In terms of media, film is the one where there’s usually more time. There’s usually a much more thought-out process in terms of getting what they need and sort of playing with different ideas. Because films take a little bit of time to put together. The music industry has nuances, depending on the type of media you want your music to end up in, so make sure you do your research for the type you want.

Television is usually very short. Very short timelines. So they’re going to want something where it’s going to really be something that is either going to be right there in your face, or you’re going to have to react really quickly to it.

Let’s talk about other forms of media. The first thing I’m going to say is really, really important for your music education. This touches a bit on video games, but it’s really pertinent to all forms of media. Do your research.

Research everything you can get your hands on. Go on IMDB. Go on YouTube. If you want to figure out how to make good trailer music, go and watch a bunch of trailers on YouTube. It’s as simple as that.

Just go on YouTube and look up trailers for films that you want, or that you like the sound of, or that you want to submit to. That’s the first order of business; do your research. Remember to always do your research as you continue your online music education.

Find out if there’s a music supervisor who does some cool stuff. Let’s say we have a music supervisor coming in on Saturday. His name is Chris Mollere! And Chris Mollere has done Get Out. He’s done Pretty Little Liars, Vampire Diaries, a whole bunch of stuff. If people want to connect music to him, first point that you need to do is to research, and find out what is it exactly that this guy’s done.

What kinds of TV shows as he worked on? What kinds of films has he worked on? What are his current projects? Armed with that info, go and listen to that. Get a feel for it.

And then be honest with yourself. Say, “Okay, I know what this person’s kind of music is. Does my music fit? Am I going to give them something that they’re going to use and will make them want to come to me? Or something where they’re going to think that this person doesn’t even know how to research? They don’t even know what they’re looking for.” That’s the first order of business; do your research.

As for the different forms of media, if you want to work with a particular brand or you want to work in ads, look up the ads of that brand. Look at what they’ve done. You want to have trailer music? There’s a specific formula for trailer music. Go watch a lot of trailers and then figure that out from there.

If you want to work with film, the best thing to do is to look at a lot of the films wherein you would want to have your music featured. The same goes for television shows. Research the TV shows and the music supervisors and what they do.

Finally, in video games, if you’re submitting for games, you had better play that game. You should just look at the video games that you like. That’s the best way to start off; if there are video games that you want to put music into, check out what’s been already been done in that franchise or genre.

If you like Super Mario, which goes back probably 30 years or so, it’s got some history behind it. You can take a look at YouTube if you know you don’t have access to a Super Nintendo. Really do your research and see what has Nintendo done during this time.

Or let’s take another example. Let’s take a look at the Metal Gear franchise. Metal Gear’s been around for way, way too long. Probably about the same amount of time as Mario. And they’ve had a certain sound and a certain feel to it.

So if you want to create great music for video games, take a look at the video games that are being created. Take a look at the kinds of music that they’ve used. Try to gear yourself towards that, or gear yourself towards submitting music for video games that is close to the music that’s being used.

That’s really what it comes down to. Out of everything I said about video games and how to submit to them, just play the game. Listen to the music. You should know.

I played Gran Turismo for years. And I played Ridge Racer. I like racing games, so I played those for years. I know the kind of music that they use.

I have to say to myself, “If I was making music, am I going to make music for those? Or do I want to make music for something that’s more like a Warcraft, or something that’s like Civilization? A racing game, a real-time strategy game, or a simulation game?” There are many genres and each have their own sound.

It just comes from doing your research and knowing what kind of project you’re submitting to.

Collaboration is a true art. It can be difficult to make boundaries with other musicians and be willing to let go of control.

DJ and rapper Ali Shaheed Muhammad experienced the difficulty of collaboration first hand as a member of the seminal hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest. After a string of successful albums, he and the group’s lead rappers Q-Tip and Phife Dawg had trouble working together.

“The only change I saw was just to see those guys’ relationship deteriorate,” Muhammad says. “Phife had a problem with me. Dude, I’m in a group with you. You’re not my dad. … That was the end of it for me. All good things must come to an end. 20 years, man, I done everything I could.”

