As a professional in the industry, I’ve learned that whether they’re DJs, dramatics or bands, they need the ability to communicate with a production staff and tell them what’s going on, when it’s going on and where it’s going to happen. And the stage plot is an industry device that’s critical to that communication.

It’s the visual means of communicating between parties who will work together but aren’t with each other currently. Who in the performance is going to go where? How should their equipment be laid out? Essentially, the general use of space and the technology layout inside of that space.

Better Stage Plot Knowledge in Music Education Means Better Music Show Productions

The better those stage plots are, the more accurate they are, the more information they have about the performance, and the better the overall production will be. You’re allowing the artists and the production staff who make the show happen to communicate and meet each other’s expectations effectively.

As much as I’ve used all these pioneering technologies in very different ways and spaces they weren’t really intended, I’ve drawn from VR spatial capture, 3D modeling, and old-school architectural approaches and blend those together when I make my stage plots.

They enable me to have a top-down, 2D, floor-plan-based discussion with a technical team, then take that flat thing and look in three dimensions at scale before I have a production conversation with the artist. Visually, they can see that same space rendered in front of them in real-time.

Students in Online Music Education Would Benefit From Stage Plot Knowledge

I can drop in the staging, musicians, et cetera, and I’m having an active conversation over the visual space and place for which the artist is creating their work. It becomes a very powerful tool.

When all those ideas are out of their head, I’m able to weave that back into the stage plot, flatten that back down, and share the updates with the whole squad. Everything maintains its up-to-date-ness.

Stage plots are certainly supercritical to creative, professional work. I think the new technologies and tools that are available are not usually exploited to make them as multi-dimensional and as rich as they could be. But I love doing it all the time.

One interesting piece of music industry history is the start of the phonograph. The phonograph started as a cylindrical piece of wax, and then it became a shellac disk, and then later on a vinyl disk, and so on. This was a way, by using acoustic and electric technology, to have somebody perform in front of a microphone, and get that recording onto a piece of material that could be played back in anybody’s home, using a phonograph record machine.

The principle of the record business is the same principle as the publishing business. If I were to just give you a piece of vinyl with no grooves on it, it wouldn’t be worth anything to you. What makes it worthwhile is the information that’s on it. The idea is what’s valuable. However, it’s not just the idea that’s on the record—it’s the performance of an idea.

To outline the difference, there is the idea that’s fixed in form with paper and ink, and then there is the actual performance of that idea, which is then fixed on the vinyl record. So, the two parts of the music business become the idea and the performance of the idea. And in the record business, you’re not only paying the performer who’s on the record, but you’re also paying the author of the idea that’s being performed.

Sometimes, when we talk about the music industry and say that there are two sides to a record, we aren’t literally talking about the two sides of a record. We’re talking about the publishing side, which is the initial idea, and we’re talking about the master side, which is the actual performance of the idea and the person or people behind it.

Just as it is with sheet music, a performer is not necessarily going to know where to buy vinyl, where to press it, where to create the little pieces of paper that go inside of it, or the names of all the stores that sell records across the country. Because of this, we need record executives, who are able to take care of those things. So, the record business, just like the sheet music business before it, becomes a partnership between musicians and entrepreneurs—between artists and business people.

A record producer has two entities to pay. The first is the publisher and songwriter, who are the owners of that song. The second entity is the performing artist, who usually gets a royalty per record for the distribution of the performance. That’s how the music business operates; you either own the song, or you can own the performance of that song in fixed form.

The music industry today operates on those same principles. The only main difference is that today, in many cases, the performance of the song is not fixed in physical form, but instead available digitally.

Performances started in much the same way that songs did: in the oral tradition. A performance wasn’t something to be bought and sold. But then came the idea of modern theater, and the modern venue. The idea behind it was very simple: there’s a performer in a room. People are outside the room, and there’s a person at the door who’s going to take $5 from you. If you pay the $5, you gain entry to the room, and you’re going to hear the performance.

That is essentially the core of the business of being a performing artist. Of course, that artist can also record things on vinyl, or a CD, or on a digital file, and that’s worth something as well.

If you’re interested in learning more about how performing artists monetize themselves and their performances, as well as many other concepts regarding the music industry, think about exploring online music education. It is by far the most accessible and convenient way to access the lessons that come with a solid music education.

“A few decades after the start of Tin Pan Alley and the sheet music business, an entrepreneur comes along with another invention — essentially another way to fix a musical idea in form,” explains Dan Charnas. “And that entrepreneur was Thomas Edison. And in addition to inventing the light bulb, he also invented the phonograph or gramophone.”

