In the digital age, performance is split into two different areas: linear and nonlinear. For example, if you’re listening to internet radio on NPR or satellite radio, like XM or Sirius, there’s a royalty, a linear royalty, which is different than a nonlinear royalty. For example, if you’re choosing songs not in a row, and you’re not listening to an internet radio station, maybe you’re choosing some of your favorite songs or a playlist that you made on your Spotify; that would be a nonlinear royalty.

Linear royalties are collected by an organization in the music industry called SoundExchange. You register your song with SoundExchange and they collect those linear royalties for you. In the case of nonlinear royalties, like an Apple Music or Spotify song, for example, they pay the artist directly. Those performance royalties can add up, and these days, now more than ever, it’s a main source of income for many artists who are generating a significant amount of spins online. This is important to know if you’re into music education or taking online music education courses.

Last but not least are sync fees. Sync fees are paid any time your song is placed in a commercial, a TV show, an online commercial, or film. That song must be licensed. There’s a master fee and a publishing fee. The publishing fee is collected by your publisher, who quotes on your behalf, or in your case, you quote on your behalf how much you are licensing your song for. In the case of the master recording, that will be licensed by your record company or by you (if you own your own masters).

One thing that I always tell my students is that every single one of them has an “it” factor. So, the process is just figuring out what your “it” factor is about and how you can relay it to your audience in the best way possible.

Finding Your “It” Factor With Music Education

Every single student has a story to tell that has never been told before. Likewise, every student has the capability of speaking to a different group of people that have never been together before. Throughout this class, my students find their “it” factor and who their community is.

Defining Your Role in a Group

I often tell my students to look at the people around them and study their roles. Look at their families, their friends, and their classmates and see what their capabilities are. For example, a cruise director will have a different set of artistic abilities than a peacemaker would have. I try to get my students to figure out how they see themselves within their groups to help them understand what they can bring to an audience.

Persona Performance

Performance is the authenticity of yourself. We discover who you want to be, who you are capable of being on stage, and what character you want to audience to see. This applies to on-stage performance, social media presence, interviews, and more.

There are many ways to think about persona. One example is a person’s alter ego versus their true, authentic self. Many artists believe that once they decide what their persona is, it can never be changed. However, persona is a fluid process that is constantly shifting and evolving.

Persona in the Music Industry

Lady Gaga is an excellent example of how persona plays a role in music. She debuted her project as an alter ego, then, through time, she shifted from one alter ego to another. Creating that conceptual relationship to her persona brought her different kinds of audiences. It also created a story for her to tell over and over again. This project was separated from her persona, which can be healthy for an artist. It allows artists to live their lives without the duality of a persona and a self.

Persona Is a Process

Your intention, narrative, and what you want to do with the persona you have created are what you aim for with this kind of artistry. Do you want to change the world? Do you want to throw a party? All of these things are important to think about when we decide what the point of our artistry is.

Where we want to take and see our artistry helps us to define the storytelling. After this, we can begin to see how the story that we created matches up with the story of our lives. The narrative that we build will become the first chapter of our identity.

Artistry is a process. One day, you might feel like writing a sad song, and the next day, you might feel like writing an anthem. Once you feel comfortable and safe with your own persona, as an artist, the character can shift and change throughout time. David Bowie is a great example of this kind of shift in artistry. He started out one way, then created an alter ego for himself, then returned to who he truly felt like he was inside.

These artistry shifts are all relative to what’s happening at the time. They can be affected by history, politics, and the current trends around the artist. You can really float with your audience to learn what they want and what you want. Making these types of connections lead to a successful journey together.

A great case study of utilizing positive exclusivity is another orthogonal example. Surprisingly, it’s Facebook, not the Music Industry. When Facebook first got started, it was not available to everyone on the planet as it is today. It used to be highly exclusive.

When Facebook was first created, you had to have a .edu email address from a particular school to even use it. At the very beginning of Facebook, you had to have a Harvard email address to access it. A few months later, they expanded to about 20 to 30 more schools.

However, if you weren’t attending one of those schools like NYU, Northwestern or Cal Arts, you couldn’t get on Facebook. Obviously, most of you know that they eventually opened it up to the whole world, but in those first moments when they were very exclusive, there were a lot of components happening. The exclusivity really resonated with people.

Everyone Wants to Be Included

First of all, when you are included in that sort of exclusive phase, you just feel cool. Exclusivity tends to instill a lot of FOMO (fear of missing out) in people who aren’t a part of the club. If you’re included, you feel as though you’re on a train that’s leaving, and maybe other people aren’t taking that ride with you. Exclusivity taps into a higher-level concept called network externalities. This is a vital tactic for a new artist trying to build an audience.

