Basically, a synchronization license is what it sounds like. You’re syncing one form of media with another form of media. In this case, it means visual media. It can also mean syncing live media with music media. So that means taking this file here that’s a music file, this file here that’s a video file and manipulating them so that they sync up.

So that’s what it means from a technical point of view. There is a particular license, called a synchronization license, that is representative of that technical experience. When people talk about sync licenses, that’s what they’re talking about. And just like there’s a sync license for sound recordings or masters, there’s a sync license for publishing. We’ll get back to that later on.

The stems are the heart of what we need in a lot of music licensing. Because there are instances, and trailers in video games, but also in film, TV, and ads. Creative people in the music industry may not want to hear this, but where people are going to want to take your music, and they’re going to slice and dice it a little bit so that they can customize it for that particular commercial, television show or film.

Because when it comes to luxury, it’s as much about where it’s from as who it’s for. Now, we’re from America, but this isn’t New York City or the Windy City. You’re seeing the city. And we’re certainly no one’s Emerald City.

If you really want to succeed in sync, you have to be somewhat flexible. You need to be able to rise to the occasion. If they say, “You know what? We need an instrumental version. Can you do that? Can you compress cadence down to 60 seconds? Can you give us just the horn section and the bass drum right now?” You need to deliver. And that means they want you to give them the stems.

Those things are really important, because unfortunately in sync, it’s not really a subjective portion of the business as much as it is a combination of subjective and objective. That means that when people think about their music, they think about it as a chapter in a book. It’s a story. It’s a thing. It’s an entity that exists. And you don’t slice and dice it or chop it up. It’s an expression. It’s meant to say something. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. That’s a really creative, subjective point of view. And people will either like it or not like it, you’ll come to learn as you continue your online music education.

From the sync point of view, you have something that is certainly subjective. The music is great. It has to be of really great quality. But on the other hand, your music is being used to fulfill an objective that is particular to that project.

So your music is being used to enhance a Coca-Cola commercial, or to enhance a story on a TV show, or a particular moment in a film, or to accentuate the excitement of a trailer. So you also have to look at that, in terms of how the music is being used. And because they’re using it in an objective way, they’re sometimes going to ask for it not to be in its full story form. That’s why the stems are important. That’s an important lesson to learn in music education.

If we want to talk about stems for a moment from a practical point of view, you need to have vocals. You need to have the rhythm, maybe the baseline, maybe a guitar line. Just break it out into its components.

What will happen won’t sound as horrific as it sounds, because there’s going to be a dialogue at that point. If they’re really into what you’re doing, they’re going to work with you. They want it to sound really good, too. After all, they’re not just coming to you because they want some generic stuff. They want you and your sound. So it’s going to be probably more fun than it sounds. You just have to have your music ready.

Everybody says metadata is extremely important. But I’m going to say that mastering and mixing come first. The second aspect to look at is metadata. You’ve got to make sure that you have the basic information available to anyone who is listening to your music so they know what it is.

Most importantly, they need to know how to contact you if they want to. There are so many stories that every music supervisor can give you about how they loved a piece of music, but they just couldn’t get in touch with the artist, and they had to move on to something else because their deadlines were tight, and they didn’t have time to spend their days just researching somebody who didn’t take the time to present themselves properly. An important part of music education is knowing how to market yourself.

So what is good basic metadata? It’s actually fairly simple. What you’ve got to do is you’ve got to put down the artist name, the writers’ names, and your performance rights organization. So BMI, ASCAP, SESAC are the organizations in the US. Let us know which one it is. Let us have a contact, email, and phone number if possible. But at least an email or a phone number, probably an email is the most efficient. But just do both. That’s the best advice you’ll get as far as online music education goes.

Of course, you’ve got to have the name of the track. There’s an album attached to it. There should be an album name to it. If you have a label, the label. If you have a publisher, publisher. If you don’t, just say you’re independent. But make sure all of that information is there. Those are the real basics.

If you really want to get into things, you can start to put in the genre. You can put in beats per minute. You can put in French horn in the chorus if you feel like it. But those are really secondary things so don’t go crazy stuffing too much info if it’s not really necessary.

The most important thing is making sure that there is a way to get in touch with you as an artist. So that’s number one. Metadata is very important to remember. And then the next thing is to just make sure that alongside the mastering and mixing, the quality of the sound file that you’re sending is high. You don’t have to send an AIFF or a wave file. But if you’re going to send an MP3, make sure it’s at least 192 kbps. It simply cannot be a low-quality file. Because they’re going to want to listen to it at least with the same quality that you’re listening to music on your headphones on a phone.