Control and collaboration are challenging aspects of working together. You have a sense of ownership over your own creative endeavor, and you don’t want to relinquish it to someone else. However, the people you work with may be giving expertise to the project, which will benefit everyone. Allowing oneself to let go while simultaneously preserving those limits is a really crucial skill to have. This is something you learn through online music education.

Sometimes it’s important for artists to collaborate with others, and sometimes it’s not. Knowing when it’s important is great, and knowing when it’s not is even better. Approaching collaboration as an idea is something that you have to take a lot of care with. Some people are not the right collaborators because they’re too pushy, or they’re not pushy enough.

Of course you also need to right artistic partner, someone who has been successful in the past with their initiatives. It’s crucial to know how they’ve kept their jobs financially afloat. All of their skills should be in areas that you would like to have on your project but are unable to bring to it yourself. You don’t need them if you can bring people to it yourself.

When the process is incredibly intimate, we don’t require a collaborator. You don’t want to be engaged with someone when you know what you want and know it’s so personal to you that you can’t truly have someone else’s opinion on it. This is a big component of being able to say no. Setting limits with your collaboration is critical in music.

And it’s all part of a bigger picture of self-awareness. Creating limits with your colleague in terms of money contracts, how much space to take up on stage, and social media interactions are all critical considerations. You should consider your collaboration to be a marriage.

In music education, I like to discuss the concept of your band as your gang. If you’re forming a band, they are the folks you’d want to hang out with all the time. Those folks should be people you trust to walk your dog, remain in your apartment while you’re away, drive your car, and care for you when you’re sick. All of these very individual qualities are desirable in a collaborator in the music industry.

The ability to critique yourself and others, and hear others’ critiques, is a true art in itself. Most of us tend to forget that this is a part of artistry, but in truth, it’s probably one of the biggest parts of it, especially once you reach a certain level. Keeping your cool, understanding yourself, and really taking the time to sit with every critique is really important.

As part of my class, we focus a lot on critiquing other people and critiquing ourselves, because it really helps us along the process of building our stamina for criticism in general. Our students critique each other on their performances, their songs, and their ability to be onstage and feel safe.

A lot of critique is really about figuring out what you’re good at, figuring out what you’re bad at, and what you need to improve on. What gets in the way sometimes is our instinct to be competitive with one another. We have to think of ourselves like we’re on two different trains moving next to each other. You can speed up and slow down, and that other person can speed up and slow down, but it doesn’t really matter who gets there first.

When providing feedback to other students, we really try to disregard this polarity idea that it’s either good or bad. Instead, giving feedback such as some things that could be worked on, or some suggestions for the future is a really helpful way of critiquing another artist.

This conversation about critique leads us into a conversation about collaboration, because really understanding how other people communicate is a major part of collaboration, as well as a major part of being able to be involved with your community of artists. So, within collaboration, we understand each other’s expertise. For example, this person is a great singer, and I’m a great drummer. Why don’t we do something together?

It’s about being able to trust each other within your creative process. This is really, really important. Sometimes, critique can be complicated, particularly when you’re not in a safe space or when you don’t already trust each other. So, the critique part of this conversation typically happens later on, after you’ve identified that you’re in a group of people that you can feel safe and comfortable around.

In this day and age of the internet, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter—all of these anonymous ways that people can critique you, it’s really hard to not get stuck in what other people think of you. That codependency with your crowd can be really debilitating. That’s where you have to come back to your authenticity, and your story, and your self-awareness, to understand where your confidence lies.

Instead of worrying about that person anonymously criticizing you, it’s important that you see your life and story as it is, wholly, rather than just that one moment.

If you have interest in a career in music, or simply want to learn more about the music industry and how it functions, online music education might be perfect for you. With the convenience of online learning, you can achieve your music education from the comfort of your own home and learn more about the value of critique and collaboration.

Who comes to mind when you hear “request a ride”? Uber. Who comes to mind when you hear “order it online”? Amazon. And who comes to mind when you hear “grunge”? Nirvana.

