The ability to critique yourself and others, and hear others’ critiques, is a true art in itself. Most of us tend to forget that this is a part of artistry, but in truth, it’s probably one of the biggest parts of it, especially once you reach a certain level. Keeping your cool, understanding yourself, and really taking the time to sit with every critique is really important.

As part of my class, we focus a lot on critiquing other people and critiquing ourselves, because it really helps us along the process of building our stamina for criticism in general. Our students critique each other on their performances, their songs, and their ability to be onstage and feel safe.

A lot of critique is really about figuring out what you’re good at, figuring out what you’re bad at, and what you need to improve on. What gets in the way sometimes is our instinct to be competitive with one another. We have to think of ourselves like we’re on two different trains moving next to each other. You can speed up and slow down, and that other person can speed up and slow down, but it doesn’t really matter who gets there first.

When providing feedback to other students, we really try to disregard this polarity idea that it’s either good or bad. Instead, giving feedback such as some things that could be worked on, or some suggestions for the future is a really helpful way of critiquing another artist.

This conversation about critique leads us into a conversation about collaboration, because really understanding how other people communicate is a major part of collaboration, as well as a major part of being able to be involved with your community of artists. So, within collaboration, we understand each other’s expertise. For example, this person is a great singer, and I’m a great drummer. Why don’t we do something together?

It’s about being able to trust each other within your creative process. This is really, really important. Sometimes, critique can be complicated, particularly when you’re not in a safe space or when you don’t already trust each other. So, the critique part of this conversation typically happens later on, after you’ve identified that you’re in a group of people that you can feel safe and comfortable around.

In this day and age of the internet, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter—all of these anonymous ways that people can critique you, it’s really hard to not get stuck in what other people think of you. That codependency with your crowd can be really debilitating. That’s where you have to come back to your authenticity, and your story, and your self-awareness, to understand where your confidence lies.

Instead of worrying about that person anonymously criticizing you, it’s important that you see your life and story as it is, wholly, rather than just that one moment.

If you have interest in a career in music, or simply want to learn more about the music industry and how it functions, online music education might be perfect for you. With the convenience of online learning, you can achieve your music education from the comfort of your own home and learn more about the value of critique and collaboration.

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

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

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

Who comes to mind when you hear “request a ride”? Uber. Who comes to mind when you hear “order it online”? Amazon. And who comes to mind when you hear “grunge”? Nirvana.

So, what’s going on here? Why do almost all of us think pretty much the same answers to these questions that, honestly, there could be multiple answers to? We could have easily said Lyft, or eBay, or Pearl Jam, right? And they all would have been acceptable answers. However, most of us likely thought of the same names.

What’s going on here is that there is this concept of creating a category that a lot of times inadvertently happens in marketplaces. Whether you’re kind of the first person to start something, or you’re the definitive market leader, categories start being referred to for what you’re doing.

When we’re starting out and trying to build an audience, one of the really difficult things, especially for those of us who write songs and make music, is that we quickly get lumped into a category. Not only are these existing categories, but categories that sometimes have been around for over a hundred years, meaning there’s really no chance of becoming a market leader for that category.

If I say I make R&B music, first of all, you might be thinking of something different when I say it than what I’m actually making. And secondly, the chances of me establishing myself early on as the number one result for the R&B genre are pretty much zero.

So, what we need to think about is this concept called the law of category, which says that if you can’t be first in the category that you’re in, then you need to create a new category—you need to create your own category name. People have chosen to do this in a number of ways, ranging from merging together genre names to just coming up with something that’s complete gibberish.

There was a great artist I worked with who makes a kind of electronic music but didn’t want to just describe it that way. So he came back one day and said “I make Tron bop hop.” I told him I had no idea what that was, but then he played me some of his new song, and I completely understood. Somehow, it sounded like “Tron bop hop”.

Now, after a while of using that in his tag instead of just electronic music, when you search on Google for “Tron bop hop”, he’s the top result. Not only that but as other artists start seeing that tag used, some of them want to use it as well. So when EDM blew up, a lot of people that had never called themselves EDM started doing so. When that happens, what it actually does is push up the leader.

If you create your own category, and then a year later I use that same name, I’m actually, in a way, inadvertently promoting you as well. So, category creation is a really important part of building your image and being seen as a singular entity, and not just one of a million people doing the same thing. Now, you can likely see why it’s important to learn how to identify an existing art form or define a new one. It’s because creating your own category and identifying existing ones is a huge part of being able to really communicate, and to identify who your audience is going to be.

