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.

Once you buy into this version of really pitching what you’re doing by going from “why, how, what,” and not “what, how, why,” and you look around at some successful examples of artists and companies, you realize that the ones that have this wide-reaching effect are doing exactly that. For a great orthogonal example outside of music, I love to look at a couple of technology ads from a while back.

What Can the Music Industry Learn From This IBM Commercial?

There’s a great ad from the ’80s with IBM, which was on top of the world then. They were making great products. But if you look at any of their ads, you’ll see that they’re talking about what they do constantly.

Let’s view this IBM commercial. You’re looking at a small portable computer called the IBM 5100. It’s helping a lot of different people do their work more productively.

From a real estate investor’s point of view: “Managing real estate investments entails many difficult decisions. Pay it now or later? What about the landscaping? Can we afford it? What about taxes? There are many, many difficult decisions to make.

“It’s really nice having a computer to help. It weighs about 50 pounds. You can plug it in anywhere. Bad weather, late deliveries, construction delays of all kinds. We need to find out how it is going to affect our schedule. Now we can find that out fast. The 5100 can help handle some very complex information.”

From a product developer’s point of view: “Jet fuel is expensive. At Simmonds Precision, we’re developing a product that’ll help the pilots save fuel. Flight test time is also expensive. But we do our flight tests right here in the lab on our IBM 5100 and save time and money. The capacity of the 5100 is about the same as some large computers a few years ago.”

From a life insurance agent’s point of view: “We’re a mid-sized life insurance company. If we want to compete, and we do, we’ve got to be flexible. We’ve got to get answers fast. This little machine will help us do it. The 5100 is easy to learn and simple to use.”

From a farmer’s point of view: “There are countless combinations of feed we can mix. What is the most economical for any particular herd? That’s what I’m figuring out now, and the cost of the 5100 is reasonable.”

From a printer’s point of view: “Paper, ink, size, waste, overhead, and don’t forget the shipping costs. Estimating a printing job is not so easy. Our estimators handle 50% more work since we got the 5100. We do it faster and a lot more accurately. And our customers really love it.”

The commercial tells us that the IBM 5100 is bringing the advantages of the computer to more and more people. IBM —helping put information to work for people.

You’ll see that they’re just talking about what they do constantly. They’re saying, this thing will help you. This thing has this much processor power. Blah, blah, blah.

In terms of who they’re choosing to associate with, which is a big part of building your image, they’re associating with, honestly, not the most exciting walks of life. They’re associating with people who are bored with their jobs, people who aren’t excited about what they do. These are people who might say, “I’m unhappy with what I do. This IBM thing will kind of help me.” That’s what we’re left with.

Contrast that with a very famous ad that Apple ran around the same time. It was called the “think different” campaign, and they took a completely different approach.

For Apple, It’s the “Why,” Not the “What”

“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes, the ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them, because they change things. They push the human race forward. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

In this ad, Apple doesn’t mention their product once. They only talk about their “why” and what they believe. On top of that, in terms of building their image, they’re associating with some of the greatest human beings of the past couple hundred years. They have video of Gandhi. They have video of Martin Luther King Jr., Amelia Earhart, people that dared to challenge the status quo and believe what Apple claims to be believing.

We’re left, at the end, not really knowing anything about the computers they make, but knowing that, if I think what they think, maybe I’ll go check it out. Maybe I’ll go see what this Apple computer is all about. And so that’s a great example.

How Can These Two Examples Contribute to Your Online Music Education?

When you look around at any marketing, anything from what you see in the supermarket to your favorite band, ask yourself: “Are they aligning with my beliefs, or are they just trying to impress me with what they’ve made?” Because what they’ve made is going to become increasingly less important, in this time of so much supply. For example, on Spotify, I have all the greatest music of all time. Just the fact that you’re telling me your song exists isn’t enough for me to take the time to listen to it. You need to resonate with what I believe, to win the trust that I’ll go and listen to it, and hopefully love it.

After considering these commercials, we need to ask ourselves, “What does IBM believe, based on their commercial? What does Apple believe based on theirs?” I’ll leave it to you to answer. They sort of speak for themselves. What I’m getting at is that we need to think about broadcasting our values when we’re actually communicating what we’ve made. Because even though you might think, “My values, those have nothing to do with promoting my band,” the truth is, all this stuff comes under the heading of trying to win trust, so people will take the time to check out what you’ve made.

You know, there’s no shortage of great stuff. You need to win people’s trust before assuming you’ll be listened to. When you’re broadcasting your values, even though your values might not resonate with every person you meet, there are 7 billion people on the planet. And a lot of people will resonate with your values. They’ll think, “That person believes what I believe. I am going to take the time to check out what they’re saying.” And if it’s someone who might love what you’ve made, but they don’t resonate with your values, that’s OK. They might find your stuff later.