The music publishing and record businesses really resisted rock and roll and rhythm and blues for quite a while. There were some events that happened in the 1960s, however, that really turned the tables and put rock and soul front and center.

Music had became more sophisticated, leading rhythm and blues to morph into something called “soul music.” In a simpler sense, soul music was rhythm and blues merged with the harmonies, rhythms, and cadences of the Black church. Some of the early specialists in soul music were Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, and Jackie Wilson.

The Father of Soul

There was a very important entrepreneur in the early soul music industry. A man named Berry Gordy owned a jazz record store in Detroit. It went out of business because kids were not buying jazz records anymore, so he decided to create rhythm and blues records.

Berry Gordy, however, did something that no record entrepreneur had ever done before. He created an assembly line, much like the auto plants in Detroit. He had teams of songwriters writing songs and teams of producers working with performers to get the songs onto records. He had a world-class band of in-house musicians called the Funk Brothers. He had his own management and publishing companies, and even his own charm school and choreography school.

Motown was a one-stop shop. It was the birth of something music producers now call “artist development,” with Berry Gordy as its father.

Assembling a Mowtown Track

“I think during the Motown era, the wonderful thing about the entire music company was that artists had an opportunity to develop in so many areas,” comments vocal music professor and record producer Marlon Saunders. Indeed, artists had the ability to rehearse and work through harmonies. They learned how to sing together, be in the recording studio, go on the road, and perform on stage. They also had time to develop as artists.

Motown was a different era, so artists had tremendous hands-on experience happening quickly and in the moment. “So in the midst of everybody being in the room, and everything happening at the same time, your game has to really, really, really be focused. Because, you think about it, if everyone’s in the room and they’re hitting the button to record, one mistake, you got to start over,” Saunders says. “So that means the level of concentration was different.”

We live in a world where people can access on-demand online music education and work towards everything being perfect. It is amazing that we have gotten to that ability. But, as a singer, your subconscious mind may tell you that you can always re-record the song or tune the recording. “If you don’t have that, if that was never something that you could envision, even how you practiced was different,” says Saunders. Singers practiced for perfection, making the skill level different.

The Appeal of Soul

Smokey Robinson wrote “The Tracks of My Tears” for his Motown band, The Miracles. “Take a good look at my face. You’ll see my smile looks out of place,” reads the chorus. “If you look closer it’s easy to track the tracks of my tears.”

“Who writes like that?” asks Kerry Gordy, fourth-generation record producer and the son of Berry Gordy. “You know, it’s like that’s some amazing, amazing writing.” When producers at Motown would receive songs, they would break them down, listen to them, and make sure that they really said something. “And that’s the reason why our songs, 50 years later, are still doing well and still amazing,” he opines.

Gordy takes awe in that he can sit with young people and sing “I guess you say, what can make me feel this way?” Everyone will respond singing “my girl,” the refrain of a now 50-year-old song. “So think about that,” he says. “That is the concept of how we wrote our songs at Motown.”

Gordy is a passionate person when it comes to both the song and to the artist. People in marketing will say that a song is nothing without the marketing. “I say, you’re correct, but it’s nothing without that song that actually inspires the feeling, and the thought, and the passion,” he responds.

One of my favorite examples of marketing upon completion comes from the great artist D’Angelo.

For those of you familiar with his music, he released his third album just a few years ago. I recommend his “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” and “Really Love.”

I think he released the album in 2014. One thing that was previously very frustrating for his fans was that he waited about 13 or 14 years after he debuted his second album to debut his third one. He released a second album in 2000 and then waited until 2014. That’s a really big gap of time.

Many people wondered if the fans were still going to be around to even check out album number three. Would a new generation of fans even know who this artist is when his other album finally dropped? There were all of these questions, right? But regardless of the concerns, the album just came out. There was no announcement. It just appeared one day in December 2014.

The Luck Factor

The third album was quickly both a critical and commercial success. But, when we do a postgame analysis of his success, it’s like, wow, that was really risky. How did D’Angelo even know the fans were still going to be around? I can’t even attribute this win to a specific strategy. The songs are really good, and his fans just happened to be around.

Relatable Content Plays a Role

Where am I going with this story? Even though D’Angelo hasn’t made a record in four years, this fact doesn’t mean that he’s living in another world. Obviously, there are topics in his third album that seem very current because of what’s happening across this country in the streets.

I was listening to it after marching yesterday, and all I could think was that this is the soundtrack to the revolution that I thought I was walking in. It makes us more powerful and more vocal and gives us a presence at a time when we are having an identity crisis in this country.

