To me, a good musical performance is about three things. One is being comfortable with your body. One is being comfortable with your breath. And one is being comfortable with yourself.

One tip I give my students is to listen to their music while they walk around the city, or ride their bike to work, or even take a bath. By allowing your music to, in a way, infiltrate your entire being, you can feel like it’s really inhabiting every cell of your body. Walking out on the street, dancing throughout the day—all of these things are enmeshing the music and your identity together, which is a really important part of your growth as a performer.

Another thing I suggest is to listen to music while you’re working out. If you go to the gym, there’s a musical exercise you can do while on the treadmill. As you’re going at a nice slow pace, for about three to five minutes, just start singing to yourself, “la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la. La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la.” Sing these notes in time with your breathing, and it will allow you to feel your breath.

Alternatively, you can do the same exercise, but instead of doing it on the treadmill, you can do it while you’re doing sit-ups. Either way, it will allow you to feel connected to your breath. It’s about the breath, and it’s all about understanding how your body works.

During a performance, you’re speaking very quickly. The volume sometimes has to be very loud, and it’s also rhythmically challenging. As a result, the tendency for singers and also for hip-hop artists/rappers is that they sometimes forget to breathe. Then, what happens is that the breath becomes short. No air is getting down. All of a sudden, you’re gripping from the outside, and eventually, the voice reaches a point where it can’t take it any longer, and the performance falters.

We’ve got to breathe deeply and move on that breath. And move on that breath, and move on that breath, continuously. We find the rhythm within the breath. The breath truly sets up the rhythm—really, it’s the breath that creates the rhythm.

I usually tell my students that they should be able to sing their entire set while they’re running, doing sit-ups, on the elliptical—during all of these different types of physical movements that we’re so used to doing. We should be able to do them while singing and listening to our own music.

And eventually, at a certain point, the rehearsing of these movements together will make it seem like second nature. We don’t ever want to walk on stage feeling like we aren’t prepared, so preparing through all of these everyday activities will help us feel like it’s no big deal. It’s just breathing.

With online music education, you can learn much more about improving your musical performances, as well as a wide variety of lessons about building a career in the music industry. Your high-quality music education is right there, waiting for you to seize it.

In the music industry, it’s crucial to find who your target audience is, and it’s important that it’s based on real data. So, what you should do right now is create a profile. Create that John or Jane Doe who you think would love your music. Even if you only have 10 fans on Facebook or any platform, try to look at what the commonalities are amongst the people who love what you’re creating. Whether it be the shoes they wear, or their age, or where they’ve gone to school, all of this stuff starts to paint a picture of where you’ll be able to find your audience in the future.

The next thing to really make sure that you’re doing once you start getting some sort of response, even if it’s only five people following you on Instagram or coming out to your show, is to really start embracing your first followers. You want to do this because those first followers have the potential to become the biggest evangelizers on your behalf.

As much as we can talk about potential marketing strategies that we can do, it’s also really nice to have your marketing happening while you’re sleeping. This is another reason that you want to really embrace your early fans and make them feel like there’s a reason they should be championing you on your behalf.

So, whether you’ve just started performing or whether you’re starting to get plays on SoundCloud, you should really make sure that you’re starting to know who your fans are. For example, if you have less than 100 fans on Facebook, you should try to know all of their names. The people who come out to your show—those are people you should try to talk to afterward.

One of my favorite related stories is about Beyoncé. If any of us went to go see her in a stadium today, she certainly would not stay afterward to talk to all of us. She doesn’t need to. However, if you look at footage from some of the first Destiny’s Child concerts from the 1990s when there were 20 or so people at a gymnasium, she’s staying after the performance and talking to every one of them. She’s taking the time to learn who they are, and she’s leaving them with a great impression. There’s no reason that you and I can’t do the same.

For anyone interested, there is far more to learn regarding a wide variety of music-related concepts by exploring online music education, which is by far the most convenient form of music education available.

You probably got here by clicking on something regarding building your image or music marketing. The truth behind your intention for doing so was probably that you want to build your audience, which is important to keep in mind during your music education. Having a clear image of what your marketing strategy will be is very important, and it should fit into a really clear goal that you hopefully have: finding your fans, identifying them, going out to where they are, and giving what you’ve made to them.