Music Education and Learning To Market

An important thing to remember is an idea called positive exclusivity, meaning that not everybody is supposed to love what you’re doing. More importantly, when you’re starting out, if you’re trying to market to everybody, if you want everyone in the room to love you, most likely no one is going to love you. That’s because people need to feel like there’s some sort of spotlight shown on them. And that’s where broadcasting your values is this tactic to reach people who feel like, “Gosh, I never hear an artist talk about X, Y, Z, that I really care about.” It could be something that has nothing to do with music. But that’s a moment when you can win trust.

I like to point out that this is very different from how we normally think about exclusivity in a negative way. Right? This is not about purposely leaving people out. I’m not saying, “Anyone who is X, Y, Z won’t get to hear my song.” I’m shining a light on people who are normally ignored. I’m saying, “Anyone who loves X, Y, Z, this is for you. And the other people can come check it out, too.”

This is our beachhead to get things started. When we tap out that market, we expand, and we open it up to everybody.

Joni Mitchell began as a folk artist but also incorporated different influences into her own writing and composition and performance.

In her song “Big Yellow Taxi”, she sang, “That you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone. A paved paradise, put up a parking lot.”

And she ignited a subgenre that we’ve come to call the singer-songwriter movement of the early 1970s. Overall, the wonderful era of the singer-songwriter was happening particularly in the 1960s and ’70s. As our country was going through a tumultuous time, and there was a lot of change, we had artists who were essentially in the midst of that and paying attention to all of it.

These artists were speaking to that situation. There was also this sense of freedom where there were many artists who had no problems picking up the guitar and creating and speaking what they did whether it was just them on the guitar or them with a band.

In the song “Something in the Way She Moves”, James Taylor sang, “There’s something in the way she moves or looks my way or calls my name. It seems to leave this troubled world behind.”

We were ready to hear a lot of singer-songwriters. We didn’t come from a period when it only had to be one artist who did this in the genre or who did it in the style. It was the 1960s and ’70s, and in terms of the music listening public, they were open and they were willing, and they were ready to hear a variety of things. And I think that for artistry, that results in incredible music.

From the song “So Far Away”, Carole King sang: “So far away. Doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore?”

One of the things I’ve seen happening recently is the return to this type of artistry. And when I speak to young artists, it’s one of the things I regularly speak about. Upcoming artists need to know that they have the opportunity now to create and to go outside of the norm. It’s a wonderful thing when artists go outside of the norm, and it’s important that it continue to happen.

Are you interested in pursuing a music education? Well, with online music education, you can learn much more about what it takes to build a career and find success in the music industry, and you can do it all without leaving the house.

Tiffany Hardin tells us that in the past, musicians and actors were the only people who had this massive audience network, and it wasn’t necessarily available to them on their phones. Interestingly, when we talk about how artists and creatives become these influencers, we’re saying they have an opportunity to leverage these social platforms.

“[These musicians and actors] were influencers regardless of a social platform, but they have an opportunity to leverage this social platform to do more with their message,” she explains. As a talent, you do not have to rely solely on a label or some external gatekeeper to help you spread your message around. “If you are an influencer and have social currency through your work, it’s a lot easier for you to talk directly to your audience.”

“Now that I have your attention let’s get to it,” Cardi B responds. “If you [were] to have a chance to ask one of these Democratic candidates a question, what would your question be? What would you like to see changed in your community? What would you like to see changed in the United States? Me, if I [were] to ask my next president a question, I would like to ask what are we going to do about police brutality?”

Tiffany Hardin says that she found working with talent to be another communication channel, and she adds, “All communication channels are open to being interpreted.” They’re interpreted by whomever handles them. “Let’s say you’re an artist, and let’s say you have an album that you’re working on. You don’t want anybody to know about that album, so you don’t put it on social. No one knows about it.

“When you are ready to promote your album and let people know, you can do some really interesting things with that communication channel. You can do some takeovers. You can work with a partner, a brand partner, and do some interesting content activities on your channel. You can just leverage that however you want to so that your audience knows that you’re working on something that is exciting to you, that you want to see come out into the world and that you want their support in.

“Ultimately, I think any type of communication channel is simply for you to be able to let people know what you want them to know and to help create this narrative that you want to share. That narrative can change as many times as you want it to. I think what’s been interesting to see with a lot of artists is how they leverage their social currency as it relates to their identity. When we’re talking about talent, sometimes that can change album to album.