Music Education

Marketing after the completion of a work is obviously a risky decision. I don’t know many artists who have enough understanding of the music and the culture and how to do it. It’s interesting to think, “OK, he was just putting it out and hoping for the best.” Few artists in the music industry have been able to reproduce this type of success without extensive pre-release marketing campaigns.

An online music education can help you learn more about this and other marketing topics and help you to make more sense of your goals and the type of marketing you want to focus on when you are the musical artist trying to draw interest to your work.

Many artists are collaborating with multimedia artists at this stage in our industry to create a truly unique and larger-than-life experience. It is critical to attempt to create something that has never existed before.

“The biggest thing about collaborating is completely removing your ego. When you remove your ego, you allow yourself to open different chapters that you may not know about that the person next to you may know about,” says Kendrick Lamar.

“I’m going to draw. You’re hearing the music and you’re flowing from your head to your hand,” states Shantell Martin.

“This is why we see many artists collaborating with different people—developing a new world to venture into, such as Beyonce, Sia, and Charli XCX. I try to make a lasting impression on my students by showing them videos of these performances actively including online music education,” continues Kendrick Lamar.

Sia, for example, works with a different visual artist for each show. This exposes her work to new communities and the creation of others in the music industry. And this type of audience sharing is the direction we see our music industry taking. So we must consider what we can gain from collaborating with others to build these relationships in music.

Playback is, in my opinion, one of the most important trends in technology right now in terms of performance. We’ve known about playback for a long time. It started with tape machines, then people in the “Talking Heads” film.

The very first song is on a boombox, which he plays. Then we moved on to CDs, minidiscs, DVDs, and everything else.

However, we now have multi-track playback equipment that greatly assists performers in being able to separate the tracks so that they may be observed blended as well. Triggering these playback devices is an art form in and of itself present in music education.

So there are a plethora of new controllers on the market from virtually every firm that will assist us in genuinely imagining movement within this procedure. As a result of this triggering, some people are developing dance performances.

Another example is the use of video. I know many artists who utilize their videos as the primary character in their performances. Anohni, for example, is someone with whom you’ll be watching an experimental video series. Off-screen, the singing is pleasant.

Sia’s Coachella performance was a prime illustration of this. Right now, the emphasis isn’t so much on the vocalist. It is concentrated on a broader presentation. We’ve seen this with holograms, such as Tupac. Sophie, an electronic DJ who uses lights. People are creating an experience rather than focusing attention on themselves. And I want my pupils to develop their ideas about how to use these multimedia tools.

Technology has drastically altered performance. On stage, you may now generate the sound of an orchestra with just one track. You may also trigger such things using a variety of instruments. Some of it is on display. Some of it is being performed on a saxophone and a piano.

At this point, we can make any item emit any sound. We may also experiment with images, videos, holograms, and costumes integrating MIDI. One person on stage can produce a louder sound than 20 people.

“Give you love, give you love, give you love, give you love, give you love, give you love, give you love, give you love. Oh, my goodness, you’re the one.” It’ll never be finished because the goals are so lofty. Emily Wells sings, “Mama’s gonna give you love.”

This is huge for electronic musicians. We can do everything ourselves, which can be financially beneficial to the artist’s economy.

In the digital age, performance is split into two different areas: linear and nonlinear. For example, if you’re listening to internet radio on NPR or satellite radio, like XM or Sirius, there’s a royalty, a linear royalty, which is different than a nonlinear royalty. For example, if you’re choosing songs not in a row, and you’re not listening to an internet radio station, maybe you’re choosing some of your favorite songs or a playlist that you made on your Spotify; that would be a nonlinear royalty.

Linear royalties are collected by an organization in the music industry called SoundExchange. You register your song with SoundExchange and they collect those linear royalties for you. In the case of nonlinear royalties, like an Apple Music or Spotify song, for example, they pay the artist directly. Those performance royalties can add up, and these days, now more than ever, it’s a main source of income for many artists who are generating a significant amount of spins online. This is important to know if you’re into music education or taking online music education courses.

Last but not least are sync fees. Sync fees are paid any time your song is placed in a commercial, a TV show, an online commercial, or film. That song must be licensed. There’s a master fee and a publishing fee. The publishing fee is collected by your publisher, who quotes on your behalf, or in your case, you quote on your behalf how much you are licensing your song for. In the case of the master recording, that will be licensed by your record company or by you (if you own your own masters).