John Carlin adds, “Thomas Edison was a true genius, maybe one of the greatest geniuses of the 20th century. He invented a way to record music and commercialize it, and that’s really the key. Now, the interesting thing about Thomas Edison is that he was deaf when he was a young man. Someone had cuffed him on the ears, and he had lost his hearing. And not only did he have bad hearing, but he also was thought to have very bad taste in music. However, he was a mechanical engineering genius, the equivalent Bill Gates or Steve Wozniak in our world.

“Edison created this machine, the phonograph, which utilized a wax cylinder. It was a round device, and a needle would etch the sound into the wax. To use it for recording, people would push their heads or their instruments into a big horn, and the horn would record on the wax. Then, when you played it back through the machine, the sound was amplified through the horn.”

Carlin describes Edison’s early efforts as “somewhat of a niche business. He would sell the wax cylinders, but he was mainly interested in selling the machines to people. So, in the early days of the recording industry, the music was essentially given away to sell the machines to musicians and get them into people’s homes.”

With music education, you can learn more about the music industry’s roots and many other useful and interesting concepts. With online music education, you can learn all these things without having to leave home.

One of the catchphrases I use with students in many of my classes is “Make sure you’re possessed by your music every time you step on stage.” I kind of coined that term while watching “Stop Making Sense” by the Talking Heads, which is a 1984 live music performance film that features The Talking Heads.

David Byrne from the very first song is really just possessed by the music. You can see it in his body movements, facial expressions, voice performance and instrumentation. Every part of his performance reveals a person who is completely embedded in their music and their process.

Music Education

I use that film as a teaching tool in not only the persona class but in classes throughout the semester because it really focuses well on stage setup, instrumentation, sequencing and collaboration. The film displays literally every aspect of the music industry and associated careers that we cover in classes. An online music education can reveal to you more about opportunities in the music industry beyond this topic. A formal education can help you narrow down your career choice and consider everything required of you to achieve success.

My point of view is always going to be that of a talent manager. That’s my background. That’s what I came up in, and that’s who really nurtured my thinking. As a result, everything that I do is always going to be from the perspective of finding a way to evolve a vision. I want to be able to know how to achieve this, who a partner should work with, and how to share the vision with its intended audience.

The advice I would give, to any artist who is looking to understand their brand and what they want to say, is to find a point of view. What do you care about? Do you care about how you look, or fashion? Do you care about types of music and telling people what influences you? Find your point of view, and start there.

Keep in mind that this is not an exact science. This is not some miraculous thing where you can snap your fingers and suddenly you have 30,000 followers. It doesn’t really work like that. It takes time, dedication, and putting your effort into the right areas.

If you’re looking to build your personal brand on social media, I would challenge you to ask yourself: What are my values? What do I care about? What do I want people to know about me? Also, ask yourself what you want people to know about your music, your story, and where you’re going. As an example, if you’re a hip-hop artist, you might love hip-hop but decide that you’re not going to have any raps with curse words in them. And that’s going to be your MO.

Figuring out these things — what you care about, what you want to share with others through your music, and what you want to achieve — are crucial when it comes to building your brand and creating your story in the music industry.

Exploring music education is an excellent way to learn more about these concepts, and building your personal brand and viewpoint in the world of music. With online music education, all you need is an internet connection and a desire to learn.

As many of you may be aware, when you perform on stage, you’ll sometimes have a music director. The music director chooses the best way to implement musicians around the song that you’ve chosen to perform. This could be an electronic track played in the background, a symphony orchestra or an acoustic guitar. It could be an electric guitar accompanied by a drummer. All of these instrumentations are different types of music direction.

If you don’t have a music director, then you’ll either be doing it all on your own or in collaboration with your bandmates. Because there are so many options, what we like to do is choose the instrumentation that works the best with our story. So, after we’ve chosen our story, we’re able to see which instruments should also be characters in the story that we’re telling.

For example, is it an introspective, intimate performance that we’re trying to create? If so, maybe an acoustic guitar and some hand percussion would work. Is it more of a wild and crazy party? If it is, maybe a track and a live drummer would be best. These are the questions that we need to consider and understand when we choose the new characters that we’ll take along with us on our story.

So, the structure of a show, and sometimes, the sequence of a show, is how we lay out all of the different songs and speaking moments, as well as any poetry we might be reading, opening acts, or DJs after the show. We ask ourselves, what is the best way for us to tell the story that we’ve written? How do we get the audience amped up for the show, and in the right place emotionally to receive the story that we want to tell them? And finally, what is the best way to relay that story and exchange energy with them throughout the show?