“It’s your responsibility to take the communication channels that you have at your disposal and allow yourself to iterate, to tell the story that you want,” Tiffany goes on. If you’re an artist, you should push a call to action. Especially if you’re an independent artist, your goal is to convert every follower on your channel to sales, meaning convincing them to buy your album. Get them to go purchase your merchandise, go to your show, go to your website. In essence, get them to go do something for you so that you know they’re not just a follower, but they’re also interested in your path as an artist. They’re also a fan, and they want to invest in your music and your career.

Music education needs to emphasize to future musicians that they should push for positive change using their social platforms. The same ought to be taught in online music education as well.

Use social media to help you drive more interest toward yourself and toward your work. You can do that if you have a sizeable social currency. If you’re highly respected and you have a large audience, you have an opportunity to use that platform to say anything. That’s exciting.

When creating an evening-length show, you want to make sure that the audience listens to your story. The audience should retain their energy in the best way possible. I try to help my students construct the event as best as possible by sequencing their songs. It is because it’s a vital element of success in music education including online music education.

“It was weird because I drew up the setlist maybe months before we start rehearsing because we had to figure out what we’re going to do for all the filmed visuals. We never changed the setlist, which is bizarre because that always happens,” says Billy Corgan.

“I spent a lot of time finding a balance between the songs people would want to hear and the songs that I think would tell our story. Our stories, as fans know, is just as much about the deep cuts in the album as the singles.”

“There are different elements of the sequence among various artists. Some genres of music, like singer-songwriters and folk musicians, like to create intimacy by speaking to the audience. It is essential for some people. Sometimes, it takes the crowd down in energy for a dance artist or a pop artist.”

“We need to figure out where those energy pockets need to be put. Also, we should figure out where we need to burst out of that with an explosion. Taking all the songs that the class is working on, putting them in order, continually moving them around, and finding the best way to make it work is one workshop that we do in the class.”

“I change my setlist and the way that we’ll go about a gig depending on the vibe I’m getting from the room,” says Gary Clark Jr.

“Each artist has a different way of playing with the audience’s emotions. Where that comes from is you guessed its authenticity. It’s important to identify yourself to know what the audience likes about you and what you want to get to the audience.
For the most part, when you’re yourself onstage, the audience will love it. The other day, I was playing a show myself, and I tend to be vulnerable on stage. My true self is someone pretty, shy, and insecure sometimes.”

“We played a song. Then somebody said, you guys are good. I said, are we good? Everybody laughed. I created this space for everyone to enjoy this moment of vulnerability in a comedic way.”

“Some people might dislike it. Some people might say, oh, you can’t be insecure. It would help if you were confident. The truth is, creating that vulnerability with the audience is essential. It is because we want them to know that we’re in a safe space and that we trust them. This kind of energy exchange is significant.”

“For some DJs, it’s crucial to have an energy exchange. The more you put out, the more they give you back the ability to work in the structure of the night of DJ set-ups, and the downs-the audience wants to go on that journey with you.
We can kind of pull into live performance as well since there is a journey of the evening. If the audience is right there with you, they will experience all the ups and downs too.”

In terms of media, film is the one where there’s usually more time. There’s usually a much more thought-out process in terms of getting what they need and sort of playing with different ideas. Because films take a little bit of time to put together. The music industry has nuances, depending on the type of media you want your music to end up in, so make sure you do your research for the type you want.

Television is usually very short. Very short timelines. So they’re going to want something where it’s going to really be something that is either going to be right there in your face, or you’re going to have to react really quickly to it.

Let’s talk about other forms of media. The first thing I’m going to say is really, really important for your music education. This touches a bit on video games, but it’s really pertinent to all forms of media. Do your research.

Research everything you can get your hands on. Go on IMDB. Go on YouTube. If you want to figure out how to make good trailer music, go and watch a bunch of trailers on YouTube. It’s as simple as that.

Just go on YouTube and look up trailers for films that you want, or that you like the sound of, or that you want to submit to. That’s the first order of business; do your research. Remember to always do your research as you continue your online music education.

Find out if there’s a music supervisor who does some cool stuff. Let’s say we have a music supervisor coming in on Saturday. His name is Chris Mollere! And Chris Mollere has done Get Out. He’s done Pretty Little Liars, Vampire Diaries, a whole bunch of stuff. If people want to connect music to him, first point that you need to do is to research, and find out what is it exactly that this guy’s done.

What kinds of TV shows as he worked on? What kinds of films has he worked on? What are his current projects? Armed with that info, go and listen to that. Get a feel for it.

