A lot of what is taught is related to mental health. You have to stay sane and strong if you want to approach this industry. You can begin to feel alone out here. As much as we have a community and a family, and a tribe, we have to make sure that we’re safe and we have to make sure that we’re well.

“It doesn’t make you weak to ask for help,” says Billie Eilish. “It doesn’t make you weak to ask for a friend to go to a therapist. It shouldn’t make you feel weak to ask anyone for help. And you should be able to ask anyone for help. And everyone has to help someone if they need it. Make sure to stay in tune with yourself because it really will benefit you in the end.”

Suz Paulinski explains, “I work with music professionals of all types – mostly musicians, but sometimes managers, label executives, and producers. I help them really take a moment to just step back, hit pause, and really think about where they’re headed, why they’re headed there, and if they need to make some adjustments.” She continues, “There is still a taboo, especially in this industry, about therapy. And I have to be grateful for my boss…for pointing out that I needed to go seek help. I was not well and I was just really overwhelmed.”

I had been in therapy for 10 years before I decided to be a mindset coach. I realized what a stigma it was. So, I just started kind of asking questions. I would meet with an artist and say, “Well, how’s this working for you?” And I’d let them come to their own conclusions that what they were doing wasn’t working for them and just kind of point out how even though they were hustling and were grinding – we were doing everything that the music industry tells us to do – it wasn’t working.”

Music Education: The Role of Substance Abuse in the Industry

How can we manage substance abuse and self-sabotaging?

“You know,” Paulinski says, “I like to point out to both musicians and the music professionals behind the scenes, a lot of the managers and the producers – listen, I’ve walked into studios before. I’ve seen the drugs. I’ve seen what people do.”

There was this wonderful interview with Missy Elliot. She was so honest about getting into that studio for the first time sober and not producing a record high. She didn’t even know if she’d have it. She believed that magic was in the pot that she was smoking, and she thought that without it she’s not going to have her edge. She realized, “oh my god, no.” She had so many more hits and so much success being in the studio sober. So a lot of artists feel – and even other professionals, too – that the drug is what’s causing their talent when really it’s just the drug maybe allowing you to relax and do that. You can relax with meditation, with yoga, and just finding your confidence. If you can work on that, you don’t need the drugs, and you’ll work better. You’ll enjoy it. You’ll remember it a bit more.

“And really, what I say to artists,” according to Paulinski, “We’re not in the rock ‘n’ roll era anymore because you don’t have a label doing everything for you. You have to do the legwork, and you have to be focused to do it. I always say to them, ‘If you want that rock and roll life, then I really hope you have a day job during the week to make up for it because you’re not going to get very far. It will be a very destructive hobby. And that’s all it’s going to be.’”

But if you want to be the Macklemore and Chance the Rapper and make it on your own – you know, they run a business. Like, they are CEOs. And so you have to show up and you have to put in the work. And in order to have that focus and that energy level, you gotta cut the crap.”

A lot of the struggles that entrepreneurs, in general, face is just the emotional roller coaster. “And I mean,” Paulinski continues, “I go through it everyday. I have a successful business. I pay my bills. It’s the only work that I do. But I have a panic attack or stress, you know – balled up on the couch crying at least once a week. And that’s par for the course. That’s just how it is. I don’t stay in the rut nearly as long as I used to and I don’t get as deep in it as I used to. It’s like a real roller coaster. If you’re on a roller coaster and you know that dip is coming, you can brace yourself. And then before you know it, you’re on the upswing. It’s the same thing emotionally. If you can tell yourself, ‘Ok, this sucks right now, but I got here pretty quickly so I can get back up pretty quickly.’ So tomorrow’s a new day.”

Focus on Making Progress, Not Perfection

If you can just remind yourself that it wasn’t always like this and that it’s not usually the same problem. You’re making progress if you’re not crying about the same thing over and over again. Then, you know you’re at least making progress.

Paulinski says, “I think the thing that made me a successful entrepreneur is, I’m like, ‘bring the mistakes on.’ Like, I own my hot mess-ness when it happens. I’ve done presentations online where all the tech falls apart. You just got to laugh your way through it and then say, ‘Alright, now that it’s over, what can I do differently?’ And so when you’re making mistakes, just know you’re getting to your goal faster because you’re going to learn those lessons. If you constantly – I call that perfection paralysis, where you’re so afraid to take action. That’s why my first business failed. We just kept tweaking and tweaking and tweaking. We didn’t produce anything that the public got to see because we were so afraid that we’d mess up.”

