really did have a strategy. It was a little funky but logical. It’s overwhelming to think about how many envelopes people in this industry are getting every day.

Sourcing and Streaming in the Music Industry

The way that we source music now has changed over time. Now the digital download and streaming services are king. In a sense, things were easier before because there weren’t infinite possibilities living within two clicks of a mouse. Now you can get songs instantly on your computer, laptop, phone, iPad, or any other device that you use. So, I think now it’s about curation and filtering.

Certain companies like Spotify have done well to create playlists for people based on the songs and artists they have listened to. I know this is an algorithm, but there is someone programming that. They have figureheads that do research and create lists based on what’s happening around them.

Radio Is Not Dead

A lot of this research is still built around things that have been around forever. One example of this is radio. There are a lot of charts on Spotify that mirror what’s happening in radio. Some people say that radio is dead but that’s not true. Radio is still a great tool for getting music to the masses when physical artists can’t be in a specific place at a specific time.

I believe that streaming services and insourcing are continuing to hone in on this method of curation with better filters. However, I still think there needs to be some sort of human connection or human aspect. Having a human behind the scenes provides emotion, which draws in many listeners. Emotion can’t be captured in an algorithm or on a computer.

Algorithms Can’t Compare to Humans

Do you know that thing on Spotify that shows related songs and artists to the ones you are currently listening to? That feature has a lot to do with human and technology working together.

Studies are claiming to be able to figure out exactly when and why people are skipping specific songs. But, as far as sourcing goes, it’s still about person-to-person relationships and recommendations. However, the way that we do these things has changed over time. Curation is still the most important part of all of this; we just need to dial it in a little more.