The music industry uses a lot of terms that might sound particularly foreign if you’re not familiar with the business. For live performers, one important term is “tech rider,” which includes a stage plot and input list. The stage plot is a picture of all the instruments on stage, the monitor placements, and the names of the people in the band that are taking part in the performance.

That stage plot also includes an input list, which specifies all the different inputs the front-of-house engineer needs to put into the system. These inputs would be anything creating audio from the stage that you want the audience to hear, such as drums, bass, guitar, vocals, keyboard, drum machines, synthesizers, or anything else that makes a sound. Each instrument on the input list should be numbered; this lets everyone talk about each one by its number.

A tech rider includes all of the proper amplification needed for a show to take place. Many people have subwoofers on their tech rider, but they might also use a certain amplitude of speakers and monitors; all of it is meant to help them make sure that they have a professional environment for their show to take place in.

Secrets of the Tech Rider

When a performer is on stage, there are speakers that point back at them. Those speakers play a mix of all the instrumentation that they are most comfortable with while performing. This monitor mix is actually a really cool thing that most people don’t know about unless they’ve pursued a music education; it lets the performer hear their instrument or vocals at their preferred volume level. It makes the performer comfortable knowing they can choose whatever they want their mix to be.

For example, some music performers don’t like to hear their own vocals, but others want their in-ear vocals to be loud. The monitors allow the performer to have the mix that they want separately from what the rest of the venue hears.

In addition to those monitors, there are also in-ear monitors that perfomers can wear like headphones. They’re controlled with a fader system by a mix engineer that’s off to the side of the stage.

What About Backlines?

Another word that you might encounter in your online music education is “backline.” A backline is a list of instruments and gear that the venue offers you when you arrive. This can include mic stands, keyboard stands, amplification devices, guitar stands, microphones, and many other things that the performer may need.

Most venues have a backline section on their website that indicates the things they have available for use by the performers. It’s best to double-check that section before visiting a venue. It’s also a good idea to email the venue before arriving to make sure everything is still on track for the show. It’s always good to have a backup plan in case something goes wrong, as you never know what is going to happen.

When it comes to music, following the artist is an important area. We follow the song to begin with. We follow the money of the song. And now we’re going to follow the artist. And what is there to follow, you may ask?

I can’t tell you the number of times an artist comes into my office, comes to talk to me about management or comes in looking for an opportunity and they’re talking about their team. They’ve got their lawyer, their manager, their agent, their publicist, their digital marketing, all of these things. And what I’ll say is, “That’s great. Now, where’s the music?”

We’re going to talk about the right time to find those people to help you out in your career. And we’re also going to talk about what those people do and how they surround the artist. I like to call the artist the orbit because if you think about the globe, and you think about the artists in the middle of that globe, all of the people that are satellites around that globe are the people in the artist’s orbit and the people who are responsible for different areas of the artist’s career. Hopefully, you add those people at the time when you actually need them, as opposed to collecting people’s work for you when there really isn’t anything to do.

First and foremost, the most important member of that team is ultimately the artist’s manager. Now a lot of you are probably wondering how you can know when you’re supposed to get a manager. The answer is you get a manager when you realize that you no longer have time to manage all of the things that are happening in your career. That’s the time to get a manager and not before. If you can do it yourself, then you should do it yourself. If you can’t do it yourself, it’s time to get a manager.

That means when you’re generating income, when you have shows, you have opportunities, when income is coming in and you actually have something to manage. Many artists make the mistake of putting the cart before the horse and getting a manager when there’s nothing really to manage. Once you know you need a manager, the next question is how do you know who the right manager is for you?

In my estimation, the right manager is the most experienced person, and the one who’s the most excited about what you can do and get. In a nutshell, when you have something going on, managers will come to you. When you have nothing going on and there’s nothing to manage, you’ll have a very difficult time getting a manager.

Ultimately, the most important person in your deal is your manager. This is because he or she is the go-between for you and the label. It needs to be a manager who really understands the music business. The manager is the person who wants to turn the artist’s career into ten times more than what they actually have seen. The manager is the one who’s going to be the go-between, the liaison who makes everything run smoothly between the artist and the label, or the artist and Spotify, or the artist and title, or just the artist and everybody.