One thing that I always tell my students is that every single one of them has an “it” factor. So, the process is just figuring out what your “it” factor is about and how you can relay it to your audience in the best way possible.

Finding Your “It” Factor With Music Education

Every single student has a story to tell that has never been told before. Likewise, every student has the capability of speaking to a different group of people that have never been together before. Throughout this class, my students find their “it” factor and who their community is.

Defining Your Role in a Group

I often tell my students to look at the people around them and study their roles. Look at their families, their friends, and their classmates and see what their capabilities are. For example, a cruise director will have a different set of artistic abilities than a peacemaker would have. I try to get my students to figure out how they see themselves within their groups to help them understand what they can bring to an audience.

Persona Performance

Performance is the authenticity of yourself. We discover who you want to be, who you are capable of being on stage, and what character you want to audience to see. This applies to on-stage performance, social media presence, interviews, and more.

There are many ways to think about persona. One example is a person’s alter ego versus their true, authentic self. Many artists believe that once they decide what their persona is, it can never be changed. However, persona is a fluid process that is constantly shifting and evolving.

Persona in the Music Industry

Lady Gaga is an excellent example of how persona plays a role in music. She debuted her project as an alter ego, then, through time, she shifted from one alter ego to another. Creating that conceptual relationship to her persona brought her different kinds of audiences. It also created a story for her to tell over and over again. This project was separated from her persona, which can be healthy for an artist. It allows artists to live their lives without the duality of a persona and a self.

Persona Is a Process

Your intention, narrative, and what you want to do with the persona you have created are what you aim for with this kind of artistry. Do you want to change the world? Do you want to throw a party? All of these things are important to think about when we decide what the point of our artistry is.

Where we want to take and see our artistry helps us to define the storytelling. After this, we can begin to see how the story that we created matches up with the story of our lives. The narrative that we build will become the first chapter of our identity.

Artistry is a process. One day, you might feel like writing a sad song, and the next day, you might feel like writing an anthem. Once you feel comfortable and safe with your own persona, as an artist, the character can shift and change throughout time. David Bowie is a great example of this kind of shift in artistry. He started out one way, then created an alter ego for himself, then returned to who he truly felt like he was inside.

These artistry shifts are all relative to what’s happening at the time. They can be affected by history, politics, and the current trends around the artist. You can really float with your audience to learn what they want and what you want. Making these types of connections lead to a successful journey together.

A great case study of utilizing positive exclusivity is another orthogonal example. Surprisingly, it’s Facebook, not the Music Industry. When Facebook first got started, it was not available to everyone on the planet as it is today. It used to be highly exclusive.

When Facebook was first created, you had to have a .edu email address from a particular school to even use it. At the very beginning of Facebook, you had to have a Harvard email address to access it. A few months later, they expanded to about 20 to 30 more schools.

However, if you weren’t attending one of those schools like NYU, Northwestern or Cal Arts, you couldn’t get on Facebook. Obviously, most of you know that they eventually opened it up to the whole world, but in those first moments when they were very exclusive, there were a lot of components happening. The exclusivity really resonated with people.

Everyone Wants to Be Included

First of all, when you are included in that sort of exclusive phase, you just feel cool. Exclusivity tends to instill a lot of FOMO (fear of missing out) in people who aren’t a part of the club. If you’re included, you feel as though you’re on a train that’s leaving, and maybe other people aren’t taking that ride with you. Exclusivity taps into a higher-level concept called network externalities. This is a vital tactic for a new artist trying to build an audience.

The concept of network externalities basically states that a small group of people who are connected, who actually have something in common, who know each other and who communicate can, in theory, organize to get things done and accomplish a lot more than a huge group of people who don’t know each other. This is why Facebook, even though there were only a few universities using it, was able to blow Myspace out of the water.

For those of you who remember, Myspace was rooted in the idea that you might have hundreds, maybe thousands, of friends, but no one really knew them. No one communicated with them. Meanwhile, the 30 friends you might have on Facebook were actually spreading the product more because they were talking to each other constantly. That’s because they really were your friends.

Connections Are Key

This concept can also be seen in political movements. Many grassroots movements have deep connections with small groups of people when they start. These people are communicating and sharing ideas fast. Often, these movements can outpace something that seems like a juggernaut because people associated with the bigger group aren’t actually communicating. With network externality, it’s essential to get your audience talking to each other.

Perfecting Music by Being Patient

The last part of positive exclusivity, from a creator standpoint — for those of you who write songs, for those of you who make things — is that it allows you to perfect your product before it’s brought out in the open to be judged by the whole world.