This goes along with any other aspirations you might have about getting a record deal or getting management. All those people in the music industry are just chasing audiences. They’re not chasing you. They’re not chasing the talent. They’re chasing audiences.

That means, your focus should be finding out who your audience is. The really good news is, unless you’re making a really bad product, assuming you have pretty good songs, there is an audience for you out there. There’s an audience for everybody.

One of the first important changes that we all need to go through when we start communicating about the things that we’ve made (and that’s what music marketing is, right?) is to grab your audience’s attention. We’re just trying to communicate and say, “I want to win your trust to take the 15 seconds to listen to my song.” To do that, I need to say something, or you need to read something.

The first big change we need to look at is to refraining from simply just focusing on describing what we’re doing, which a lot of us start out doing in the beginning. We say, “Hey, I’m Mark, and I play guitar.” But that’s sort of a commodity and it doesn’t really resonate on an emotional level with anyone.

A really important hack you might learn in online music education is to actually just change the sequencing of saying what you do and focusing on saying why you do what you do first. Then you just illustrate that what you’re working on, be it your band, your album, whatever project it happens to be, is proof of what you believe in, what your “why” is.

So on one hand, I could say, “I play guitar. I’ve been playing for a long time. I have an album coming out. Please listen.” That doesn’t resonate very hard, does it?

Or I could go a different route and say, “When I was growing up, I didn’t see my brothers or sisters very often. But one day, my brother came around and gave me his guitar, and then everything changed. I ended up writing songs. I have an album coming out with those very songs. Would you like to listen?”

Now, it doesn’t really matter if my style of music isn’t your cup of tea, as long as — on a belief level — if my “why” has resonated with you. If it has, then chances are you’re going to take a moment and check it out, which is all we’re ever trying to do. So this pivot to starting with “why” is really important.

It’s not just rooted in psychology. There’s also a biological component to it. I promise we won’t go too scientific in this course, but the reason we all focus on “what” is because the outer layer of our brains, the first thing that the information I’m saying is reaching, just focuses on language.

So if I know that the first thing you’re going to process when my words hit your brain is “what” I’m saying, I’m going to emphasize “what.” But where we make decisions, where our beliefs and our values live, is actually deeper in the center part of the brain. That’s why “why” is more important than “what.”

What we’re essentially doing, if you can visualize it, is that by starting with “why,” we’re jumping right to the decision-making point and we’re not making all these words go through the processing part of the brain. That’s all happening as well, but we’re sort of taking a shortcut. So it’s literally in our biology that when we lead with “why” in our beliefs, things resonate faster.

Looking at other people’s performances on stage and critiquing them is a really good way for us to grow as a class and also be able to critique people without the fear of them getting upset. So one thing we can look at is Ed Sheeran’s performance with his looping pedals versus his performance of the same song with a band.

We will talk about the ways in which one seems more intimate, but one seems more professional. In one, you can see the errors that are made. In the other one, it’s more easygoing.

It’s really usually split half and half between the classes of which one they appreciate more. But what we’re looking at here is really the ability to do the same song in two different styles: one by yourself, and one with an entire band. And it’s really awesome to see that that’s possible these days. As far as music education goes, knowing the difference between a solo performance and a group performance is important to remember.

We’re in an age of technology where we can make practically anything happen. And depending on who the audience is, we can focus that performance for those people specifically.

A really great exercise I do with my students is that I force them to take out all the elements of the song except for two. So there are only two instruments and a voice. This changes the students’ understanding of their song completely. In a lot of cases, it also changes the way they see the song, and sometimes even all of the music they’re creating.

Just this one little experimentation in minimalism can help see which elements of the song are important and which of them are superfluous. Removing elements that don’t synergize well can greatly improve the quality of a song in creation, remember this as you continue your online music education.

Experimentation with live instrumentation is greatly important to the artist’s development. If somebody comes in with an electronic-based track, we try to make it live because being comfortable onstage in all different ways means that you’re ready for anything.

If somebody comes to you and says, “We really loved your performance, but could you do it acoustic?” We want you to feel like you’re more than strong enough to do that, to take that chance, and feel comfortable with different instrumentation onstage.