So, what’s going on here? Why do almost all of us think pretty much the same answers to these questions that, honestly, there could be multiple answers to? We could have easily said Lyft, or eBay, or Pearl Jam, right? And they all would have been acceptable answers. However, most of us likely thought of the same names.

What’s going on here is that there is this concept of creating a category that a lot of times inadvertently happens in marketplaces. Whether you’re kind of the first person to start something, or you’re the definitive market leader, categories start being referred to for what you’re doing.

When we’re starting out and trying to build an audience, one of the really difficult things, especially for those of us who write songs and make music, is that we quickly get lumped into a category. Not only are these existing categories, but categories that sometimes have been around for over a hundred years, meaning there’s really no chance of becoming a market leader for that category.

If I say I make R&B music, first of all, you might be thinking of something different when I say it than what I’m actually making. And secondly, the chances of me establishing myself early on as the number one result for the R&B genre are pretty much zero.

So, what we need to think about is this concept called the law of category, which says that if you can’t be first in the category that you’re in, then you need to create a new category—you need to create your own category name. People have chosen to do this in a number of ways, ranging from merging together genre names to just coming up with something that’s complete gibberish.

There was a great artist I worked with who makes a kind of electronic music but didn’t want to just describe it that way. So he came back one day and said “I make Tron bop hop.” I told him I had no idea what that was, but then he played me some of his new song, and I completely understood. Somehow, it sounded like “Tron bop hop”.

Now, after a while of using that in his tag instead of just electronic music, when you search on Google for “Tron bop hop”, he’s the top result. Not only that but as other artists start seeing that tag used, some of them want to use it as well. So when EDM blew up, a lot of people that had never called themselves EDM started doing so. When that happens, what it actually does is push up the leader.

If you create your own category, and then a year later I use that same name, I’m actually, in a way, inadvertently promoting you as well. So, category creation is a really important part of building your image and being seen as a singular entity, and not just one of a million people doing the same thing. Now, you can likely see why it’s important to learn how to identify an existing art form or define a new one. It’s because creating your own category and identifying existing ones is a huge part of being able to really communicate, and to identify who your audience is going to be.

With online music education, you can learn more about finding success and crafting your own lane in the music industry, as well as many other important lessons and concepts that come with a quality music education.

The history of the music industry is an important piece of any music education or online music education. What many might not realize is how early folk artists heavily influenced the modern music industry in ways you wouldn’t expect. It began with mobile recorders traveling to find otherwise undiscovered talents.

Reebee Garofalo talks about a division in the music industry and that there was a carriage trade, as he called it. What he meant by that was a very upscale market for music and a cracker barrel trade, which essentially is a downscale market for music. There were sections of the music industry that really catered to this sort of downscale market, and they sought out, essentially, the sound of the common folk or folk music.

What were the songs that eventually made it onto the records? Entrepreneurs like Ralph Peer crossed the country with mobile recorders in an attempt to find hillbilly artists and blues artists to record. These were local singers and songwriters who would not have been known to the outside world otherwise.

As one example, Ralph Peer was the first person to record Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter family.

Hillbilly songs and sounds later became known as country or country and western. Two other towering figures of this time were John and Alan Lomax. They were folklorists who managed to record lots and lots of blues tunes from all over the country.

John and Alan Lomax discovered artists like Lead Belly. Alan Lomax was later very much a patron and supporter of Woody Guthrie. Alan Lomax taught a lot of these songs to a young man named Pete Seeger, who then, in turn, mentored somebody named Bob Dylan. There is a genealogy of popular music that can be traced back to the work of these early field recording music entrepreneurs.

The front-of-house engineer is going to help you make a seamless transition between paper and live performances.

Up here at the front-of-house, the centerpiece of the sound system is the console. In smaller venues in the music industry, you’ll just have a stage box that has Wi-Fi and connects via an iPad. They can actually be controlled by a tablet and the software looks like the control surface.