With online music education, you can learn more about finding success and crafting your own lane in the music industry, as well as many other important lessons and concepts that come with a quality music education.

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

Sourcing and Streaming in the Music Industry

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

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

Radio Is Not Dead

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

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

Algorithms Can’t Compare to Humans

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

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

The history of the music industry is an important piece of any music education or online music education. What many might not realize is how early folk artists heavily influenced the modern music industry in ways you wouldn’t expect. It began with mobile recorders traveling to find otherwise undiscovered talents.

Reebee Garofalo talks about a division in the music industry and that there was a carriage trade, as he called it. What he meant by that was a very upscale market for music and a cracker barrel trade, which essentially is a downscale market for music. There were sections of the music industry that really catered to this sort of downscale market, and they sought out, essentially, the sound of the common folk or folk music.

What were the songs that eventually made it onto the records? Entrepreneurs like Ralph Peer crossed the country with mobile recorders in an attempt to find hillbilly artists and blues artists to record. These were local singers and songwriters who would not have been known to the outside world otherwise.

As one example, Ralph Peer was the first person to record Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter family.

Hillbilly songs and sounds later became known as country or country and western. Two other towering figures of this time were John and Alan Lomax. They were folklorists who managed to record lots and lots of blues tunes from all over the country.

John and Alan Lomax discovered artists like Lead Belly. Alan Lomax was later very much a patron and supporter of Woody Guthrie. Alan Lomax taught a lot of these songs to a young man named Pete Seeger, who then, in turn, mentored somebody named Bob Dylan. There is a genealogy of popular music that can be traced back to the work of these early field recording music entrepreneurs.

At the beginning of each semester in this music education class, we have the students write down all of their favorite performances and why they were their favorite performances. Then, we have them write down all their least favorite performances and why those are their least favorite performances. And then we have these tools to look at for the rest of the semester that really shape what we think is good and what we think is not so good about certain performers.

Before you go on stage, you should be able to look at this list and say, “Oh, well, I’m not going to not care about what I’m doing,” or “I’m not going to be off key when I’m performing,” or “I’m not going to just stand there and look at my feet.” If these were things we didn’t like about other people, then we shouldn’t do them ourselves.

One of those qualities I see year after year is that students don’t like it when the person doesn’t feel into it. What we want to focus on is really getting lost in your music and what can make you do that. Some people need the music to be really loud on stage. Create that for yourself. Tell the sound engineer you need it louder.

Some people say, “I don’t want to hear myself that much. It takes me out of it.” Then, turn yourself down on the monitors. These are all things that we learn so that we can really feel as lost as we can be on that stage and in the music and exactly where we want to be in the music industry.

As producers, one of the most important jobs we have in music is to preserve an artist’s voice. This is done by maintaining or exposing the idiosyncratic nature of a particular artist’s voice. This could be their physical voice or the voice of their message. An artist is the last person to know what they are all about. So often, in a creative sense, the people around the artists understand them before they understand themselves. It’s our jobs, as producers, to keep them in a place that is representing what the artist wants to represent.

The Voice of an Artist Is Very Complex

An artist’s voice, their inflection of speech, and the timbre of sound coming from their throat all contribute to the sounds that the microphones pick up. These are just a few of the many small pieces of music that people can be sensitive to hearing. The average listener isn’t even aware of the sounds that they are sensitive to. We do our best to help the artist express all of these small things through pronunciation, timbre, vocal-through phasing, and even vocabulary.

Timbre

Timbre is defined as the combination of elements that make a sound. For example, if you take all the harmonic and amplitude aspects of sound and combine these components, you will get a unique sound. Timbre is the composition of all the elements that make sound resonate in your ear.

Throat-singers can perform with different timbres of their voice by doing various actions. These variations come from the way the singers open their mouths, the way they clench their jaws, the way they open or close their throats, or the way they breathe. This is similar to the way that we yell “help, police!” versus the way we say “I love you.” When you cry for help, the timbre of your voice lets people know that something is wrong. When you tell someone you love them, the timbre of your voice lets them know that they mean something to you. Believe it or not, there is an entirely different set of harmonics coming out. We are reacting to those harmonics subconsciously. We don’t know that they are harmonics or amplitudes of overtones, but it is what’s happening.

Phrasing

Phrasing has to do with how a vocal artist or counter melody from an instrumentalist plays a passage or theme. Is the melody marked staccato or legato? It’s how they release the rhythms with accents and stresses. Vocal phrasing can alter how we understand the narrative or story that the singer is singing, rapping, or talking.