This means it could be a symphony orchestra or just playing to a track or singing an a cappella. We want all of those things to feel just as comfortable for you. So we make sure that we collaborate with different people, feel different rhythms, and explore the way it sounds to have live drums next to you versus having drums on track.

All of these things can be complicated to feel safe with on a stage. But making sure that you practice and get used to it is really important.

You know, some people’s sound is so specific, and they don’t want to move outside of this. But for me, I feel like attempting to go for it, and really challenging yourself is an incredibly important part of the process.

Last year, one of my students was a hip hop performer. I kind of forced him to try to play with a live band. He was not initially interested, but he did so. Afterwards, it completely changed his sound. And from then on, that was his go-to method of performing.

So for me, it’s really important to just try this process because it doesn’t hurt. You don’t know what’s going to happen with that song, the rest of your music, and you could even be starting an entire new genre of music.

As an artist, you have to make the choice of whether or not you’re going to be the leader of your band, or whether or not you’re going to have a musical director, or whether or not you’re going to have someone who is basically producing your show and putting you in place.

There are three different types of directions there. If you are leading your band, then your music knowledge has to be on point. You have to understand the arrangements. You have to understand how to start a song and how to end a song. You even have to understand how to talk to your band musicians.

If you have a musical director, then you have to be willing to listen to what the musical director is telling you in terms of when your entrance is, when you should pause, where a solo is appropriate, when you should take a break, and so on.

All of those things are worked out (with your input, of course) with the musical director. If there’s someone who’s producing the show from top to bottom, then it’s pretty much like you’re going to be told when to sing, where to go, when to stand, when to breathe, when to move, and when to bow. All of those things are worked out because you have someone who’s producing the show and they usually know what they’re doing, so you can all put on an amazing show.

When you talk about revenue streams in the music industry, without a doubt, the biggest source of revenue for the majority of major artists these days is live performances and touring. Live performances and touring, if you think about it compared to traditional spins or record sales, for example, maybe you sell a million records. Then maybe it takes a year to sell a million records. Or maybe you get a million spins, but it takes 10 months, or 11 months, or 12 months to reach those kinds of numbers.

An artist who is getting that level of sales and performance royalties most likely is able to sell out Madison Square Garden. An artist will make more in one night in Madison Square Garden than they will in the first six months of releasing a song. So every big artist realizes that the music is the business card that gets you in the door to touring and really generating that income. Because, at the end of the day, an artist will end up making more money in one month of good strong touring than they will in a year of spins and performances on the radio and likewise. That’s a good bit of music education to be aware of.

The best advice I could give to any aspiring artist is to make your live show fantastic, and the way you make a live show fantastic is to simply play live. There’s no secret. That’s how you do it. The old adage in the music industry is a band who plays 100 shows live is a completely different band from the one who plays their first show. A lot of times when big artists tour, you’ll find that the first couple of weeks of the tour, they’re in playing secondary or tertiary markets.

You might wonder something along the lines of why Rihanna is in West Palm Beach and San Antonio as opposed to New York, Dallas, Boston, Los Angeles, or any other major media mecca center. It’s because artists always want to gather some steam, get the machine running smoothly, get the kinks out of a show, and really make it run well. And in today’s shows, that’s no small feat. Don’t neglect the importance of this as you continue your online music education.

Between the pyrotechnics, the sound, the lighting, the staging, and all the things that go on, it’s really important that all pistons are firing at the same time to make the show great. Now, I understand that you guys aren’t all going to be selling out Madison Square Garden like Drake. You need to make your live show compelling on the club level. It doesn’t matter if there are five people there, 50 people there, or 500 people there. You have to make it kill.

That means you rehearse. That means you build your following. That means you slowly build your audience outside the epicenter of your home base. If you’re a New York-based band, you shouldn’t overplay in New York.

You play a show in Brooklyn, maybe a show in Manhattan. Take a little break. Do you play a show in Westchester? Yes. Maybe try and hit Philly. Maybe you go into Hartford. Maybe you go into Boston. Slowly build your center out. That’s how you build a fan base.

This is a great story that I love to tell. A friend of mine was a manager in Chicago for many years. He was a very big manager and managed a lot of really great acts. Artists would call him all the time in Chicago and say, “Hey, we’re looking for a manager.” And he would say, “Can you sell out the Metro?” For those of you who don’t know, the Metro is a historic club in Chicago.