You just got to roll up your sleeves and do it. In this industry, in particular, if you think about the film industry, they’re creatives too. But the actors get rejected playing somebody else and reading somebody else’s lines. Musicians, when they get rejected, it’s usually if they’re writing their own songs from somewhere deep down inside. The vulnerability is just a lot heavier and it hits a lot more, which is why there’s so much substance abuse. A lot of what they do is “fraud talk,” where we say, “Why did I even think I could do this? Or you see somebody else get ahead, and you say, well, then they took my spot.”

That doesn’t exist. There is no true competition in this industry because everybody is so different. Learn to ride the coaster, and the minute you hear fraud talk, call up a friend who always compliments you or gives you a boost. Spend time with people who make you smile. It’s been proven in science that smiling can actually – just the muscles and the energy and the hormones going through you – will actually change your mindset. So take a step back, walk away from whatever is making you feel really crappy that day, and get yourself in the right mindset. That’s why it’s so important because that will help you keep going. You’re not going to avoid the bad days. You’re just not. So embrace it and keep going.

Artists and repertoire (A&R) professionals exist to take care of the artists and their repertoire. That means you are making sure that they make the proper records. You got to have an ear musically to make the correct records in any music industry.

The game has changed a lot, and artists are getting signed because they have many followers. A&R has become a popularity contest. The guys doing A&R usually don’t deserve their jobs. They got their jobs because they were homies with somebody at the record company. Also, they know how to find YouTube numbers.

If that’s the case, it’s the reason when you pick up an album, you like two songs instead of enjoying the whole album anymore. Projects aren’t based on the entire package. They’re based on the two singles that they will try to push.

What’s happening with so many artists is they’re getting single deals. Yeah, you can make some money, but the record company is getting burned. It is because they’re not looking for whole albums anymore.

I would have to say hip-hip-hooray for the artist getting paid for your spins. It is preferable to wait until publishing clicks back Spotify paying quickly. It includes all the streaming money that’s there to be made. It’s a great time for artists now if they make great music. If they make great music, it isn’t even a record deal.

You don’t sell your music. No, it’s free. How do you make money? I’m on tour right now. I’m a touring artist. As the music grows, there are always better approaches of releasing. These can include visual albums, concerts, or broadways. There are many ways in which music moves amongst people. I feel like trying to force music into an album intended to be for-sale is obsolete.

There are guys making millions of dollars without selling records. Do you know what I’m saying? Some guys are giving away their albums and making millions of dollars like they sold albums. Some guys are becoming so crucial with their music that they’re giving it away for free. At some point, a kid won’t equate being a real fan unless they’re buying an artist’s merchandise. Some kids will bootleg an artist album in any way they can, from streaming, stripping, downloading, or finding it somewhere. They will not feel like they’re attached until they buy all merchandise.

There are many ways that artists can get right to it, especially without a record company that the game is super-duper wide open. It’s also super wide open for bad music. You had an A&R that had 2,000 tapes on their desk back in the days. They listened to the 2,000 tapes and picked the four that were good. You didn’t have to hear the 1,996 terrible tapes. Now you got to listen to it all.

Considering your attention span is down to eight seconds, you might have something unique in front of you. Then, you don’t hear it because you’ve been going through so much bad music. Once you get to that, you don’t give it a chance. It is because your attention span is gone. You don’t have the time to sit around going through all the bad music again.

We are in a new age, where the artist is in control. The days of finding a manager to save you and get you a deal are gone. You must figure out all the business and make music. It would be best if you found yourself in a position where you’ve been able to generate enough interest and income. You do this to get a bigger fish on the line, to help catapult your career to the next level. Any music education, regardless of it being a physical class or online music education must teach artists to be authentic and independent.

The 1960s brought lots of change and innovation to the music industry. It’s an era of music frequently studied in music education and online music education.

The influential artists of the 1960s are almost too numerous to mention. On the soul music side, we could talk about the genius of Aretha Franklin.

We could also talk about James Brown, a soul artist who fostered a whole other set of rhythmic innovations that came to be a new genre called funk.

We could talk about Stevie Wonder, who helped incorporate the synthesizer into pop music.

We could talk about Jimi Hendrix, who pioneered a new way of relating to the electric guitar, and in many ways helped to ignite another genre called heavy metal.

In this first module, “Building Your Image,” we are going to talk about how we build our audience. We need to define why you do what you do. In the unit “Marketing Your Music in the New Economy,” we look at embracing your first followers. We’re going to think about these areas especially:

• How do we try to guarantee a certain amount of traffic before putting our music out?