People should be encouraged to play their songs and share what they are working on with others early in their creative process, even before they think it’s done. This gives you the feedback you need to make it better. An example of positive exclusivity and music education would be deciding to only play your music in your hometown for the next year before moving on to other towns.

Even if your fans in those other towns say they want you to come play there, sticking to your home venue allows you to workshop the songs you’re creating, perfect them. By the time you open them up to everybody, you know they’re going to work.

Worth the Wait

This method is exactly what Facebook did when they moved from just a handful of universities to the whole world. By the time they made the switch, they knew that they had something solid that the world wanted. It may have been a slower process, but it was perfected in the end.

I’m JD Samson, a professor of performance and artistry at the Clive Davis Institute. I’m going to talk to you a little bit about authenticity and intention narrative and all the things it takes to put on the best live show you can in the music industry.

I’ve worked with Christina Aguilera, Kathleen Hanna, and Yuksek. I was the music director for Peaches. I also have worked with Sia on many different projects, including songwriting and performances, and some other incredible writers, performers, and producers. I love collaborating with new people.

Before we get started in this module on music education, I can’t stress enough that this journey of becoming a performer and an artist is completely nonlinear. You can choose your own adventure. You should be exploring this journey on your own unique path, which means it can ebb and flow. There can be fluidity within the process, and I’d love for you to choose your journey as you see fit.

We all have different bodies, and they’re unique to us in many different ways. The public sees our bodies in one way, while we’ve grown up with our bodies in other ways. As you launch your career, being comfortable and feeling safe in your body are going to put you light years ahead of other people in the music industry.

Think about the way you breathe. Just like we practice with our instruments every single day, we should do breathing exercises in order to grow and expand our lungs. This will help us get to a place where we feel comfortable singing and performing at a high capacity every day.

Another thing to focus on is understanding who you are and how you fit into the world. Your anxiety, confidence, and insecurities — all these things help you to really exist in the present. These are the three pillars that will help you to become the best performer you can be.

One book I like to look at when thinking about how to exist in my body comfortably is “Deep Listening” by Pauline Oliveros. I recommend that you complete some of the practices she lays out in this book because they can help you feel comfortable in your body, comfortable in your breath, and comfortable within yourself.
is
Understanding your voice and how to project it requires two different techniques. One is for speaking in a room with no amplification, and the other is for performing on stage with a microphone. You must learn not only how to enunciate but also how to project your voice so that you feel it vibrating and resonating. When you do these things, people will be able to hear and understand you.

When you’re on stage with a microphone, it’s an amazing tool. The microphone loves air. It loves breath. Because of this, we don’t have to project as hard. Many times, people “over sing” on the mic because they don’t realize that the air-to-tone ratio is incredibly important.

You can be on the mic and just barely talk. It will give you a nice, resonant sound. Artists need to spend quality time with the mic. Being in the studio on the mic is its own lesson. Being on stage with the microphone is a completely different lesson in your music education.

Every aspect of performance requires that you know and become comfortable with the inner workings of your instrument and your breath. This includes your breathing. Understand how to breathe and where your breath comes from. Understand how the diaphragm and the lungs work when you take a full breath. A complete understanding of this process is very important.

When it comes to music, one of the most important things an artist must pay attention to is vocal stamina, which starts with correct breathing. Breathing is the most important part of the entire process. My main suggestion for artists is to set a metronome to 74 BPM. Inhale for four beats, then hold your breath for four beats. Then exhale for four beats, and finally, relax for four beats.

Every part of this process occurs at four beats, except for the exhalation. The goal is to take in the inhalation and then to exhale so that you can reach about 32 beats, then 36 beats. In this way, you can feel the movement of the air as you listen to the metronome.

You want to make sure that there is a continual flow of air so you can feel the connection. You want to feel it within you, and feel your diaphragm and lungs as they expand and contract. This is a very important process.

The key to vocal longevity and vocal health is understanding that no one part of the instrument can dominate. The key to it is the same as the way the body works. The parts work together. If you’re a singer who sings in the lower register, get to know your upper register. If you sing primarily in the upper register, get to know your lower register.

That wonderful section in-between — the Italians call it the passaggio — is the passageway. This is the key. If you get the passageway right so that your voice becomes balanced, then you can go from bottom to top and vice versa.

My old vocal coach Kenneth Kamal Scott used to say that it is the top of the voice that teaches you how to sing. The top teaches the bottom and the bottom gives way to the top.

We tend to push, push, push, push, push. But we find that the singers who put us in awe, those who can sing for years and years, have voices that are balanced. They are seamless voices from top to bottom.