Every great artist has come through the Metro. It doesn’t matter if you’re the Smashing Pumpkins or Kanye. It’s about a 900-capacity room and very famous. Every great artist who’s come through Chicago has sold out the Metro. More often than not, the artists say, “Well, no, I can’t sell out the Metro. I can sell like 300 tickets.” And he would say, “Well, when you sell out the Metro, give me a call again.”

All this to say you’re not going to be the biggest band in the world if you’re not the biggest band in your hometown. So build your fan base locally. Build those fans, the real fans that are going to stick with you through thick and thin before you try to take over the world. Everybody starts with 1,000 real fans and builds up from there, and you need to do the exact same thing.

Get critical feedback about your show. Make sure your show is great, and when you play, make sure it’s an event. If you overplay, nobody’s going to want to see you anymore. That’s going to have a long-term effect on how you’re going to make a significant amount of money in the music industry if you’re a performer. And if you’re a manager, that’s also how you’re going to make commission.

The music business begins with music, and the core of the music experience is the song, right? What’s being played by the musician. The song’s at the core of everything we do, and it’s important to understand exactly what a song is. A song is really just an idea. It’s a melodic idea, a rhythmic idea, a harmonic idea. Something that brings a bunch of information together and creates an incredible work of art that can be enjoyed by lots of people.

But the music business starts when that idea first needs to be distributed. For centuries, music was something that was essentially free. It was part of our culture, part of our environments. Songs and music began as oral tradition, as something passed from person to person, and from generation to generation.

The music business starts when the song, the idea, becomes something to sell and to buy. So that’s what I’m going to talk about right now. It’s important to remember that the music business actually starts before there’s anything like records or recording. It actually starts as just a piece of information on a piece of paper. That’s the first bit to learn in your music education.

As we move into the Industrial Revolution and to more contemporary times, it becomes possible not only to fix those musical ideas in form, but also to buy and to sell that form. So the form becomes a humble sheet of paper with that musical information written upon it.

Now, here’s the thing, and it’s really the key to understanding what the business of music is. How much would you pay me for a sheet of blank paper? Next to nothing, right? Because it’s worth next to nothing. Maybe fractions of a penny. It’s almost not even worth talking about because there’s nothing special about it.

Now, I’m going to put some random ink on this paper. How much would you pay me for it now? Still nothing, right? Still pretty much worth nothing. It’s just paper and meaningless ink. The random ink doesn’t really mean anything, so it’s not going to change the value of the paper.

But let’s say I were to write some specific symbols on it, something that you could interpret and understand as a piano player. Then it begins to be worth something, because there is something worth having that’s on this sheet of paper, and now it’s much more valuable. And what’s worth having is the idea, right? The idea of a song. It works the same way for books. Words on a page convey a particular kind of idea, and those ideas are worth money.

And essentially, the early music business was all about putting those ideas on paper. So this is worth more than nothing. It’s worth 50 cents, $1, $2, however much the market will bear for buying sheet music.

Now, it just so happens that the music business emerges and there becomes a market for music in the late 1800s, early 1900s, because there’s an emergent middle class who can afford to buy things like pianos. Well, if you have a piano, and you know how to play music, then you need the instructions for playing that music. So suddenly there is a market for these ideas on paper called songs.

So here’s the thing, if I’m a musician, I definitely know how to make and interpret these symbols. What I might not know, for example, is where to buy a whole bunch of paper to print songs on, or where to buy ink, or the names of all the music stores in America and the addresses so that I can distribute that stuff to them. So frankly, I’m a musician. I want to stay at my piano, I want to compose things. I don’t want to do all that other stuff. That’s when I need somebody else, I need a partner.

So if I’m a songwriter, what I really need is a song publisher. And that is the beginnings of the music business in America, so remember that as you continue your online music education. That’s the beginnings of a music business that started on 28th Street in New York City between Broadway and Sixth Avenue, and it was known by the nickname Tin Pan Alley. The reason it got that nickname is because when people would walk down the street and hear all the sounds of the pianos coming out of the windows as they walked down the street, it sounded like little plunking on tin cans, all these little percussive piano hits that blended into this cacophony of sound spilling out into the world.