• How do we track the sources of big newspapers and blogs to try to get on their radar even when we are still small?

• How do we utilize social media to share stories and empower our fans to market on our behalf?

Leveraging Social Media

I have 1.8 million followers on Twitter, 1.5 million on Facebook, and 1.2 million on Instagram. The fans are more powerful than almost any music industry label. They post my music. They find other people who are searching for new music and send them mine. People pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to get this kind of promotion.

A lot of artists do not need deals. If they can establish a solid touring foundation, they can make money and pay their bills. They crave that freedom. I feel like a lot of artists lose their freedom when they jump straight to a major label.

Choosing the Moment

In regards to the timing of when marketing actually happens, it’s a really big question to ask. On one hand, some of us might think, “I want to be a perfectionist. I want to wait until the song is totally done to ever tell anyone about it.” Some of us might be more open to getting feedback, and we share every version of it.

The truth is that there really is not a right answer. There are different ways of making a decision about it.

Music Education

Our next plan is to look at three different examples of people who have all marketed themselves super-successfully but have chosen very different times to do so.

Quick reminder: These and other modules provide you with a well-rounded online music education that helps you to learn the ins and outs of bringing your sound or songs into the world and sharing your passion with others. They are also designed to guide you in your chosen industry career so that you can achieve long-term success.

There are many different ways to understand music history, but one that I find helpful is to talk about the orientation of an artist rather than the genre. In other words, what does an artist want to do? What is the goal of an artist?

By the 1970s, two major archetypes had emerged in the music industry. The first was the entertainer. An entertainer is someone whose primary goal is to acquire and minister to as large an audience as possible — or as large an audience as possible for them.

Another archetype emerged as well: the auteur. That’s somebody who performs and creates as an artists almost for their own benefit. They do it for the growth of their art or art in general.

Many artists use both orientations. Even still, in online music education, it’s helpful to think about the primary drive of certain artists because that’s why we have such different kinds of artists and such different kinds of audiences.

Of course, these archetypes are just a way of thinking about music, but it’s an approach that’s very helpful for people who are going into the music business to help artists. What are you helping an artist to do?

One of the reasons that David Bowie is so important is that he was one of the first — if not the first — recording artist to create an entire career out of adopting a succession of personalities, aliases and characters, such as Ziggy Stardust and Thin White Duke. David Bowie is somebody who has a huge strain of that auteur mentality. He is essentially cultivating his own world.

On the opposite side, you could think of somebody like Michael Jackson. In many ways, Michael Jackson was born for the stage. He was born into it. He started performing when he was a child.

Even though Michael Jackson is an incredible artist and auteur in himself, he called himself the King of Pop because that’s what he wanted out of his career. He wanted to have a massive, massive audience. A lot of the choices he made were oriented toward acquiring that audience.

Now, this isn’t a hard and fast delineation, but it is one of the ways that we in music education can compare different motivations. Why is Taylor Swift different from Mitski, for example? Why is Beyonce a different artist from Janelle Monae?

Now, it’s important when pursuing music education or online music education to know the history of the business. The early music industry business is essentially divided into categories that mirror American society at that point. American society was in the middle of a period called “Jim Crow,” which is essentially legal segregation. The early segments of the record business essentially mirrored that segregation.

First, you have the mainstream, popular records. Then you have a category called “Race,” which is where all the black artists were signed and sold. Then, you have something called hillbilly, which is seen in many ways as the province of poor, white Americans. This triangle of Jim Crow became embedded in the architecture of the modern music business.

As the music business grew up, what you’re hearing on these records is, in general, musical forms that come from African Americans. We’re talking about ragtime. We’re talking about blues, and we’re talking about jazz. Those became the main drivers of popular music in America.

When creativity came into the music business, it was a whole other story. In the 1920s, an African American woman named Mamie Smith recorded a track called “Crazy Blues.” To everyone’s surprise, this track by an African American sold a million copies even in the midst of segregation and everything else going on in this period of history.

Suddenly, the big companies in New York–RCA, Columbia, and what would later become Sony–realized that they could make money doing this. They hustled down to the South, and they started recording African American artists. It’s that culture–it’s black American culture–that essentially established the recording industry as one of the most creative forms of expression in the 20th century as it is still seen today.