To learn more about the music industry and telling your story on stage, many people explore the opportunities of music education. With online music education, you can even learn about these concepts from the comfort of your own home.

A lot of times in the music industry, we think that the only way to market ourselves as artists is to always position ourselves from the standpoint of music, and nothing else. We tend to think that our fans must only be looking for people who make music, and that just isn’t true. One of my favorite examples is a singer-songwriter named Eileen Quinn. Very few people are familiar with her work.

However, since the 1980s, she has sold hundreds of thousands of records. She has done very major partnerships, all without the help of the traditional music industry. And all of this stemmed from one clear decision that was really antithetical to how most musicians would think, which was choosing to make music about boats. She wrote her songs about boats. I believe she even recorded some albums while on boats. Obviously, it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but that’s just fine. It did, however, have a niche element to it.

For example, in her song, “The Anchoring Dance,” Eileen Quinn sings: “Up on the foredeck, see them prance when they do, do, do, do the anchoring dance.”

And so, rather than sending her tapes or CDs at the time to “Rolling Stone,” or “Paste,” or the places we associate with music, she went the other way, and sent her stuff to yachting weekly magazines, and started doing partnerships with boating companies. Most likely, the first question you’d ask yourself is, how many singer-songwriters are also mailing their stuff to yachting magazines?

Probably, she was immediately able to stand out as completely different from the other kinds of solicitations they were getting, right? So, there is one way that you can immediately differentiate yourself from your competition in terms of other artists you’re similar to, by not necessarily going for traditional musical press. And eventually, there will be partnership opportunities.

For Eileen Quinn, for example, for everyone who bought a certain kind of boat, they also received one of her CDs. So, by knowing who the audience is that’s going to love your stuff, there’s most likely something you can look at, whether it be in your lyrics, where you’re from, or something in your background, that you’d be comfortable utilizing.

These are all opportunities to find your initial audience in a way that doesn’t have to only rely on describing yourself as a musician. I would definitely encourage you to look inward at what you’re doing and ask yourself, is there a niche that you’re comfortable utilizing about yourself that will help people find your music?

Again, these are all starting points. However, if you can figure that part out about yourself and find some success there, you can then move on to the next level and make your way to the more traditional musical press. Overall, though, finding that niche or unique trait about yourself or your work can really be a great starting point.

You can learn much more about defining yourself as an artist, connecting to your audience, and how the music industry operates, with online music education. With the online method as an option, getting your quality music education doesn’t need to be a hassle or prohibitively expensive.

For musicians who are taking time off from touring and other projects, performing in the studio is a great revenue stream. Now, how do artists get paid when they’re in the studio? Oftentimes, artists get a day rate. That means they’ll pick, for example, $100 per day, or in major instances, $500, $1,000, or even $2,500 for the day. They record as much as they can get done for the day.

Artists can get paid for the time they put in at the studio. Many times, these artists are given a flat day rate. This rate may pay anywhere from $100 to $2,500, and artists will record all they can on that day.

The great thing about the day rate is that it is fixed. If a drummer contracts work for a $2,500 payday, then he gets paid that amount whether he performs on one track or ten. Studio work for a flat day rate is not something that is regaled to small or up and coming artists. Many “big time” artists are racking up time in the studio. This is a great way to have steady income as an artist.

When a singer takes a group of musicians on the road, the musicians in the act may get a flat weekly rate of between $250 and $5,000 per week. They often also have allowances for hotels and meals as well as a per diem rate. A well-liked and respected artist who is also versatile can make money – as much or more – than a touring musician.

If a drummer comes in and records five songs, they get their $2,500. Or if they record one song, they get their $2,500. And many big name artists are recognized studio musicians, who have played on many of the records you know and love. When you’re on the road, an artist normally pays their musicians a weekly rate, where they’re getting $200, $500, $5,000 a week, plus obviously, hotel and a small per diem. So if you are a well-liked and versatile artist, there’s a great model for you to make money performing in the studio, as well as a touring musician.

Online music education tells us that production companies have always been a tremendous asset to those in the music industry. Take for instance the presence of Berry Gordy. Using the Motown Model, Gordy would find an artist, bring him or her into the musical family at Motown, and then use the same sets of musicians and writers to write and record many of the hits of notable artists such as Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross, and a wealth of other Motown artists. This successful model still exists today.

However, musicians today seem to be participating in more collaborative projects. In this form of collective music, artists from various types of media will get together and collaborate on projects. Noted rapper Dr. Dre collaborated with other producers and sound artists to create multiple hits by breakout artist Eminem. Not only did he produce a number of Eminem’s songs, but he also took part in the music making process and he appeared in numerous Eminem videos. Artists are enjoying being creative in other ways in addition to working with other talented individuals.

