Staging and costumes are all about the way things look. As part of your online music education, let’s go back to Art History 101 to learn about composition. What is most pleasing to our eyes? What colors work best when you want to create an intimate atmosphere? Do you want warm colors like red, or cool colors like blue? This is all a trial-and-error process, but it’s best for us to see how the characters from earlier in the story fit in with these color-blocking ideas and the composition of the canvas as our stage.

Staging Philosophies
In the same way that we think of instrumentation with a song, color-blocking is a good way to impose splashes of color onto a stage that look good next to one another. Sometimes the juxtaposition of these colors can create a really interesting tone in itself. Using lights, we can really make them take on a whole different shape. So, for example, if you have a red light onstage and a blue backdrop, it’s going to change color as it’s turned on and off. The ability to see color and the way that it plays a role within the stage setup is important to know as you continue your music education.

Creating a conceptual identity for your product is something a lot of people are doing nowadays. Some people decide that they want to be a monster in another world. When you walk into this venue, you want to feel like you are a monster in another world, and you’ve never met someone else that is a monster from another world.

So how do we make that happen? What does the set design look like? How do we implement these ideas in the performance of our work? Do we speak to the audience? Do we start on the floor? Do we perform from the audience, with the audience themselves on stage? Original interpretations of what everything means and flipping the script on yourself is a really incredible way to understand yourself better as an artist.

My art teacher in high school used to say, “Do you belong to the school of squint?” And this helps me all the time when I’m thinking of visual elements for my live performance. What she meant by that was, if you squint and you see just the outside of everything and the composition of the larger pieces in color-blocking, you’re going to be able to see what it looks like from far away. This is what’s important for us as performers because it should look just as good in the front row as it does in the back row.

About Costumes
We want to create costumes that have really great profiles. We want apparel that makes us look the way we want to look, and that creates a color that pops out from the set itself and gives the audience something to be excited by. We can create so many different stories with costumes. They can be abstract shapes. We can reimagine our bodies as other-selves in this moment. But when it comes down to it for us, the entire conceptual performance is really focused on how to bring the costume, the set, the songs, and the choreography all together in wondrous harmony.

A costume doesn’t have to be some crazy Halloween thing at all. It’s just about what you put on that day that is your work outfit. And for some people, that’s going to be jeans, a T-shirt, and some Converse. And for other people, it’s going to be an evening gown, some makeup, and an up-do. But the truth is that you should always be wearing something that’s really comfortable to you that screams, “This is my authentic self.”

What we put on our bodies and how we present ourselves can shape the way we feel about our performance to a great extent. We want to be comfortable. We want to feel safe. This is all the puff-up, shrink-down thing again. If we act like something we are not, we are not going to be comfortable. We are not going to relate to our audience the best way that we can.

Another use of the costume is that it’s a personal prop. Being able to use something that you wear on your body as a through-line of a story that you tell on the stage is really important. We see this with James Brown with his cape. There are so many ways in which that cape means something more than just a piece of clothing. And his performance with this cape is something that I return to over and over again with my students in order to explain how to use props and how to use your body onstage in order to tell a deeper story.

How The Knife Uses Staging and Costumes
One of my favorite bands is called The Knife. They’re a Swedish electronic band. And every performance they do is wildly different from the one before. Creating this new world for them to live in is something that the audience loves. This is why people keep coming back; because they know that what they’re walking into is going to be a whole new world than the last time they saw the band.

Their last performance included choreographed dances with around 12 bandmates on stage. The lead singer wasn’t always even the one singing during performances. They had costumes and instruments they built themselves, plus new technologies around percussion instruments and wind instruments. Everything about the night was an experiment in pop music performance and what an audience is.

The opening band was an aerobics instructor. They got the crowd up and moving. It was a great way to create an amazing story throughout the night. It was new and different, and the audience is shocked to experience it. These are the kinds of performances we remember. They also make an impact on us in the world of music.

There’s a concept called product-market fit, and it’s one of the most important elements in finding your audience, finding customers, in anything you ever want to do. It may sound self-explanatory, but it’s actually pretty complicated when you learn about it in online music education. A really helpful way to think about product-market fit is to think about it as a moment in time.