The artist should be truly focused on making great music. The manager should never want to do that. The manager should just be thinking that they want this artist to be the biggest thing going on in the world and that they’re going to do whatever they can to make that happen. If, as the artist, you don’t believe that someone is going to be that person for you, then that means it’s time to find a new manager. What it ultimately comes down to is that the manager needs to believe in the artist. If they don’t, then they’re just somebody looking for money, and as the artist, you’re going to get screwed.

Online music education is a wonderful way to learn more about what makes a good manager, how to find one, and many more great lessons on finding success in the music industry. And what could be better than a quality music education from the comfort of your own home?

The blogosphere, as it was built, really influenced music journalism. I believe this is because people gravitated toward the blogs because they had a different sense of voice than what a digital publication might have. There was not only a playfulness with these blogs but also a sense of perspective that people really grew to appreciate. And that came in a lot of different forms across a lot of different blogs.

Overall, though, I think there’s a reason why the blogosphere was influential and, to some degree, still is. There is that voice. There’s a kind of perspective that makes you want to engage over and over again, and not just with one piece of content. You want to return to getting that perspective and getting that sense of self you might not necessarily find on a major digital publication.

To me personally, any article that is compelling is a good music journalism piece. There are so many different ways to tell the story of an artist, or a song, or an album, or a trend in music. There are also so many different voices. For example, some of my favorite writers who focus on music sound completely different from some of my other favorites, and I believe that’s because they have a developed voice.

Not only does a great piece of musical journalism need to be persuasive, but it also needs to be compelling. There have been times when I’ve read something that I completely disagreed with, but I ended up loving it because it shed some new light on a topic that I hadn’t previously considered. It was able to add a different sense of perspective, and I always appreciate that as a reader, as an editor, and as a writer myself.

I think that a compelling piece of musical journalism needs to grab your attention. That’s what I mean when I say compelling. It needs to be able to differentiate itself from the sea of coverage, of stories, of posts and of links that make their way online.

At Billboard, that’s what we try to offer every day. We try to offer voices not only within our analysis and our essays and our persuasive pieces of content, but also in terms of our in-depth coverage and our reporting. That can take the form of a reported piece with multiple sources you trust because of the brand name of the writer and the publication. Ultimately, a good piece of musical journalism might come in any of a lot of different boxes, but I believe that overall, it just has to be compelling in some way.

If you’re interested in learning more about music journalism and the music industry, give online music education a try. It is far and away the most accessible way to attain the music education that you desire.

There are lessons for musicians to take from the story of Instagram. A lot of people don’t know that Instagram did not originally launch as a company called Instagram. They launched as a company called Burbon, which was sort of a geolocation check-in service similar to Foursquare, if you’re at all familiar with them. And really, the concept was that since people finally have GPS on their phones, maybe it will be fun to be able to go to a restaurant or somewhere and check in.

The one little extra feature they had that made it unique was that if, for example, you wanted to take a picture of the cocktail you ordered, they had these fun little lenses that you could choose from. They looked at the data and noticed that no one really cared about checking in. Nobody was checking in, but everyone loved taking random pictures, even of things outside of where they checked in and using these fun lenses.

So what they did was shut it all down. They looked at Burbon and decided they were going to pretend it never happened. However, knowing that people loved the camera part of it, they decided they were going to relaunch their product as a thing called Instagram. It looked to the world like it was a new company, and it looked to the world like it worked overnight.

They basically went through this whole workshop of a failed product that people didn’t want and relaunched with only what they did want. It was a pivot. And you could argue that they almost make marketing irrelevant. Their marketing happened via the failed product and the feedback that they got.

There’s really no correct way or timing to do this, but you do want to think about when in the process of making music you want to do it. For example, is it important to get a lot of feedback before putting it out, and make it look like it’s perfect when it comes out? Or do you go the other route, and have the confidence in the music that it’ll just work? There’s really no universal right answer. Instead, it’s up to you to make the right call for your project.

Online music education is a good way to find out more about effective ways to approach putting out music, and a wide variety of other topics related to the music industry. If you’re like many people who may not have the resources for other forms of music education, you would be wise to consider going the online direction.

The great story of creativity and business in the music industry in 20th-century America has to do with understanding that recorded music is not just a performance art. In your online music education, you’ll develop an understanding of the technology and process of recording music, too.