Well, Tin Pan Alley is not just a place. It’s also a metaphor and a nickname for the first music business. And the first music business was about selling these ideas on paper, and it was a partnership between the artist and the businessperson, the person who knew how to write these songs and put the symbols on paper, and the person who knew how to distribute and sell them.

This is how folks began making a lot of money. They sold sheet music to music stores, and they also got money for artists performing them onstage called a performance royalty. So this was the nature of the early music business.

One of the most important things about revenue streams in the music industry is registering your song. Without registering your song and without having proper songs splits, there is no revenue to collect. That money just sits out there in the ether with really no place to go. That armored car is driving around the parking lot with no hope and no place to stop. How do you solve that?

Every time you write a song—whether you’re writing it with a partner, a friend or somebody else you’ve collaborated with in the past—you should never leave a songwriting session without a song split sheet. It’s a very simple sheet that just says, for example, I wrote 50% of the music, and you wrote 50%, so those are our shares. Without having an effective song split sheet, you’re opening yourself up to a lawsuit. If things go well for you and the song becomes a big hit and you have an argument later on about who owns what share of the song, that money gets held up for as long as the litigation gets held up. You don’t get paid on your song for quite some time.

Song splits can take many different forms. Two people could be a 50-50 split. It could be 95-5. Some songs have seven or eight different writers on them, ranging from 50% for one writer down to 3.5% percent for another. Online music education will show you that Kanye West famously had 21 writers on one song.

Consider “All Day” with music by Kanye West. Kanye sang: “I took a young, sweet breath. And I reached into my head. Gave him what I had left. At that moment I dispersed. At that moment I dispersed.”

Of course, that’s not even including the idea that perhaps you sampled some of a previous song or used a beat from somewhere else. Those rates need to be negotiated as well. So, without a song split sheet, you can’t even register your song. Once you have your song split sheet, and once you are clear on who did what and who contributed how much, you’re able to then go ahead and register your song with a performance rights organization like ASCAP, BMI or SESAC. It’s very important you do that.

You can also then take your song and register it online. All of this can be done online with SoundExchange, for example. SoundExchange collects all your digital royalties for you. Then, of course, when you upload your song to Spotify or Apple, all that information is given there. You’d be surprised how many artists don’t take the first step toward monetizing their music by simply registering their songs with the proper performance rights organizations and collection agencies that are able to get that money for you. It’s a vital part of being in the music industry. If you’re in a situation where you have a major label or you have an indie label on your side and you do have representation like a lawyer or a business manager, they’ll often advise you to do these things. We’re living in a day and age in which music education teaches us that the artist really must take control of their own career. And this is the first step to doing so, making money doing what you love.

Music supervisor is a term for somebody who’s in charge of finding and processing musical information for particular projects. That’s the easiest way to put it. In advertising, they will be called a musical producer or an executive musical producer. But it’s a similar process in terms of what they do.

A musical supervisor will come and say, “I’ve got this deal. This is what the structure is. This is how much we want to pay. Do you have any songs that will work?” And then, we’ll send the musical supervisor some selections.

It’s sort of like throwing darts at a dartboard. I wouldn’t say that it starts against the wall, where you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s throwing darts at a dartboard. And we say, “OK, well, we know what the supervisor wants. We can hit that. We think we can hit it well.” Then, we just basically wait for the supervisor to process it. We just have an ongoing dialogue with them to talk about whether or not it works. If it works, then we do a deal. If it doesn’t, we don’t. It’s fairly simple business, but there’s a lot of intellectual property stuff in the background that’s not quite so simple.

This position is sort of the central point in the music industry for a particular production when it comes to everything musical. Sometimes, that means that they also act as a musical director and not just as a supervisor. And what I mean by that is a musical director, being somebody who will coach actors on how to sing properly for camera, how to lip-sync, or if they need to lip-sync. We’ll work with composers, if needed, to bring together custom work that needs to be done. So there are a lot of things that a supervisor touches on. But really, if you want to think about the supervisor from your perspective, that’s the person to connect with either directly or through a sync agent, a label, or publisher or other entity, to get your music connected to a project and then possibly get it used.