Perhaps the master of the form that becomes known as rock and roll in the music industry is Chuck Berry. He developed a particular kind of guitar style that we in music education associate with rock and roll, a particular kind of singing that we associate with rock and roll, a particular way of holding his body that we associate with rock and roll and a particular lyrical obsession that we associate with rock and roll, whether we’re talking about cars or school or girls.

In, “Johnny B Goode,” Chuck Berry sings, “Go, Johnny, go, go. Go, Johnny, go, go. Go, Johnny, go, go. Go, Johnny, go, go. Johnny B Goode.”

This becomes, essentially, what we know in online music education as rock and roll in the 1950s.

In the field related to music and the music industry that folks are calling XR-AR, VR, and MR are all collectively called XR. That’s your new-fangled bucket for immersive experiences. AR being Augmented Reality, VR being Virtual Reality, MR being Mixed Reality. XR is eXtended Reality, and it is a catch-all for the terms you hear — AR, VR, and MR.

They each have nuances. Augmented reality seeks to bring a connectivity between digitally generated images and your real world. It’s not about putting headsets on. It’s about bringing digital images, or holograms, into your space via either a device or supported by some technology like glasses or contact lenses, which would enable you to see what are now projected digital forms in your physical, real environment.

Virtual reality is when you are putting on a device and immersing yourself inside of an entire, enclosed virtual space. While that virtual space may include real spaces, you are entirely inside that place with goggles on and moving yourself around as an entity, usually with some controller. There are also certain technologies where you might actually be the controller yourself.

MR is Mixed Reality, and it’s a way of picking from all sorts of the various pieces of new forms of technology that are coming out and trying to blend them in any kind of way that’s beyond the traditional means. Mixed reality is a blend of real-world environment and what a performer’s doing on stage onto the various screens and devices. If they’re not formally AR or VR, you’re projecting and combining audio and trying to synthesize it all together for the MR experience.

Hence AR, VR, and MR are the world of XR, and these are influencing music education and online music education in new and interesting ways than have ever been done before.

In recent years, the biggest thing that has happened to the music business has been social media. And streaming, of course. Everything’s changed. Streaming music, when I was in school, we talked about this. We knew that it was happening. It was just a question of what the music business was going to do about it.

So, while waiting for the answer, musicians needed to find other means of income. I love the fact that you can be an independent artist — for real. Being able to own your distribution. Being able to own your narrative of your brand. Being able to own everything that surrounds the ecosystem of how you make money. That is important. If you’re an artist, you’re going to want to do that.

Granted, you can phone it in and have the label be a sort of consigliere for everything related to you. But that’s not the best way to do it. The label is just a big bank with a marketing team and a PR team. With the right capital, you can do all those things on your own. And you can have your own teams that you hand-select — teams that get your brand and get your vision. And you can have a lot of success doing these things on your own.

This is what Beyoncé figured out. This is what Chance the Rapper figured out. This is what Wu-Tang Clan figured out. This is what all of these huge names in music have figured out for themselves.

One of the biggest ways that the music industry has changed has been the democratization of the industry for the little guy, as well as the older talent that’s out in the world and trying to reclaim the narrative of their music.

If you’re interested in using music education to learn more about finding success as an independent artist, but aren’t sure you have the resources or time, consider giving online music education a try. It may be exactly what you need to get a jump start toward the career that you desire.

All of the concepts around authenticity inside of yourself also relate to your authenticity as a community. Your story is a big part of this, as your story helps you find your community and, as my colleague Michael Thurber says, your tribe. In life, we move along from one career to the next. We move along from one day to the next. During all of this, who are the people that we reach out to all the time? Those people are our community.

The final project for my class, “Creating a Compelling Live Performance, Part Two.” is centered around booking a show, inviting friends and creating an evening-length performance. The most important part of the show is figuring out how many people can attend and what venue will make the best setting. My students really have to question who their community is and how many people will be willing to come out. This practice can be really challenging for some of them, because it can be difficult to know how many people—how many friends and family members—are willing to pay money to watch them perform live.

For me, developing a community is all about finding the ways in which we unite together. They can be historical, political or emotional, but all of these ways that we are self-aware within our community can bring us together closer and closer.

In my case, it has really been political, finding a connection that we are all driving towards. For example, feminism was, for me, a huge way to create and maintain a community, because it led me to people who wanted to be smart, academic and intellectual, and also have fun. Together, we developed a sound as a community and set up shows with each other’s bands. More and more people started showing up because they needed it. They needed this historically. They needed a place to come together. So, let’s create a space where we want to come together.

To learn the skills and concepts for creating a community in the music industry, both standard music education and online music education are great places to begin.