A great example of how technology changes content is that, when the first records were made on wax cylinders and the early 78s, they came with a time limitation. You could only record, at best, up to three minutes. So, a lot of the jazz bands of that era sped up their performances, playing in double time in order to make their piece fit on the record. Hot jazz, that really fast jazz that people all over the world grew to love, is actually a byproduct of the technology of the time. That wasn’t necessarily how those bands sounded in clubs, but it was how they sounded in the studio.

The reason that that’s really important is because this byproduct of a groove had a huge influence on late-20th-century music. One of the great musicians of the mid-20th century was a guitar player named Les Paul. His name often pops up in music education because he invented and created a very famous electric guitar called a Les Paul.

An interesting anecdote is that Les Paul, one of the great guitar players — sort of the Eric Clapton of his day — had a very bad car accident, and he broke his elbow. They put his elbow in a cast, which was standard practice at the time. Because of this, when his elbow healed, he could never extend his arm the way he did before. So, being an engineering genius as well as a musical genius, he invented a contraption that would let him double-track his guitar lines and sound as fast and as agile as he did before the accident.

That invention was essentially the multi-track recording studio. Les Paul sort of used this as a crutch — almost literally. He used it as a utility. But other people, particularly in the early 1960s, started to understand that the music studio had become an instrument in and of itself.

The first major person in the music industry to understand that was an eccentric man named Phil Spector. He had a storied past, including a murder conviction, and recently passed away while incarcerated in California. However, as a musician, he was a true genius, and he had a genius engineer named Jack Nietzsche.

Together, they somehow stumbled on the fact that the way things sound when played back from a recording is not exactly the way they sound when your ears just hear them. So, they started double-, triple-, even quadruple-tracking instruments, particularly bass and drums. They created this gigantic sound that people called the “Wall of Sound.” That was the first level of the studio becoming, in effect, an instrument.

Then, Spector had two important proteges: Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, and The Beatles. In the mid-’60s, these artists elevated the recording studio into a more important instrument for the creation of music than the guitar, the drum, the keyboard, or anything else that anybody played.

And at that point, they transformed music from a performance medium into a constructed medium. George Martin, who was The Beatles’ producer, had a great way of explaining what happened. He said, “Before us, recorded music was like photography. After us, it was like painting.” What he meant was that the technology of the recording studio allowed people to be artists and to have full control over their work.

Many emerging artists don’t like to think in terms of genres or classification. They think associating their music with an existing category is impossible. It’s like being put in a box.

If you’re looking for discovery, however, genres are important. Consider streaming services — when you upload your music to a streaming service, you’ll have to put in a genre. While you can start your own “new” genre, there are advantages to sticking with established categories.

Casting a Wider Net

The biggest reason to pick a pre-existing genre is that it helps fans discover your music. Once you identify with a specific type of music, the streaming platform could potentially recommend your song to people listening to that genre.

Online music education teaches us that it’s important to be as honest as possible when classifying your own music. You don’t want to upload a country song to a streaming platform and say that it’s hip hop. In this case, an unsuspecting listener might hear 15 seconds and immediately turn it off. They may then never want to listen to any music like that ever again.

Important for Emerging Artists in the Music Industry

“At least trying to figure out what elements of your music fit into a specific genre can potentially help you to open the door to being discovered in that early stage of your career,” says hip hop artist Ryan Leslie.

According to Leslie, you want people who enjoy music in your specific vein to be able to discover and fall in love with what you create. If you refuse to “put yourself into a box,” then you have to understand the challenges associated with that. It may take you a little bit longer to find your audience. You’ll need to put forth some extra effort to find the relationships and people who want to go on your journey.

Leslie started out making R&B records and felt specifically attached to that musical style. When he did his “Les is More” album, which included a collaboration with Kanye West on a song called “Christian Dior Denim Flow,” that all changed.

“(Kanye) said, hey, make a rap album,” Leslie said “I did a rap album. And now I’m doing a hybrid. I got a new EP. We did a hybrid on that. So really for me, I’m still living in a world of music that I love.”

Even though Leslie “reclassified” his music, he said he still enjoys having artistic freedom. He can utilize his music education and make a straight piano ballad one day and then later decide to work on a hip hop track with some heavy sub bases with trap high hats.

“When you have artistic freedom and you build the audience that’s willing to go with you wherever you want to go, then you have a little bit more latitude,” he said. “I believe at the early stages of your career, though, when you’re looking for discovery, choosing a category of music that allows for you to be discovered in the algorithms on the streaming services is a prudent move to make.”