Hospitality Riders and Preparing for a Music Show

Yellowbrick on December 24, 2021

When you’re booking a show, there are a whole lot of actions you need to take before you actually get into the venue on the day of the show, and one of those actions is called advancing. To do this, you write an email to the venue in preparation for your show with your tech rider, your hospitality rider, your questions about the run of the show, and any other information you may have, including your stage plot as well as your input list.

The hospitality rider is often what the band sends to the venue to make sure that they’re hydrated, and that they have everything they need in terms of a backstage setup. That includes water, drink tickets, towels, a mirror, chairs, and other things you might need to make sure that you take care of yourself in order to put on the best performance that you can.

In some cases, hospitality riders can actually be pretty funny. Some people will put that they only want green M&Ms. Some people will put that on Monday, they would like Doritos, and on Tuesday, they would like Ruffles. Some people have puzzles on their riders. They like to keep things fresh backstage and have something to do. A lot of people have newspapers from the area on their riders. Some people have even put kittens and puppies on their riders and actually received them.

One of the most important things to remember when you walk into a venue is that you are in control of your show. I don’t mean that you need to be overconfident about the way that you take up space in the room. What I do mean is that your kindness to your bandmates, your kindness to the employees of the venue, the front-of-house engineer, and everyone else who’s working is really paramount to everything else. You are in control by the way that you treat everybody and the way that your generosity comes through while playing the show.

If you’re interested in finding out more about how artists interact with venues, in addition to many concepts and lessons about working and succeeding in the music industry, think about giving online music education a try. This is the only form of music education that requires nothing more than an internet connection, and ideally a passion for the subject.

The Media Writing Landscape

Yellowbrick on December 24, 2021

This module is really an overview of media writing. It will help you understand the professional landscape of becoming a writer in today’s media industry, which is always in flux. Be prepared to change, and be prepared to pivot. The following information will help you understand how to become a media writer in the Digital Era and beyond. In this first module, you’ll understand what it takes to become a professional writer in today’s digital, print, and broadcast industries. Journalism has history, and this module will introduce you to that history. You’ll learn about the landscape of media education and all the skills that it takes to become successful, especially in this Digital Era where everything is in flux as it has changed so much over time. Online media education offers you the ability to navigate this exciting and complex landscape as a dynamic career opportunity.

Understanding Effective Entertainment Writing for the Media

Yellowbrick on December 24, 2021

When it comes to entertainment stories, the people who really excel at media writing are people who become super fans and want to be in this business to take a peek behind the curtain and see how things operate, get a media education. When I was very young, I was obsessed with watching as many movies as I could and watching as much TV as I could. My mom picked up a letter from me when I was 5 years old, and it said “I just want to eat popcorn and watch movies all day for a living.” I got about as close to that as I could, having a real job.

People are putting their hearts and souls into these productions, and when a movie bombs opening weekend and everybody’s making fun of it on Twitter, years of people’s lives and their livelihoods have banked on the movie’s success. There are a lot of different parts of the making-a-movie stew that can screw up, and the movie goes from an Academy Award winner to total dust. There are so many parts that go into making a movie, and people work so hard to put their all into it. It’s such a tight rope of putting yourself out there. If you really are passionate about learning those stories from people, that makes a great entertainment writer, and that makes a great entertainment story.

Alongside that, you want to be able to pull yourself out and be professional enough to know that there is a business element about the media industry. Like at “Variety,” we’ve been known for more than 100 years as the business of entertainment. That’s our slogan because we want to break down the deals in the deal-making. It’s the intersection of loving art and then understanding the commerce behind it.

Entertainment and media journalists have a bit of a luxury. They tend to be a little bit more adventurous and curious than other journalists and other fields I’ve met with, wanting to understand what’s new. The music journalists at our publication, they’re all musicians in their spare time, and they’re not stuck in whatever decade they came of age listening to music. They’re wanting to hear what’s fresh, what’s new, and really act upon that. One of the things about my job that makes me the happiest is finding that small movie or that small record that you really think deserves a bigger platform and then telling people how great it is.

If you want to keep that content fresh, you’re gonna want to keep the site refreshed, updated, and current. You’re gonna want to be on all social media platforms and integrate yourself in a way that is natural while not trying too hard to fit in. We at “Variety” always know that we are a business publication. So when we go on Tik Tok, for example, we’re teaching people how to make it in the entertainment industry or how to be an entertainment journalist. It’s a type of online media education. We’re trying to comment on these platforms from our vantage of knowledgeability plus trying to remain current and keep ahead of things.

What It Takes to Be a Great News Media Writer

Yellowbrick on December 24, 2021

What makes news writing special is the opportunity to be the first one in the room with the thing that everybody wants to hear. It’s kind of like when you meet up with your friends and you have a story that you just can’t wait to tell them—that’s essentially the job of news writing. But, instead of just meeting up with your friends, you get to tell tens—or even hundreds of thousands—of people something that you believe they need to know.