In that role, the supervisor is sort of a central musical point. That’s the easiest way to understand it. Now, there’s one thing I want to talk about here when it comes to supervisors that a lot of people may not know. Basically, the supervisor is only one voice. A lot of the time, they don’t have the ultimate control of approval, or they are not the ultimate decision-maker when it comes to the usage of musical information.

A lot of the time when you’ve submitted musical data to a supervisor, or someone has on your behalf, and it seems like everything’s going well but then it stops, people naturally get really frustrated. And they’re like, “What? You know, the supervisor told us that it was great. I don’t know what’s going on. What’s wrong with these people? They’re totally crazy.”

But they’re not totally crazy. They’re not the person who’s the ultimate decider a lot of the time. The ultimate decider is the person who writes–the people who write the show, the showrunner, the director in a film, or the creative head at an advertising firm. Or it could be a producer, somebody who is at a brand for an advertising company, or somebody high up at the studio in marketing, who just said, “That’s just not resonating with us. We don’t want it.”

So there are a thousand reasons why something that you’ve submitted to a supervisor may not actually happen. I just want to say that, because a lot of people think that the supervisor is like some kind of god. However, a lot of the time, the supervisor is trying to do the best job that they can for their bosses. And the reason that I’m telling you all of this is that there’s an end game for you.

And the end game for you is to say to yourself, “How can I be of service to this supervisor? How can I help them to solve a problem?” That’s your job outside of your music education if you want to step up and deal with supervisors directly. Or a good sync agent would say the same thing, which is, “How do I solve a problem for a supervisor?” And you know what? If you can solve that problem, you’ve got to be honest with yourself about your music and about what you can do, and say, “OK, I can solve that problem!” And then you solve it.

If you can’t solve the problem, don’t send the supervisor something that will set you up for failure. I’ve seen it done time and time again. I see a lot of the time that people will know that a supervisor is busy with several tasks, and they’ll send them musical data that will never work for anything they do, which is the kiss of death in everything.

If there’s a supervisor who is working on a project where everything sounds like it’s very ’80s and you send them some current hip-hop verses, maybe something that sounds like Kurtis Blow or LL Cool J, then you’re going to set yourself up for failure because that’s not what the job of the day is. The job of the sound is to emphasize what the story is. You’ve got to take a look at what kind of stories are being told and what the supervisors are looking to enhance with your contribution. So your creation, as good as it may be, is not always going to be the best thing for the particular job.

Let’s talk from generalities first in terms of how you make your music licensable. Then, we can talk about how you present it because there are two parts of the equation. How you present is extremely important, but before that, let’s talk about what you need to do to make sure that everything is packaged correctly and that when you present it to a supervisor or somebody who’s representing you, you’re truly putting your best foot forward rather than setting yourself up for failure.

Now, the first thing is you’ve just got to create a really good sound. I’m just going to keep on saying that because that’s the most important thing that you need to do. Without really good musical compositions, nothing will happen, so you’ve got to make your sound the best it can be.

Also, you’ve got to make sure that anything that you submit is mastered and mixed correctly. You can’t give somebody something that’s a demo that you’re working on that’s really sort of a rough edit. You’ve got to have things that are ready to go and really represent you the best that they can. That’s probably the most important thing to remember as you continue your online music education, that you have to put in 100% of your effort.

Now, if you do have a relationship with somebody that has developed over time and you’re working on something, then, yeah, of course, just like any other relationship, you can say, “Hey, I’ve been working on this, what do you think? Do you think I should really go for it? Or what do you think of the direction of this?” That’s fine if you have a long-term relationship with a supervisor or with a sync agent or a label or publisher.

But let’s assume you don’t. Make sure that everything is mastered. That’s the number one rule that I’m going to say because I don’t think that people say it enough. They always talk about things like my next subject, which is metadata.

The pop music industry evolved a specific kind of artist: the recording artist. Whether you’re just beginning your online music education or you’re familiar with the industry, it’s important to remember that the journey of the recording artist begins with another invention, and that invention is called the microphone.

Not only does the microphone enable somebody to have their voice amplified in a venue, but it also enables a performer to fix that performance on a physical form, like a vinyl record.

