Coming from a performance art background, I can see a lot of times how my music students aren’t really giving themselves the opportunity to work in a more conceptual or abstract direction in regards to their performances. And what I try to discuss with the students is the possibility of creating an entire world on the stage that is different than how they ever imagined it could be in the music industry.

Elements to Consider

Where does the audience sit? Are you on stage? The lighting, the stage, the costumes — all of these elements can be put together during a music performance to create a piece of art in a way that tells a much deeper story than just the songs. For example, somebody like Sia, who doesn’t want herself to be seen on stage, is really creating a new persona using collaborators, such as choreographers to create dance performances, and wild set design with crazy costumes and video.

All of this is leaning towards a more artistic context of the work. And I think it’s really important that students at least try to experiment in this direction once in their career as they continue their music education.

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.

Billboard has been around for 125 years. It started in 1894. It was focused on outdoor advertisement. That’s where the word “billboard” comes from. It moved to live entertainment, mostly carnivals and circuses. When music and vaudeville started, it began to produce sheet music. You started seeing some charts in the magazine based on the top-selling sheet music in big-city stores.

This went on until our first national chart in 1940 and continued from there. What’s kept us around so long? Any industry needs an independent voice to help spread the word, and Billboard’s been there from the inception of music. We have been tracking it and acting as an independent voice to lend legitimacy. Originally, charts were based on store-based sales. Somebody at the store would tell you what the top sellers were.

Somebody at the radio station would say, “Here are my 40 biggest songs in rank order.” There was a formula behind where they ranked, how big the store was and how big the radio station was. It was a weighted system, so a radio station in New York would be more of a voice than a station in Detroit, for example. It was the same way for retail- the bigger the store, the more weight they had. So it was really a reporting-based model with an honor system.

As with any honor system, it’s not always so honorable. Generally, it was a system that worked, because at the time there were checks and balances. It wasn’t that easy to smell out a fake, and that’s what people did. That’s why they had a position they had. In 1991, we moved to electronic monitoring of radio stations and over-the-counter sales. So when you bought a CD, they would scan it. That UPC number would click, and we would know for the first time ever exactly how many units of an album were sold in a week.

In the past, it was really speculation and the gold and platinum certifications that were accumulated over time. So that was a big change in the early ’90s, and the industry was a bit taken aback at what reality showed. What it did show was that Country was a pretty big genre, and Hip Hop was a pretty big genre. Where those titles might have struggled in the past, now we knew. All of a sudden, we had NWA albums debuting at number one and Garth Brooks albums debuting at number one.

It was a whole new world for everyone, and it made the charts much better. Over time, it’s continued to evolve in the digital landscape to where we are today, with streaming being the main mode of music consumption. Being that independent voice, lending legitimacy as to what is happening, over the past 25 years, we’ve aligned ourselves with great data partners whom we trust. This includes Nielsen music, which has tracked our sales and radio and streaming data since 1991.

We work with the industry to make sure we have the right data sets coming in. If there’s a big streaming service out there, we want them in. Thankfully, as these services started to rise, which also goes back to retail stores and radio stations, they want to be part of what we do. It adds legitimacy to their business. They know that if they’re part of the Billboard charts, then they have some cachet with the labels and the artists and managers as well.

Their business is going to be reflected in what we do. So we have a great system working, and we work hard to cultivate those relationships and to make sure that everyone feels like they’re a part of what we do. Just continuing to evolve the charts. We moved from a pure album sales chart to one that incorporates streaming in 2014, and it was pretty much the right time to do it.

It was right on the cusp of where sales were really starting to decrease and streaming services were really starting to increase their usage and their pay subscribers. Billboard is quite thankful that people still look at our charts as the standard in the industry. Record labels, artists, and managers work very hard in mining the right avenues to create noise, to do well on those charts. We hear about it every week. We’re involved from the production to promotion level, as people try to understand how the charts work, and what they can do to fare better on the lists on a week-to-week basis.

We hear from artists and management all the time, when their artists get to number one, about how happy they are, and how it means the world to them. Billboard has been around for 125 years, and the fact that we’re still standing here today. We mean so much to so many people, which is really something that we take great pride in. We’re not resting on our laurels, we’re continuing to innovate what we do. I can tell you, in the past 10 years, what we’ve done in terms of data and chart measurement has just been incredible.

That’s just due to how music consumption has changed over that time. For decades it was pretty simple. You bought a song, you bought an album, or you listened to it on the radio. Those are your only options. So it’s a pretty simple thing to do. How you bought it might have changed, and we adapted how we did that, but it was a pretty standard set of data.