The concept of network externalities basically states that a small group of people who are connected, who actually have something in common, who know each other and who communicate can, in theory, organize to get things done and accomplish a lot more than a huge group of people who don’t know each other. This is why Facebook, even though there were only a few universities using it, was able to blow Myspace out of the water.

For those of you who remember, Myspace was rooted in the idea that you might have hundreds, maybe thousands, of friends, but no one really knew them. No one communicated with them. Meanwhile, the 30 friends you might have on Facebook were actually spreading the product more because they were talking to each other constantly. That’s because they really were your friends.

Connections Are Key

This concept can also be seen in political movements. Many grassroots movements have deep connections with small groups of people when they start. These people are communicating and sharing ideas fast. Often, these movements can outpace something that seems like a juggernaut because people associated with the bigger group aren’t actually communicating. With network externality, it’s essential to get your audience talking to each other.

Perfecting Music by Being Patient

The last part of positive exclusivity, from a creator standpoint — for those of you who write songs, for those of you who make things — is that it allows you to perfect your product before it’s brought out in the open to be judged by the whole world.

People should be encouraged to play their songs and share what they are working on with others early in their creative process, even before they think it’s done. This gives you the feedback you need to make it better. An example of positive exclusivity and music education would be deciding to only play your music in your hometown for the next year before moving on to other towns.

Even if your fans in those other towns say they want you to come play there, sticking to your home venue allows you to workshop the songs you’re creating, perfect them. By the time you open them up to everybody, you know they’re going to work.

Worth the Wait

This method is exactly what Facebook did when they moved from just a handful of universities to the whole world. By the time they made the switch, they knew that they had something solid that the world wanted. It may have been a slower process, but it was perfected in the end.

I’m JD Samson, a professor of performance and artistry at the Clive Davis Institute. I’m going to talk to you a little bit about authenticity and intention narrative and all the things it takes to put on the best live show you can in the music industry.

I’ve worked with Christina Aguilera, Kathleen Hanna, and Yuksek. I was the music director for Peaches. I also have worked with Sia on many different projects, including songwriting and performances, and some other incredible writers, performers, and producers. I love collaborating with new people.

Before we get started in this module on music education, I can’t stress enough that this journey of becoming a performer and an artist is completely nonlinear. You can choose your own adventure. You should be exploring this journey on your own unique path, which means it can ebb and flow. There can be fluidity within the process, and I’d love for you to choose your journey as you see fit.

We all have different bodies, and they’re unique to us in many different ways. The public sees our bodies in one way, while we’ve grown up with our bodies in other ways. As you launch your career, being comfortable and feeling safe in your body are going to put you light years ahead of other people in the music industry.

Think about the way you breathe. Just like we practice with our instruments every single day, we should do breathing exercises in order to grow and expand our lungs. This will help us get to a place where we feel comfortable singing and performing at a high capacity every day.

Another thing to focus on is understanding who you are and how you fit into the world. Your anxiety, confidence, and insecurities — all these things help you to really exist in the present. These are the three pillars that will help you to become the best performer you can be.

One book I like to look at when thinking about how to exist in my body comfortably is “Deep Listening” by Pauline Oliveros. I recommend that you complete some of the practices she lays out in this book because they can help you feel comfortable in your body, comfortable in your breath, and comfortable within yourself.
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Understanding your voice and how to project it requires two different techniques. One is for speaking in a room with no amplification, and the other is for performing on stage with a microphone. You must learn not only how to enunciate but also how to project your voice so that you feel it vibrating and resonating. When you do these things, people will be able to hear and understand you.

When you’re on stage with a microphone, it’s an amazing tool. The microphone loves air. It loves breath. Because of this, we don’t have to project as hard. Many times, people “over sing” on the mic because they don’t realize that the air-to-tone ratio is incredibly important.

You can be on the mic and just barely talk. It will give you a nice, resonant sound. Artists need to spend quality time with the mic. Being in the studio on the mic is its own lesson. Being on stage with the microphone is a completely different lesson in your music education.

Every aspect of performance requires that you know and become comfortable with the inner workings of your instrument and your breath. This includes your breathing. Understand how to breathe and where your breath comes from. Understand how the diaphragm and the lungs work when you take a full breath. A complete understanding of this process is very important.