Think of the way that Sia sings the song “Chandelier:”

I’m gonna live like tomorrow doesn’t exist.
Like it doesn’t exist.

What I like the most about this is that it’s unpredictable. For example, sometimes Notorious B.I.G.’s sentences are long, and sometimes they are very short.

In the Notorious B.I.G song “Hypnotize,” he raps:

Dead right, if the head right, Biggie there ery’ night
Poppa been smooth since days of Underoos
Never lose, never choose to, bruise crews who
Do somethin’ to us (come on), talk go through us (through us)
Girls walk to us, wanna do us, screw us
Who us? Yeah, Poppa and Puff (hehe)

Paired with an instrumentalist and a solo, vocal phrasing can express urgency. It can direct a sense of legato or relaxation with many different emotions. It is also incredibly important how vocal phrasing affects rhythm by hitting or dancing around a downbeat.

Cadence

Different rappers are known by their cadences, and this is really how they dance around the rhythms. Rhythms are going to be the quarter notes: “tack, tack, tack, tack.” What is the rapper doing around those quarter notes? How are they stretching or truncating their lines and phrases, so we get both narrative and sense of motion?

Here is an example by rapper MF Doom called “That’s That:”

Cornish hens switchin’ positions, auditionin’ morticians
Saw it in a vision, ignorin’ prison
Ignoramuses enlist and sound dumb
Found ’em drowned in cows dung, crowds flung

MF Doom will have entire bars that rhyme. The entire setup bar of this song rhymes every syllable in the punch line bar. That is incredible.

Everyone is fighting for attention right now, because there is so much music. It’s all accessible. If you have any kind of access to a streaming service, you can listen to millions and millions of songs and so many different types of artists. So, it’s really hard to market music simply to get someone’s attention or simply to have somebody pay attention. It’s interesting, because on the one hand you have fewer gatekeepers actually getting your music out there.

If you want to publish music, you have fewer barriers to overcome. But, on the other hand, because everything is so accessible, it’s hard to really market that and have not only writers and music journalists pay attention to that music, but also consumers — having people really figure out what your aesthetic is, what your reason is to pay attention to you.

It’s difficult. It’s something that those who market music, those who position music, are increasingly trying to figure out. Social media is incredibly important to what we do. It’s interesting, because 10 years ago you would be in a situation where you had to pay attention to Twitter, you had to pay attention to Facebook. Now, in this year, you have to position articles, videos, anything really that you produce, with social media in mind. You have to understand how a tweet should function when thinking about linking to a cover story, linking to a video, linking to an essay or a news story.

You have to think about Facebook, and especially Instagram, as Instagram becomes increasingly more important. You have to embrace the role that social media plays as a gatekeeper. And obviously that extends to search and optimizing your stories or your content for search engines. But social media is such a key component of what we do, because it’s a means of discovery, more than anything. If you want to have something read, it needs to be able to be shared. And the way that happens now is social media.

Coming from the artist side, digital editorial coverage and social media is massive. Social media is the easiest way for you to get in front of millions of people without having to be on the radio, without having to physically go places to play these giant arenas and things like that. It’s not easy to reach this amount of people on social media, but it is possible. There are platforms like YouTube that have broken huge stars, Justin Bieber. And Vine, which is no longer an app, played a big part in Shawn Mendes’ career.

Social media is helping these artists grow, and it helps them connect with people, whether you’re a new artist connecting with new people or a huge artist connecting with people on a day-to-day basis. I feel like I know some really big people because I see what they do on their Instagram stories every day. With digital content and articles and stuff like that, the process of picking up a magazine to find new artists is very, very different. I used to find artists by the small lines in CD catalogs.

It was, like, “Thank you so and so,” and that’s how I used to find new artists or people I didn’t know. But now we have things like “related artists” on Spotify and these playlists. You can be on “new music Friday” and you could have hundreds of thousands of plays just being a new artist, if you get that great placement on a playlist. So, there’s a lot of new aspects to the music industry with Spotify, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, especially.

And just like with all these different blogs and stuff, you can find new artists and you can help cultivate those artists with all this new digital content.

Often, an artist in the music industry will approach a producer and look for assistance in having the songs that he or she wrote translate to an audience. And they have to translate over a really strange medium, which is this recorded-music medium. You can’t see the person. And you can’t really get a feeling for what they’re wearing or what they look like. There’s no other information other than what you hear, their music. And making that translation could be quite difficult. It could be quite tricky.

So, the first thing that a producer would really do is try to get to know what the artist is all about, what the artist is trying to express, what the song is trying to say. This is a key part of music education. How can we do that through sound alone?

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.