If you think about the moment when someone is saying the words coming out of their mouth, or when they play you a song, at first it all sort of has infinite potential. One could play a song right now and, in theory, 7 billion people on the planet could love it. But that doesn’t actually happen in the music industry, does it? But as soon as that product interacts with any sort of market, the potential for it starts to fall. This happens even with the greatest things of all time.

But at a certain point, hopefully what happens is it stops somewhere. So that song has infinite potential at first, then it starts falling down, and suddenly there’s some consistency to the group of people that like it. This actually happens with most things that come out. What a lot of entrepreneurs and artists miss, though, is actually doing the analysis to figure out what the commonalities are about where it stopped.

So the story goes that an artist has been playing concerts, and it seems like these five specific people keep going to every show, even though they’re not friends. Is there anything they have in common? You’ll find that it’s usually not random. They actually all like the same five artists. They all listen to music on Spotify but not TIDAL. They all use Android but not iPhone. It can seem very random at first.

But as soon as you notice these patterns, you’re starting to find your product-market fit. You’re starting to be able to define exactly who your target audience is. It’s always recommended, to make a John or Jane Doe profile of who your person is, so you can put a name to your fan. So saying, “My fan is someone who shops at H&M, lives in Canada, is in this age range, and likes these kinds of artists,” is great information to have.

This is really important to do because artists are people who make their own things out of nothing. They are usually not the best at actually predicting who their audience is. It’s been seen time and time again. Usually, what we want to do is make our target audience a mirror of ourselves. So it could be tempting for me right now to say, “My target audience is 32-year-old men who live in New York and who have beards, right?”

But if I actually look at my SoundCloud data, it would reveal that a lot of my fans are 45-year-old women who live in Europe. Which is great, but it’s not exactly me. And it’s actually taking the time to look at where and who my music is resonating with, and finding out what’s common among them. That’s your target audience.

So finding product-market fit is something that will take you a very long time to master as you study music education, but you need to constantly be thinking that it’s kind of a waste of time for you to do a lot of marketing, advertising, and trying to get the word out until you find your product-market fit.

Not finding your product-market fit is how labels and artists waste upwards of millions of dollars by these very expensive experiments of doing Facebook ads to anybody, rather than knowing who they’re selling to. We know that the product-market fit is comprised of people that love these three artists. We’re only going to go there. So it’ll save you a lot of time, money, and emotional heartache by waiting to actually market and do these creative ideas you hopefully have to get the word out until you have found your product-market fit.

One of the essential things about authenticity while making music is knowing yourself. That self-awareness can come from all kinds of self-help books but also exercises where we can look at ourselves in the mirror and project exactly what we want to see. Looking in the mirror is one of the most critical elements about learning how to perform well and perform authentically.

Each day, you must go to the mirror, and the first thing you must do is confront yourself. It means you’re looking in the mirror, and the moment that you’re about to say, “Oh, my eye, oh, my hair, oh, my face, oh, I need to…,” you must confront all those things. Even when you’re standing there, and you’re thinking, “This is silly. I don’t know why I’m doing this;” you must observe. It would be best to observe all those things. Understanding your inner self should be taught as part of music education also in online music education.

The idea is to see who you are, and you begin to observe them and pay attention. Then, you’re comfortable within yourself. At that point, when you step on the stage, you’re able to make that connection. Do you know what happens? You connect with the audience, and the audience feels your authenticity. It’s essential that they feel your authenticity.

As an artist, you are working through who you are and what you want the audience to feel when you are on stage. That connection that you’re trying to make with the audience, you must do some work where you understand who you are, why you are, how you are, and the purpose of you being that artist. The only way that that can happen is if you have and learn to have that intimate connection with yourself.

One of my favorite authors, Brené Brown, talks about authenticity a lot. I find it to be helpful to look at one of her examples. She often uses the phrase, “Don’t puff up. Don’t shrink down.” Sometimes when we’re in a tense situation, we try to make ourselves more confident than average. Or we try to make ourselves smaller because we feel like we’re acting. We’re taking up too much space.