The key to news judgment is finding something that people are interested in but also something that they’ll benefit from knowing. Something that will make them better citizens or more informed voters. Something that will help them know where they’ll want to travel or help them be more prepared for what’s coming next in the world. With media writing, it’s always about finding a balance between the things that will get clicks and bring people to your website and the things that will actually enrich them for having read them.

I once had a great editor who told me that you want to write stories that get read, but you need to write stories that are worth reading. I’ve tried to follow that advice. One thing that’s special about news media, is that you aren’t telling the reader what you think might be true, or what you’ve had a hunch about. Instead, you’re telling them what you know; what you’ve sussed out, nailed down, verified, confirmed, and what you can say with full confidence that you know to be true.

Personally, I think that’s where you build your reputation as a good news writer—when people come to you, hear what you say, and don’t feel the need to check three or four other sources. When they think “okay, this is a place I can come to for information that’s verified, and I can take it as a known fact”, that’s when you’re doing your job well.

Standard media education and online media education are excellent places to start on the path towards understanding the media industry, and what it takes to be a good news writer.

Why Writing for the News Media Is Here to Stay

Yellowbrick on December 24, 2021

If you’re interested in news writing and reporting, you need to know that the media industry is very competitive.

Most people view the news media as a glamorous field to work in. You may, too, at first. You may want to be on camera, not primarily for the glamour, but a little bit.

People say, “You know, you’re gonna meet celebrities,” or, “You have this exciting lifestyle.” On the other hand, the media industry has a bad reputation. Journalists take offense when people say, “Oh, it’s all fake news. There’s no real news.” So, you need to ask yourself why you want to write for the news media, and why you believe it’s important.

Today, journalists are as necessary to society as they ever were. People need to hear facts about topics such as COVID-19. And for a vital issue like this, nothing hits you more than hearing a personal story about someone coping with the virus. As a journalist, you can get in and tell those stories. You’ll not only inform the public but also enrich your own life. You have this privilege to walk inside someone’s life, share their experiences, learn from them, and translate everything into a story that will be meaningful to readers.

Writing a Podcast for Media Education

Yellowbrick on December 24, 2021

Podcast writing is definitely a viable path for writers now. If not your full career, it’s at least one way that you could find work or find specific gigs. I read a lot of newsletters, lots of different job posts, and there are always calls for writers for podcasts.

What’s different about podcasts in regard to media writing is that it’s like you need journalistic research skills, but then you need really good storytelling skills because it’s is audio. People can’t see things, so you need to be able to write in a way that comes across well without a person being able to engage with any other media to make your story make sense. You know, it’s writing clearly. It’s finding sensory details, making sure that you’re vivid, that you’re descriptive; that’s a big part of it in the media industry. And just making sure that you can write in a way that’s engaging.

So, in a sense, some of the web writing techniques apply in terms of writing shorter sentences, that kind of stuff, keeping paragraphs short. But I think that it’s really important to just be very visual when you’re writing and be descriptive in online media education.

It’s kind of combining the quality of journalism, but then more of the imagination or the creativity of fiction and kind of putting those things together so you can tell really great stories.

Are You Helping Music Entertainers or Auteurs?

Yellowbrick on December 24, 2021

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?

Black American Culture’s Influence on Music

Yellowbrick on December 24, 2021

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.

Chuck Berry, Master of Rock and Roll Music

Yellowbrick on December 24, 2021

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.

How Data and the Digital Age Have Changed the Media Industry

Yellowbrick on December 24, 2021

Today, we have something called data at our fingertips. Before the era of digital journalism, we only knew who our readers were based on their subscription information. So, if you can remember subscribing to a newspaper on a piece of paper and mailing it to that newspaper’s office, you might provide some information like your age, gender, your name, the neighborhood that you live in. Those become the demographic and psychographic points of information for that news organization. That’s the information they had to go off of.

Then, that is the information they sometimes use to make decisions about the pieces that they did. In the golden age of journalism, what we did see is reporting for reporting’s sake, news of the day. The most important information was put on the front page. And you might find that information on a competing newspaper’s front page as well.

Nowadays, with data, sometimes newsrooms, news managers, and editors might make decisions based on really granular data that they have at their fingertips because people come to their websites and give over data that helps them understand, “Who are our readers? Where are they from? What are their likes and dislikes?”

Especially with social media helping out with that data, we know our readers so much more today than we did before. There are some people who say in the industry that that’s a great thing. We can find out more about our readers. We can serve our readers in a better way. There are others who say we depend on data too much, and we are making decisions based on the data that we have versus the news of the day and what is newsworthy.

This is the conversation that is happening within newsrooms today. You might see over the next 10 to 15 years these legacy outputs that come from these news organizations, like nightly broadcasts or newspapers, lessen as digital properties grow.