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The Art of Collaboration in the Music Industry

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.

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