The truth is that if someone dislikes you for doing either of those things, you’re going to feel worse about yourself. If they dislike you for being who you are, you’re still going to feel good about exactly who you are. The critical idea is to walk out of that situation and know that you didn’t try too hard to mold yourself into what you think someone would want you to be. We want to sit with ourselves in precisely the space that we are.

I speak about not the space of when you think you’re putting on. That’s the mask you wear so that people know you as this when you step out. We’re talking about when you’re alone and you’re standing in front of that mirror. You’re looking at yourself, and you’re taking in all the voices that are inside your head.

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.

Many bands don’t even bring a crew on tour; it’s just them. They do everything themselves. As you start to get bigger, though, you might need someone to sell merch for you. You might need someone to run the sound at the front of the house, or someone to run the monitor mix. As you continue growing bigger, you might need a wardrobe person. You might need a production assistant, a production manager, a tour manager. All of these people are very expensive to hire.

So, these are really some things to think about as you start to gain momentum in the music industry. For the most part, your manager is going to help you with this. As for needing a manager, you don’t need one until you need one. If you find that you can’t handle everything by yourself, that’s when you need a manager. At the beginning though, I recommend that you try to do it on your own.

Obviously, selling tickets for your show can benefit you financially. In some cases, though, you’ll really only be making money from alcohol sales at the bar, or from a guarantee that the venue has already given you. This is typically a certain amount of money that you’re guaranteed to receive after the show, no matter what. For instance, a venue may give you a $500 guarantee to play a show, and if they do, it won’t matter how many people are in attendance—you’ll receive the $500 regardless.

Another way that some venues might do it is to give you a guaranteed amount, plus a percentage of ticket sales after a certain amount of money is made. So, for example, after you’ve already made $1,000, you would receive $500, plus ten percent of ticket sales. You might get offered a deal like this as a way to incentivize you to promote the show and bring along as many people as possible.

Ultimately, creating a successful performance or tour is about the following things: finding your true, authentic self, creating your intention, telling your story, finding your audience, and creating a visual element that will evoke a certain energy from the crowd. So, in that vein, there are a few things you really need to focus on deciding, and they are who you are, who you need to bring with you on your music journey, and what kind of story you want to tell. In many cases, exploring online music education can help you get started on the right path.

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.

Mark Plotkin is an American songwriter and award-winning artist, a Grammy shortlisted producer, Bloomberg Businessweek Top 25 Entrepreneur, and a professor at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. He’s existed both in the music industry as both an artist and a musician. He’s also been in the tech startup world. He’s excited to bring all those experiences together in music education and online music education.

One really important concept to digest before studying a lot of music marketing is the idea of orthogonal thinking. Orthogonal is a word that comes from the math world. It basically refers to where a right angle meets two lines. It’s a really helpful visual because one of the problems in music marketing is that we all sort of become lemmings and just kind of copy each other.

Orthogonal thinking says, “Let’s look at something that is directionally the same as what we’re doing but is actually in a completely different lane. A great example is if you’re in a band, and you think about who you’re musically inspired by. It’s not crazy to think that you might want to do the marketing things that that band did. However, the reality is that you’re probably existing in a completely different era from them. You’re not the same people as them. There’s a million variables that are different.”

An example of a model that is more similar to what you’re doing might be, let’s say, a technology company. Maybe you think that your band and Snapchat have nothing in common. However, if you started your band the same time as Snapchat, and your fans exist sort of more in that ecosystem than on MTV like the band you’re modeling yourself out of, it makes a lot more sense to study what Snapchat does from a marketing perspective than who you sound like. Plotkin has many examples outside of music. That’s where the orthogonal thinking challenge is going to keep coming up.

When you’re planning to perform music in a show, one of the most important things is being able to sketch your performance ideas beforehand and then bring them to life on stage. To achieve this, it can be really helpful to get a look at the stage you’re going to be performing on and then build something from what you see.

Everyone can draw at least a little bit. Some people don’t think that they can, but the truth is, even they can draw a stick figure, and that can be enough to create your vision. One workshop I do with my students is having them look at the stage in front of them and then sketch out the ideas that they have for a show that would use it. This really helps them to envision ideas that they may have thought impossible—but in reality, they’re entirely possible.