For the most part, everything that would have normally existed in an analog world is all in your control tablet. In the old days and in certain older venues, you have a console. You’d have some control over the sound system in rack-mounted form. You can also control effects. This includes making enhancements to whatever is coming into the console from the stage.

The console connects to the stage via something called a “snake”. A snake in the analog world is literally a long cable that’s also called the multi-core cable. It has multiple wires in it that connect to the stage box. Nowadays, you have a digital snake. It’s still called a multi-core because it’s got multiplex digital signals coming in from a digital stage box that connects to the computer.

These are called DI boxes. Without getting too technical, they convert an instrument quarter-inch cable to an XLR cable. The reason is that those two kinds of signals have different impedances. That’s something that you probably want to learn about as you continue your online music education.

A lot of times, because we have a lot of signals coming from computers or audio interfaces or synthesizers or drum machines or iPads, they really want to get that data out. So we have boxes for that.

Monitors are typically speakers that you’ll find on a stage or wherever you’re performing. You need them because you’re usually not in front of the speakers when you’re performing your music.

If you look at most stages, there will be a stage and then a sound system in front of it. So you’re hearing everything coming back at you from the room. In a perfect world, that’s fine, and everything sounds good, and you’re able to perform with confidence and enjoy yourself and hear everything and play in tune.

However, that’s not always the case. So we add speakers that point at the artists in the opposite direction of the audience. This can help you to confirm that the balance between all the instruments are specific to your needs. For example, sometimes you don’t need to hear the prerecorded string symphony on your backing tracks in order to sing.

Or you’ve already heard it a million times and all you want to do is just concentrate on your vocals. That’s part of interfacing with either the monitor engineer or the house engineer, and doing that in such a way that you both can agree on it and is beneficial to the performance and hopefully to the audience. Because sometimes the audience can hear them, too.

Then you have microphones. They convert acoustic air pressure into voltage, which will go into the snake. From there, it will go where it needs to. That’s the first thing that connects a person or an amplifier or a drum to the snake.

Microphones come in different shapes and sizes. And they do different things. Usually, you can kind of tell what a microphone is going to do based on how it’s designed. But not always. There are no hard rules. But a lot of people use certain kinds of microphones for bass drum or a bass guitar amps or just something low.

The SM58 is probably one of the common mics in the world. You see it on vocals, but really, you can use it for anything. This is the kind of microphone that you usually see in front of a guitar amp because it looks kind of like an amp. Most engineers work with the band to figure out what you like or how to use what you have.

It’s really good to know ahead of time what your input list is, and specifically which parts of that input list you want to hear in your monitors.

You may not necessarily need a specific vocabulary of all the frequencies in the audio spectrum and how they apply to musical instruments, but having a general idea of what the difference between a low frequency and a high frequency is is a good start.

Using a lot of colorful adjectives doesn’t really help anybody. It sounds cool. But for the most part, bright and dark are good ways of describing things. But warm… warm means a lot of different frequencies to a lot of different people. You learn this in music education.

This can be something that you’re dealing with in the studio over a vocal, where it’s just not warm enough. And the content on the audio that is just not warm in general. It’s missing those frequencies.

So often, the pitfall of all of that is when you have a microphone and you have a speaker and you point the microphone at the speaker, you can set up a feedback loop. This is a sound that you’ll definitely hear at some point in your life. What will usually happen is that the engineer will do their best to give you exactly what you want before creating that feedback loop.

If you turn a microphone up too loud in front of a speaker, feedback is what’s going to happen and it’s not pretty. It’s usually not what you want when you’re setting up the sound system.

In your pursuit of music education or online music education, you’re going to study the successes and failures of different artists. Let’s take a look at one very successful music record example: Lady Gaga’s first big record, The Fame.

That record basically had the music industry appearance of coming out. Almost every song on there was a huge single. It seemed almost mathematically impossible that a debut record could really hit all those marks so successfully. We also didn’t know if this would work, but it did.

The truth was they actually took a very different approach. Those songs were heavily, heavily workshopped for many years before that album came out. They were releasing those on different Myspace channels and engaging feedback, then taking them down. They also went through many more songs that came out on that album.