And then be honest with yourself. Say, “Okay, I know what this person’s kind of music is. Does my music fit? Am I going to give them something that they’re going to use and will make them want to come to me? Or something where they’re going to think that this person doesn’t even know how to research? They don’t even know what they’re looking for.” That’s the first order of business; do your research.

As for the different forms of media, if you want to work with a particular brand or you want to work in ads, look up the ads of that brand. Look at what they’ve done. You want to have trailer music? There’s a specific formula for trailer music. Go watch a lot of trailers and then figure that out from there.

If you want to work with film, the best thing to do is to look at a lot of the films wherein you would want to have your music featured. The same goes for television shows. Research the TV shows and the music supervisors and what they do.

Finally, in video games, if you’re submitting for games, you had better play that game. You should just look at the video games that you like. That’s the best way to start off; if there are video games that you want to put music into, check out what’s been already been done in that franchise or genre.

If you like Super Mario, which goes back probably 30 years or so, it’s got some history behind it. You can take a look at YouTube if you know you don’t have access to a Super Nintendo. Really do your research and see what has Nintendo done during this time.

Or let’s take another example. Let’s take a look at the Metal Gear franchise. Metal Gear’s been around for way, way too long. Probably about the same amount of time as Mario. And they’ve had a certain sound and a certain feel to it.

So if you want to create great music for video games, take a look at the video games that are being created. Take a look at the kinds of music that they’ve used. Try to gear yourself towards that, or gear yourself towards submitting music for video games that is close to the music that’s being used.

That’s really what it comes down to. Out of everything I said about video games and how to submit to them, just play the game. Listen to the music. You should know.

I played Gran Turismo for years. And I played Ridge Racer. I like racing games, so I played those for years. I know the kind of music that they use.

I have to say to myself, “If I was making music, am I going to make music for those? Or do I want to make music for something that’s more like a Warcraft, or something that’s like Civilization? A racing game, a real-time strategy game, or a simulation game?” There are many genres and each have their own sound.

It just comes from doing your research and knowing what kind of project you’re submitting to.

The front-of-house engineer is going to help you make a seamless transition between paper and live performances.

Up here at the front-of-house, the centerpiece of the sound system is the console. In smaller venues in the music industry, you’ll just have a stage box that has Wi-Fi and connects via an iPad. They can actually be controlled by a tablet and the software looks like the control surface.

For the most part, everything that would have normally existed in an analog world is all in your control tablet. In the old days and in certain older venues, you have a console. You’d have some control over the sound system in rack-mounted form. You can also control effects. This includes making enhancements to whatever is coming into the console from the stage.

The console connects to the stage via something called a “snake”. A snake in the analog world is literally a long cable that’s also called the multi-core cable. It has multiple wires in it that connect to the stage box. Nowadays, you have a digital snake. It’s still called a multi-core because it’s got multiplex digital signals coming in from a digital stage box that connects to the computer.

These are called DI boxes. Without getting too technical, they convert an instrument quarter-inch cable to an XLR cable. The reason is that those two kinds of signals have different impedances. That’s something that you probably want to learn about as you continue your online music education.

A lot of times, because we have a lot of signals coming from computers or audio interfaces or synthesizers or drum machines or iPads, they really want to get that data out. So we have boxes for that.

Monitors are typically speakers that you’ll find on a stage or wherever you’re performing. You need them because you’re usually not in front of the speakers when you’re performing your music.

If you look at most stages, there will be a stage and then a sound system in front of it. So you’re hearing everything coming back at you from the room. In a perfect world, that’s fine, and everything sounds good, and you’re able to perform with confidence and enjoy yourself and hear everything and play in tune.

However, that’s not always the case. So we add speakers that point at the artists in the opposite direction of the audience. This can help you to confirm that the balance between all the instruments are specific to your needs. For example, sometimes you don’t need to hear the prerecorded string symphony on your backing tracks in order to sing.

Or you’ve already heard it a million times and all you want to do is just concentrate on your vocals. That’s part of interfacing with either the monitor engineer or the house engineer, and doing that in such a way that you both can agree on it and is beneficial to the performance and hopefully to the audience. Because sometimes the audience can hear them, too.

Then you have microphones. They convert acoustic air pressure into voltage, which will go into the snake. From there, it will go where it needs to. That’s the first thing that connects a person or an amplifier or a drum to the snake.

Microphones come in different shapes and sizes. And they do different things. Usually, you can kind of tell what a microphone is going to do based on how it’s designed. But not always. There are no hard rules. But a lot of people use certain kinds of microphones for bass drum or a bass guitar amps or just something low.