However, the microphone also does something else: it actually alters the nature of how songs are performed. It used to be that if I were a performer onstage and there was no amplification, I would really have to project so that everybody in the venue could hear my voice. Suddenly, you have a microphone which allows for a greater dynamic range. In particular, a performer can sing very, very softly, and that voice will still carry. In some ways, it allows for a greater degree of intimacy with an artist, as if you are up close with that artist.

That really is one of the things that birthed a new kind of singing: an American singing, a popular music singing. Sometimes it’s called crooning, and there were a few figures of the early music business that really worked that microphone. Whether we’re talking about a Billie Holiday, a Bing Crosby, or a Frank Sinatra, people you might hear about when studying music education, these are some of the earliest superstars of recorded music, and they’re known especially for their subtle nuanced vocal performances.

I want to talk a little bit about performance anxiety. The truth is, it’s normal. We all have fight or flight so that means that everybody gets nervous, and everybody should get nervous if they’re getting up on a big stage in front of a lot of people or even a little stage in front of some people. Sometimes that is actually scarier.

The truth is, we should have an increased heart rate, some difficulty breathing, and perhaps some sweaty palms, but what we shouldn’t do is let that affect our performance. Practice is a really good way for us to move through this. We have to imagine that setup, that situation we’re going to be in, and be able to get through it. One thing that I really suggest is changing your thinking about the outcome of the situation. Camila Cabello says, “I remember the first show. I was so intimidated, like I was so scared. And there was a switch, I think, in the second or third show where I was like, wait a second, these people aren’t judging me.”

There’s three different ways that you can think. The first, is a positive outcome. This can be great, but it can also be detrimental. An example of that positive-outcome thinking would be, “I’m going to be amazing. I am the best singer ever.” Again, this confidence is awesome, but in reality, sometimes if we mess up, it can work to our disadvantage. The second is negative-outcome thinking, “I’m going to suck. I’m going to ruin everything. Everyone’s going to hate me.” Obviously, this is a terrible way to think. Sure, it’s low expectation so if we do well, we’ll feel really great, but it’s a terrible way to set yourself up for failure. Lastly, the third kind of thinking is just practical thinking. “I’m going to do this. This is my job. I’m going to perform.” This is really the best thinking for performance anxiety because we don’t say it’s going to be good or bad. We just say it’s going to be. This is the best way that we can be our authentic self and get through this difficult moment of nerves.

Coping Mechanisms to Overcome Performance Anxiety

One way to deal with performance anxiety is being able to mentally go through the entire performance in real time. Music education teaches, a lot of people use this technique when they can’t get together with their band. It just exemplifies a way that we can build confidence on our own in our own mind. It’s kind of like meditation. I’ll think about all the parts I need to play, all the vocalizations I need to do, and all of my choreography. After we do it once in real time, I like to do it a second time in double time. That means that I can go through everything quickly and know where I’m going to move to next. Before we finish up, we go one more time in real time. This helps us to end this process with what we are expecting to do on stage exactly. Going through this over and over again is just going to help us feel comfortable when we actually get on stage in front of the crowd.

The best way to recover from a mess-up during a performance is really the same way that you would mess up from a life experience. There’s a couple of ways that you can regain control after you mess up in a performance. According to online music education, one of those is seeing it in the scope of the entire show. Most people won’t recognize that you made an error. The only person that’s going to know that you made an error is yourself and maybe your band. Don’t acknowledge it and push through it. Take a breath and step back. This does not define your entire performance. It will not define your career. It will not define your entire life. It is only a moment to move past and it is gone now.

Everyone makes mistakes during a show. I definitely make more than one in every show. The truth is, we shouldn’t let that take over our anxiety around performing the rest of the show with confidence. One person that has made a mistake that we’re all aware of was Adele. When she performed at the Grammys and she couldn’t find her place, she actually stopped and acknowledged her mistake. I think this was really important for her to do because it created a vulnerability with her and the audience of millions of people all over the world. Showing that she was human actually made her more lovable. I thought it was a really brilliant way for her to deal with making that mistake. Other people on stage will just keep going and not care. Other people will stop the song and acknowledge it until the audience laughs. Really, there’s so many ways of doing this, but I think the most important thing is just to allow yourself to be vulnerable and authentic to your true self when you make a mistake on stage.