The point that team got to with that record was that they didn’t have to guess how it would perform when it came out. They knew that all of these songs performed at a certain level from having exposed this many people to it. There were some songs we loved, but that didn’t get a good reaction, so we didn’t put them out.

You could argue that that marketing was sort of happening throughout the process. They’re getting that feedback and only putting out what they know will work.

Lady Gaga herself even said, “Whether you’re doing pop or doing rock and roll, I don’t believe that there’s any other way to do it than from the bottom up. So, you have to write records. And you have to record them yourself. And you have to play every venue you can get your hands on. And you have to fail. And then you have to get better. But you have to live and breathe your art. And if you don’t, you won’t get anywhere. That’s what The Fame is really about.”

When you talk about revenue streams, the biggest source of revenue for the majority of major artists these days is live performances and touring. Compared to traditional spins or record sales, you may sell a million records as an artist, which could take a year to sell. Or, maybe you get a million spins, and it could take 10, 11, or 12 months to reach that point.

An artist who is getting that level of sales and performance royalties is most likely able to sell out Madison Square Garden. An artist will make more in one night at Madison Square Garden than they will in the first six months of releasing a song. Every big artist realizes music is the business card that gets you in the door to touring and really generating income. At the end of the day, an artist will end up making more money in one month of good, strong touring than they will in a year of spins and performances on the radio and likewise.

The best advice that I could give to any aspiring artist is to make your live show great. The way that you make a live show great is to play live. There’s no secret — that’s how you do it. The old adage in the music industry is a band that plays 100 shows live is a completely different band than the one that plays their first live show. A lot of times when big artists tour, you’ll find that within the first couple of weeks of the tour, they’re playing secondary or tertiary markets. You may ask yourself, “Why is Rihanna in West Palm Beach and San Antonio as opposed to New York, Dallas, Boston, Los Angeles — the major media mecca centers?” That’s because artists always want to gather steam, get the machine running smoothly, get the kinks out of a show, and really make it run well. With today’s shows, that’s no small feat. Between the pyrotechnics, the sound, the lighting, the staging, and all the things that go on, it’s really important that all pistons are firing at the same time to make the show great.

Online Music Education: How to Build Your Fan Base

I understand that you guys aren’t all going to sell out Madison Square Garden like Drake. You need to make your live show compelling on the club level. It doesn’t matter if there’s five people there, 50 people there, or 500 people there. That means you rehearse. That means you build your following. That means you slowly build your audience outside the epicenter of your home base. For example, if you’re a New York-based band, you shouldn’t overplay New York. You should play a show in Brooklyn, maybe a show in Manhattan, then take a little break. Do you play a show in Westchester? Yes. Maybe try and hit Philly. Maybe you go to Hartford. Maybe you go into Boston, and slowly build your center out. That’s how you build your fan base.

Build a Base at Home First

A great story that I love to tell is a friend of mine has been a manager in Chicago for many years. They’re a very big manager and have managed a lot of really great acts. Artists would call him all the time in Chicago and say, “Hey, we’re looking for a manager.” And he would say, “Can you sell out the Metro?”

Those who don’t know, the Metro is a historic club in Chicago. Every great artist has come through the Metro. It doesn’t matter if you’re the Smashing Pumpkins or Kanye. It’s about a 900-person capacity room and very famous. And every great artist that has come to Chicago has sold out the Metro. More often than not, the artists say, “Well, no, I can’t sell out the Metro. I can sell like 300 tickets.” And he would say, “Well, when you sell out the Metro, give me a call again.”

You’re not going to be the biggest band in the world if you’re not the biggest band in your hometown. Build your fan base locally. Build those fans, the real fans who are going to stick with you through thick and thin before you try and take over the world. Everybody starts with 1,000 real fans and builds out from there. You need to do the exact same thing.

Get critical feedback about your show. Make sure your show’s great. When you play, make sure it’s an event. If you overplay, nobody’s going to want to see you anymore. On a long-term basis, that’s how you’re going to make a significant amount of money in the music industry if you’re a performer. If you’re a manager, that’s also how you’re going to make commission.