Music education should include teaching artists about the entrepreneurship of the music business as well as how to improve upon their personal craft. All artists should learn how to think outside the box and how to build each other up so that they can make the best business decisions for themselves. Newer artists should learn the success of the Motown model just as they should learn about other methods of creating the superior sound of success. The Rockefeller model is another profitable method of creating successful music. Artists such as Kanye, Camron, and Beanie Sigel have all benefited from the use of the Rockefeller way.

We wanted to share our successful model with as many musicians as possible. This form of music education is free; it is simply knowledge that helps all artists. Musicians and artists should want to see each other thrive and develop a family atmosphere.

Another important part of the music business is one’s staff within the recording industry. Staff is highly important. without a dependable staff, artists have to not only worry about their creative element but also the business part of the music business. A knowledgeable staff that is appreciated is a staff that goes above and beyond for their artists.

All elements of the music business must work together if artists will truly leave a legacy. The ability to collaborate with others and a supportive staff contribute highly to the success of an artist and a recording label as well as those who work in the studio.

I highly recommend looking into finding ways to collaborate with like-minded people within your friend group or your artistic group. You’ll find that you’ll get people playing on your records, or you’ll get studio time in exchange for, perhaps, doing a photoshoot (if that’s something that you do). Look for opportunities to trade your skills for other people’s skills in order to further your project along.

Thinking orthogonally again, a really great trend that comes more from the technology world but is a great one to also bring into the music world is this concept called growth hacking. The overlying idea behind growth hacking is this sense of taking areas of marketing and creating things that we’ve always described as completely disparate things. For example, being in the studio, getting my message out, advertising, doing data analyses, looking at who is resonating with my stuff — we’ve traditionally thought of these as separate phases and that they each happen only once.

Growth Hacking in Music Education

Growth hacking says, “Not so fast.” That process can be cyclical and going on all the time. If I have enough songs and am putting out a song today, I can look at how people resonate with it and who’s resonating with it, and that can influence the song that I’m putting out next month.

And we just keep going around. It doesn’t have to be so isolated. A really great example of who’s done growth hacking well is anyone who makes a change to their product that sort of does the marketing for them. Remember this as you continue your online music education.

Before releasing work in the music industry, something really important I recommend doing is called “quant-based marketing.” It’s basically this idea of literally plotting out how you’re going to get the amount of traffic that you would like to get before ever releasing music. What we really want to avoid is putting out a song, and then first starting to market it, and getting a certain amount of traffic. A music journalist or an influencer wants to feel like they’re getting to cover something new.

The first thing to do is to establish a goal. Let’s say you want to put out a song soon. Say you would like in the first four weeks to get, say, 50,000 streams. That’s totally cool. We just need to reverse engineer how you’re going to get that. So what I’m going to do is pick a few outlets, influencers, things I either have relationships to or people that I’m starting to build relationships with, and I’m going to look at their audience size. If you’re a student at a university, a great place to start is to see if there’s a school paper or a school blog at your university, even if you’re in online music education. Would it be relatively easy to look up the editor’s email address and send them a message, asking to be covered in it?

Next, I would look up the traffic amount; what is the audience size of that school paper? In music education, you’ll find there’s a great website called SimilarWeb. Amazon has a tool called Alexa, where you can check the traffic counts of different websites. So, let’s say your school is getting 100,000 unique visitors a month. Basically, you can think of it like this: if the school paper writes an article about me, in theory, 100,000 people could be seeing that article about you and your song.

The next part of it is sort of trying to guess how many people would actually convert from that. So even though 100,000 people might see that article, maybe only 10% will click on it. So that gets us down to 10,000 people actually seeing your article. Now, they’re reading your article. The question is how many of those people are actually going to click on the song? That was your goal all along. Maybe 10% of that 10,000, so let’s say a thousand people end up being converted to your song if you’re featured in your school paper. That’s amazing.

We know that beforehand, even if our goal is 50,000 hits and we just got a thousand, we’re on our way. Now, we just need to do that five, six, ten, fifteen more times with different kinds of outlets. Doing all that before deciding what the release date is is huge, because then the release date comes, and you know what? You can sleep really soundly knowing you’re not guessing. You’ve pretty much guaranteed the amount of traffic you’re going to get. This is going to be a very big difference between artists that are really disheartened by the response they get versus ones who know that it’s starting at a certain point and hopefully grows from there.