Now, with streaming and social and how things continue to evolve, we’re constantly trying to evolve with the times and adjust the methodology to how people are getting their music today. We just try to be where the music consumer is, and we’ve done a really good job over the past 80 years in doing that. So we want to continue to evolve and continue to grow with the music industry, and more importantly, with the music consumer. Billboard is a big name in the history books so remember our contributions as you continue your music education.

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.

Today, we’re going to talk about the philosophy behind production. Of course, we first start with the song. The song is the reason why we’re all here. The song is the reason I have a job, and it’s also the reason why music education and music industry people such as attorneys and record company executives and so forth all have jobs. It all starts with the song.

As a producer, I oversee how that song gets arranged, finished and recorded as well the colors that accompany that song, such as the instrumentation, the emotions, and the performances. I help the artist guide that song to its proper place by finding out what the artist means, who the artist wants to speak to, and the emotional intention behind the song. The process involves having the song and the artist inform me, followed by me guiding that artist through the process of coming up with the best possible version that represents everything they want the song to represent to their public.

Producing music, records, and any sort of multimedia always starts with the song. If you ask 10 different people what a producer does, you’ll get 10 different answers because it’s so ambiguous. Every artist and every song needs a different treatment and help in different areas. Some need no help at all. Some need you to just stay out of the way and pay the bills. Others need intense help with song structure, such as songwriting, arranging, recording, and performance. The song, the artist, the artist’s audience, and the song’s goals define our role as producers.

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.

Music has always been sourced from a variety of different places. When I started out, I would stuff physical envelopes with CDs and handwritten notes. I would try to make them stand out by putting them in bright pink or purple jiffies in hopes that they would somehow make it to the top of the stack. I really did have a strategy. It was a little funky but logical. It’s overwhelming to think about how many envelopes people in this industry are getting every day.

Sourcing and Streaming in the Music Industry

The way that we source music now has changed over time. Now the digital download and streaming services are king. In a sense, things were easier before because there weren’t infinite possibilities living within two clicks of a mouse. Now you can get songs instantly on your computer, laptop, phone, iPad, or any other device that you use. So, I think now it’s about curation and filtering.

Certain companies like Spotify have done well to create playlists for people based on the songs and artists they have listened to. I know this is an algorithm, but there is someone programming that. They have figureheads that do research and create lists based on what’s happening around them.

Radio Is Not Dead

A lot of this research is still built around things that have been around forever. One example of this is radio. There are a lot of charts on Spotify that mirror what’s happening in radio. Some people say that radio is dead but that’s not true. Radio is still a great tool for getting music to the masses when physical artists can’t be in a specific place at a specific time.

I believe that streaming services and insourcing are continuing to hone in on this method of curation with better filters. However, I still think there needs to be some sort of human connection or human aspect. Having a human behind the scenes provides emotion, which draws in many listeners. Emotion can’t be captured in an algorithm or on a computer.

Algorithms Can’t Compare to Humans

Do you know that thing on Spotify that shows related songs and artists to the ones you are currently listening to? That feature has a lot to do with human and technology working together.

Studies are claiming to be able to figure out exactly when and why people are skipping specific songs. But, as far as sourcing goes, it’s still about person-to-person relationships and recommendations. However, the way that we do these things has changed over time. Curation is still the most important part of all of this; we just need to dial it in a little more.

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.

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.

Even though people like Barry Gordy helped to invent artist development in the music industry, he was not primarily a manager of artists. The task of the artist manager is a role that’s a little bit different when all is said and done.

The artist manager emerges as the person who is primarily responsible for the development and the curation of an artist’s career. There are a number of examples we can look at.

Brian Epstein was the person who discovered the Beatles in the early 1960s. Through curating the way that they dressed and the manner in which they presented on stage, he helped to create a new archetype, not just for the Beatles, but for the entire music industry. The Beatles became this hugely iconic part of music history thanks in part to the work Epstein did with them.

Fifteen years later, another entrepreneur, Malcolm McLaren, would help to shape the images and music of punk artists like the Sex Pistols.

If you jump forward another 10 years, you have Def Jam, which was not just a record company but also had a management company associated with it. They fostered the careers of artists like LL Cool J, Run-DMC, and Public Enemy.

What founders Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons did was encourage these artists to be themselves. They helped them create an image for themselves in the way that they dressed and in their music to reflect a certain street credibility. That’s one of the things that helped turn hip hop into a huge business because it was a market difference from what had come before. Anyone interested in music education or online music education needs to know where that change came from, how these managers influenced the music industry in ways that became part of history.