There are many different ways to understand music history, but one that I find helpful is to talk about the orientation of an artist rather than the genre. In other words, what does an artist want to do? What is the goal of an artist?

By the 1970s, two major archetypes had emerged in the music industry. The first was the entertainer. An entertainer is someone whose primary goal is to acquire and minister to as large an audience as possible — or as large an audience as possible for them.

Another archetype emerged as well: the auteur. That’s somebody who performs and creates as an artists almost for their own benefit. They do it for the growth of their art or art in general.

Many artists use both orientations. Even still, in online music education, it’s helpful to think about the primary drive of certain artists because that’s why we have such different kinds of artists and such different kinds of audiences.

Of course, these archetypes are just a way of thinking about music, but it’s an approach that’s very helpful for people who are going into the music business to help artists. What are you helping an artist to do?

One of the reasons that David Bowie is so important is that he was one of the first — if not the first — recording artist to create an entire career out of adopting a succession of personalities, aliases and characters, such as Ziggy Stardust and Thin White Duke. David Bowie is somebody who has a huge strain of that auteur mentality. He is essentially cultivating his own world.

On the opposite side, you could think of somebody like Michael Jackson. In many ways, Michael Jackson was born for the stage. He was born into it. He started performing when he was a child.

Even though Michael Jackson is an incredible artist and auteur in himself, he called himself the King of Pop because that’s what he wanted out of his career. He wanted to have a massive, massive audience. A lot of the choices he made were oriented toward acquiring that audience.

Now, this isn’t a hard and fast delineation, but it is one of the ways that we in music education can compare different motivations. Why is Taylor Swift different from Mitski, for example? Why is Beyonce a different artist from Janelle Monae?

Now, it’s important when pursuing music education or online music education to know the history of the business. The early music industry business is essentially divided into categories that mirror American society at that point. American society was in the middle of a period called “Jim Crow,” which is essentially legal segregation. The early segments of the record business essentially mirrored that segregation.

First, you have the mainstream, popular records. Then you have a category called “Race,” which is where all the black artists were signed and sold. Then, you have something called hillbilly, which is seen in many ways as the province of poor, white Americans. This triangle of Jim Crow became embedded in the architecture of the modern music business.

As the music business grew up, what you’re hearing on these records is, in general, musical forms that come from African Americans. We’re talking about ragtime. We’re talking about blues, and we’re talking about jazz. Those became the main drivers of popular music in America.

When creativity came into the music business, it was a whole other story. In the 1920s, an African American woman named Mamie Smith recorded a track called “Crazy Blues.” To everyone’s surprise, this track by an African American sold a million copies even in the midst of segregation and everything else going on in this period of history.

Suddenly, the big companies in New York–RCA, Columbia, and what would later become Sony–realized that they could make money doing this. They hustled down to the South, and they started recording African American artists. It’s that culture–it’s black American culture–that essentially established the recording industry as one of the most creative forms of expression in the 20th century as it is still seen today.

Perhaps the master of the form that becomes known as rock and roll in the music industry is Chuck Berry. He developed a particular kind of guitar style that we in music education associate with rock and roll, a particular kind of singing that we associate with rock and roll, a particular way of holding his body that we associate with rock and roll and a particular lyrical obsession that we associate with rock and roll, whether we’re talking about cars or school or girls.

In, “Johnny B Goode,” Chuck Berry sings, “Go, Johnny, go, go. Go, Johnny, go, go. Go, Johnny, go, go. Go, Johnny, go, go. Johnny B Goode.”

This becomes, essentially, what we know in online music education as rock and roll in the 1950s.

In the field related to music and the music industry that folks are calling XR-AR, VR, and MR are all collectively called XR. That’s your new-fangled bucket for immersive experiences. AR being Augmented Reality, VR being Virtual Reality, MR being Mixed Reality. XR is eXtended Reality, and it is a catch-all for the terms you hear — AR, VR, and MR.

They each have nuances. Augmented reality seeks to bring a connectivity between digitally generated images and your real world. It’s not about putting headsets on. It’s about bringing digital images, or holograms, into your space via either a device or supported by some technology like glasses or contact lenses, which would enable you to see what are now projected digital forms in your physical, real environment.

Virtual reality is when you are putting on a device and immersing yourself inside of an entire, enclosed virtual space. While that virtual space may include real spaces, you are entirely inside that place with goggles on and moving yourself around as an entity, usually with some controller. There are also certain technologies where you might actually be the controller yourself.

MR is Mixed Reality, and it’s a way of picking from all sorts of the various pieces of new forms of technology that are coming out and trying to blend them in any kind of way that’s beyond the traditional means. Mixed reality is a blend of real-world environment and what a performer’s doing on stage onto the various screens and devices. If they’re not formally AR or VR, you’re projecting and combining audio and trying to synthesize it all together for the MR experience.

Hence AR, VR, and MR are the world of XR, and these are influencing music education and online music education in new and interesting ways than have ever been done before.

In recent years, the biggest thing that has happened to the music business has been social media. And streaming, of course. Everything’s changed. Streaming music, when I was in school, we talked about this. We knew that it was happening. It was just a question of what the music business was going to do about it.

So, while waiting for the answer, musicians needed to find other means of income. I love the fact that you can be an independent artist — for real. Being able to own your distribution. Being able to own your narrative of your brand. Being able to own everything that surrounds the ecosystem of how you make money. That is important. If you’re an artist, you’re going to want to do that.

Granted, you can phone it in and have the label be a sort of consigliere for everything related to you. But that’s not the best way to do it. The label is just a big bank with a marketing team and a PR team. With the right capital, you can do all those things on your own. And you can have your own teams that you hand-select — teams that get your brand and get your vision. And you can have a lot of success doing these things on your own.

This is what Beyoncé figured out. This is what Chance the Rapper figured out. This is what Wu-Tang Clan figured out. This is what all of these huge names in music have figured out for themselves.

One of the biggest ways that the music industry has changed has been the democratization of the industry for the little guy, as well as the older talent that’s out in the world and trying to reclaim the narrative of their music.

If you’re interested in using music education to learn more about finding success as an independent artist, but aren’t sure you have the resources or time, consider giving online music education a try. It may be exactly what you need to get a jump start toward the career that you desire.