It’s important that we look at a blank piece of paper the same way that we look at a stage: as a canvas for us to experiment. The blank stage is a canvas for us to create our wildest dreams—the blank stage can be anything that we want it to be. So, what are your wildest dreams? I want you to think about not only what you’re capable of in your performance next week but also what you’re capable of in the performance that you’ll be doing at Madison Square Garden.

When it comes to using sketching in music education, one thing I really try to help my students understand is that there’s always something that you can afford to help create your vision. For example, you can get sheets on Amazon for only $12. You can color them with paint that you get from the hardware store for $5. These things can help your show have a more defined and original fingerprint, which your audience will appreciate. By the end, they will be thinking, “you did all of this work for me, and I will forever love you for that.”

Keep in mind that online music education can go a long way towards giving you the tools that you need to find success in the music industry.

There are a number of other players that may fall into an artist’s orbit that are crucial to long-term development and career management in the music industry. They range from a publisher to a business manager, an attorney to an agent, and perhaps a digital marketing manager, or even a publicist.

Those people should be added to your team as needed. For example, you don’t need an attorney if there aren’t any contracts to negotiate. These people get paid in different ways and should be added at different points. So let’s talk briefly about what they do and what role they fulfill to help you determine when you need to add those people.

What does a publisher do? As part of your online music education, you should know that a music publisher does a number of things. In addition to collecting revenue and income from sync fees, setting up co-writes, and also pitching your music for opportunities, they are an important part in developing you as a writer.

A lot of young writers say, “Oh, I really want a publishing deal.” Publishing deals are really well-suited for artists that have a number of things bubbling under or are showing a lot of potential. Or they may have a number of songs that have already been placed with a number of artists that are being released so that a publishing company can actually collect on your behalf and propel you forward to get other co-writes, to get other opportunities, using their network and having access to their staff.

Publishing has historically been a great asset for many artists. The deals worked very similarly to how record company deals work. They pay in advance. They collect on your behalf. You get a royalty. And they recoup that money.

Publishing entities have been tremendous assets for performers who perhaps no longer want to perform, or aren’t as interested in touring anymore, but still possess a great skill for songwriting and also on the flip side have been true champions of up-and-coming writers and have really helped develop and propel their careers. They represent the writing and the writer, the songwriter, and pushing the song forward.

An attorney negotiates deals on behalf of the artists, oftentimes serves as a confidant or a mentor to an artist, and works closely with the manager. They generally get paid 5% of the deals that they negotiate. That could range from anything like merchandise deals to licensing deals, record deals, publishing deals, and other things of that nature.

Again, none of these numbers are set in stone. Different deals work in different ways, depending upon who the person is and what the circumstances are.

Agents collect money on live shows. They generally make 10% of the gross on your live shows. Artists generally book their own shows until such time as they can no longer do it. Agents are extremely effective at routing tours, booking shows, and help determining what the right venues are for that artist to play in particular cities, both domestically and internationally.

A business manager generally makes 5%. A business manager is an accountant. They oftentimes handle your entities, meaning your touring entity and your label entity. They handle payroll for tours, for your crew, for your band, sound, lights, and other such aspects.

Again, a business manager comes in very handy once you are in a situation where you have a number of different businesses that need to be managed. A publishing entity, a label entity, and a touring entity are generally the three different lanes that a business manager helps coordinate and files taxes on your behalf.

Digital marketing managers are great to add, especially if your audience primarily comes from social media. Publicists are also an option if you’re more of a traditional TV, radio, or magazine type of artist. Publicists can come in very handy.

But record companies also provide many of these services. They have publicists. They have digital media entities as well as business development people.

But all of these people work in concert with your manager. The manager is the closest, most important business relationship you will have in your career. It’s the manager’s job to interact with all members of your team.

So think of it like a football team. As the artist, you’re the owner of the team, and the manager is the quarterback. They’re on the field, calling the plays and running the ball on your behalf.

It’s an important lesson in music education that you have a great relationship with your artist or manager. It’s important that you’re honest with your artists and with your manager. And it’s important that you feel that your manager represents you, your brand, and who you are out there in the world. Because 99 times out of 100, they’re going to represent you long before you ever get into the room.