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.

At the beginning of each semester in this music education class, we have the students write down all of their favorite performances and why they were their favorite performances. Then, we have them write down all their least favorite performances and why those are their least favorite performances. And then we have these tools to look at for the rest of the semester that really shape what we think is good and what we think is not so good about certain performers.

Before you go on stage, you should be able to look at this list and say, “Oh, well, I’m not going to not care about what I’m doing,” or “I’m not going to be off key when I’m performing,” or “I’m not going to just stand there and look at my feet.” If these were things we didn’t like about other people, then we shouldn’t do them ourselves.

One of those qualities I see year after year is that students don’t like it when the person doesn’t feel into it. What we want to focus on is really getting lost in your music and what can make you do that. Some people need the music to be really loud on stage. Create that for yourself. Tell the sound engineer you need it louder.

Some people say, “I don’t want to hear myself that much. It takes me out of it.” Then, turn yourself down on the monitors. These are all things that we learn so that we can really feel as lost as we can be on that stage and in the music and exactly where we want to be in the music industry.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.