The SM58 is probably one of the common mics in the world. You see it on vocals, but really, you can use it for anything. This is the kind of microphone that you usually see in front of a guitar amp because it looks kind of like an amp. Most engineers work with the band to figure out what you like or how to use what you have.

It’s really good to know ahead of time what your input list is, and specifically which parts of that input list you want to hear in your monitors.

You may not necessarily need a specific vocabulary of all the frequencies in the audio spectrum and how they apply to musical instruments, but having a general idea of what the difference between a low frequency and a high frequency is is a good start.

Using a lot of colorful adjectives doesn’t really help anybody. It sounds cool. But for the most part, bright and dark are good ways of describing things. But warm… warm means a lot of different frequencies to a lot of different people. You learn this in music education.

This can be something that you’re dealing with in the studio over a vocal, where it’s just not warm enough. And the content on the audio that is just not warm in general. It’s missing those frequencies.

So often, the pitfall of all of that is when you have a microphone and you have a speaker and you point the microphone at the speaker, you can set up a feedback loop. This is a sound that you’ll definitely hear at some point in your life. What will usually happen is that the engineer will do their best to give you exactly what you want before creating that feedback loop.

If you turn a microphone up too loud in front of a speaker, feedback is what’s going to happen and it’s not pretty. It’s usually not what you want when you’re setting up the sound system.

In your pursuit of music education or online music education, you’re going to study the successes and failures of different artists. Let’s take a look at one very successful music record example: Lady Gaga’s first big record, The Fame.

That record basically had the music industry appearance of coming out. Almost every song on there was a huge single. It seemed almost mathematically impossible that a debut record could really hit all those marks so successfully. We also didn’t know if this would work, but it did.

The truth was they actually took a very different approach. Those songs were heavily, heavily workshopped for many years before that album came out. They were releasing those on different Myspace channels and engaging feedback, then taking them down. They also went through many more songs that came out on that album.

The point that team got to with that record was that they didn’t have to guess how it would perform when it came out. They knew that all of these songs performed at a certain level from having exposed this many people to it. There were some songs we loved, but that didn’t get a good reaction, so we didn’t put them out.

You could argue that that marketing was sort of happening throughout the process. They’re getting that feedback and only putting out what they know will work.

Lady Gaga herself even said, “Whether you’re doing pop or doing rock and roll, I don’t believe that there’s any other way to do it than from the bottom up. So, you have to write records. And you have to record them yourself. And you have to play every venue you can get your hands on. And you have to fail. And then you have to get better. But you have to live and breathe your art. And if you don’t, you won’t get anywhere. That’s what The Fame is really about.”

When you talk about revenue streams, the biggest source of revenue for the majority of major artists these days is live performances and touring. Compared to traditional spins or record sales, you may sell a million records as an artist, which could take a year to sell. Or, maybe you get a million spins, and it could take 10, 11, or 12 months to reach that point.

An artist who is getting that level of sales and performance royalties is most likely able to sell out Madison Square Garden. An artist will make more in one night at Madison Square Garden than they will in the first six months of releasing a song. Every big artist realizes music is the business card that gets you in the door to touring and really generating income. 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.

The best advice that I could give to any aspiring artist is to make your live show great. The way that you make a live show great is to play live. There’s no secret — that’s how you do it. The old adage in the music industry is a band that plays 100 shows live is a completely different band than the one that plays their first live show. A lot of times when big artists tour, you’ll find that within the first couple of weeks of the tour, they’re playing secondary or tertiary markets. You may ask yourself, “Why is Rihanna in West Palm Beach and San Antonio as opposed to New York, Dallas, Boston, Los Angeles — the major media mecca centers?” That’s because artists always want to gather steam, get the machine running smoothly, get the kinks out of a show, and really make it run well. With today’s shows, that’s no small feat. 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.

Online Music Education: How to Build Your Fan Base

I understand that you guys aren’t all going to sell out Madison Square Garden like Drake. You need to make your live show compelling on the club level. It doesn’t matter if there’s five people there, 50 people there, or 500 people there. That means you rehearse. That means you build your following. That means you slowly build your audience outside the epicenter of your home base. For example, if you’re a New York-based band, you shouldn’t overplay New York. You should play a show in Brooklyn, maybe a show in Manhattan, then take a little break. Do you play a show in Westchester? Yes. Maybe try and hit Philly. Maybe you go to Hartford. Maybe you go into Boston, and slowly build your center out. That’s how you build your fan base.

Build a Base at Home First

A great story that I love to tell is a friend of mine has been a manager in Chicago for many years. They’re a very big manager and have 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?”

Those 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-person capacity room and very famous. And every great artist that has come to 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.”

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

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