When we talk about utilizing social media in the music industry, one of the really important things to think about is something that social media is really good at: spreading stories. A lot of times, especially in the music world, we look at it from a different lens. We’re focusing too much on just what we’ve made and not the story around it.

I’m sure everyone reading this has a friend who worked really hard on a song, was excited to put it out, and posted a link to the SoundCloud on Facebook. They think, “Watch it go; it’s going to be huge.” They post it, and then nothing happens. That’s because the existence of your content is not, in itself, interesting, and not something that will spread in social media. A story around it that’s truthful absolutely can.

An Online Music Education Assessment of Social Media Success

In the music video for “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X featuring Billy Ray Cyrus, they jump in the air and transform into cowboys.

What about that song made it perfect for a meme? Music education will show you there’s usually one line or something strange in the song. In this particular song, it’s the phrase, “I got the horses in the back.” For some reason, that’s what people latched on to.

Social media was one of the biggest factors in the song’s success. Social media is the biggest factor in every song’s success nowadays.

The Proof in the Practice

I used social media to my advantage, and it worked. I produced a record a few years ago that I was really proud of, and I did that exact same thing I say above. I was really excited the day it came out. I was like, “Watch it go, it’s going to be huge.” I posted a link to it, and nothing really happened.

Fortunately for me, at the exact same time, someone else related to the record took a very different approach. The artist’s little brother, actually, went on Reddit and not only posted a link to the album on Bandcamp, but also started telling the story around the album. And the album had an interesting story.

We had recorded all these different musicians in different places, different locations, 30 different studios. It was interesting, inherently, and the little brother just started talking about that story and linking to the album. Lots of people started asking questions about that on these music threads, and people started linking to the album. By the end of the week, it was the number one album on Bandcamp, all from him posting the stories on Reddit versus me just posting a link. No one cared when it was just the link itself.

That was an amazing lesson for me: it’s context that leads us to the content. The content alone will not be enough to get us hooked in first. You need to think about the story around what you’re doing.

When looking to build your career in the music industry and thinking about gaining a fan base, it can be really difficult and stressful to be thinking that the sky’s the limit. Obviously, you want to attain as many fans as possible. But it’s really hard to reverse engineer a strategy for an unlimited number of them. But, what we can do is make a very specific plan to find enough fans, up to a certain number. In fact, we can literally find which places have that audience size and go get them.

There’s also another element to this that’s really important. For those of you that want to make the transition into making your living from music, you need to define a starting dollar amount goal. Then, you need to just figure out how many fans you actually need to provide you with the financial support to reach that goal.

This comes from a concept called “1,000 True Fans”, from a great thinker named Kevin Kelly. And basically what it states is this: Let’s say that I was able to charge a fan, for example, $100 over the course of a year—whether this person is coming to a couple of concerts, or buying a t-shirt of mine for $20 or $30, or maybe they support me on Patreon or Kickstarter.

Now, if I had 1,000 fans worldwide, and I was getting $100 in a year from each of them, that would be a six-figure salary. That’s a life-changing amount of money for a lot of artists that are just getting started. The really important thing there is that you’re getting that life-changing amount of money without having to have millions of fans. Instead, it’s just about your 1,000 being really true fans. And that number can be as low or as high as you want, based on where you’re at in your career.

I believe it’s good to ask yourself when you’re just starting out, how do you get those first 50 true fans? Everyone’s goals are different, and for you, they might be that you want to make one third of your regular day job salary this year from music, and maybe that means you need your first 50 fans to each spend at least $75. Once you figure that out, you start coming up with ways you can make that happen.

Looking at it this way really lowers the stakes and makes these transitions into being a professional person in music a lot more doable. This whole idea that you need millions of fans on Spotify right now is just not true, particularly if you’re giving the fans you do have an opportunity to financially support you as well.

To learn more about these concepts and other lessons for success in the music industry, think about exploring online music education. If you’re looking for a music education, you’ll find that there’s no more affordable, accessible, or convenient way to achieve it.