When it comes to music, one of the most important things an artist must pay attention to is vocal stamina, which starts with correct breathing. Breathing is the most important part of the entire process. My main suggestion for artists is to set a metronome to 74 BPM. Inhale for four beats, then hold your breath for four beats. Then exhale for four beats, and finally, relax for four beats.

Every part of this process occurs at four beats, except for the exhalation. The goal is to take in the inhalation and then to exhale so that you can reach about 32 beats, then 36 beats. In this way, you can feel the movement of the air as you listen to the metronome.

You want to make sure that there is a continual flow of air so you can feel the connection. You want to feel it within you, and feel your diaphragm and lungs as they expand and contract. This is a very important process.

The key to vocal longevity and vocal health is understanding that no one part of the instrument can dominate. The key to it is the same as the way the body works. The parts work together. If you’re a singer who sings in the lower register, get to know your upper register. If you sing primarily in the upper register, get to know your lower register.

That wonderful section in-between — the Italians call it the passaggio — is the passageway. This is the key. If you get the passageway right so that your voice becomes balanced, then you can go from bottom to top and vice versa.

My old vocal coach Kenneth Kamal Scott used to say that it is the top of the voice that teaches you how to sing. The top teaches the bottom and the bottom gives way to the top.

We tend to push, push, push, push, push. But we find that the singers who put us in awe, those who can sing for years and years, have voices that are balanced. They are seamless voices from top to bottom.

For anyone taking part in music education or trying to forge a career in the music industry, it’s important for students or artists to figure out how to think about themselves, and to formulate a plan for the way that they’re going to connect with an audience. So, first and foremost, they need to understand that self-awareness is going to be the key to their success.

In some ways, we have to start from this self-awareness and confidence-building and ability to see your own faults, and also to see all of the possibilities that you have within yourself before you push yourself forward and find your outlet. Finding your intention as a performer is really about looking into yourself and realizing what you’re capable of.

Personally, for some of my music students, I like to have them fill out personality quizzes. The reason for this is that in reality, they allow you to answer all of these questions about yourself that you might not have thought about otherwise. Some people figure out that they’re people pleasers. Some find out that they’re introverts. And the good news is, none of these traits keep you from being a good performer. All of it is really about figuring out what both your weaknesses and your strengths are, and playing to them.

After we figure out our personalities, we can then figure out what our intention is as an artist. This means answering questions like, what do we want to give over to our audience? Do we want them to be hopeful? Do we want them to be introspective? Do we just want them to enjoy themselves? Are we just all about creating a conceptual artistic experience that is abstract in nature? All of these questions are things we figure out when looking at our intention as a performer.

One of the best ways to go about taking these personality quizzes, I find, is to do them in a group or a class, and fill them out together. Then, everybody shares the results with each other, which can sometimes be pretty shocking. Oftentimes, people might take the quiz thinking that they’re an extrovert, and then discover to their surprise that they’re actually an introvert. These kinds of realizations can help people determine who they want to be as an artist.

Some people might find out that they’re a people pleaser, and wonder if that’s a negative thing. Some people might realize that they’re an extrovert, but not actually feel like one. Overall, these personality quizzes are a great way for people to get to know each other, and they can also help us discover the ways that we can best connect to an audience.

If you have a desire to learn more about how to discover yourself as an artist and how to best connect with an audience, consider giving online music education a try.

Working in the music industry, a common occurrence for me is that an artist comes in and says, “I got 50,000 plays on Spotify,” or “I got all these streams on Apple Music.” And I’ll say, “Great, so are you making money?” And they’ll say, “I don’t know, am I?” The answer is yes, they’re making money. But without properly knowing their revenue streams and knowing where the money comes from and where it’s going, they have no way to collect it.

Part of your practical music education involves making sure that your song has direction when it comes to the revenue that’s coming in. When you think about revenue streams in the music industry, think about where the money is earned. There’s an entity that collects that money for you and delivers it to you, or to a publisher, or to a label on your behalf. I call it the “armored car model.”

Who is that delivery system that’s collecting money from your song and delivering it to you? In the case of a traditional record deal, where an artist is signed to a label, the label collects the money from record sales for you and delivers it to you per your royalty agreement. That deal is the same for labels of all sizes, whether it be an independent label or a major one like Warner Brothers.

When a song or an album is duplicated, multiple copies are made to be sold. There’s a fee that’s generated called a mechanical royalty. That is the money that a record company must pay to duplicate, which dates back to the old publishing days when song sheets were duplicated. That’s how songwriters made their money, and it’s very similar today.

There’s a company called the Harry Fox Agency that collects those mechanical royalties, and they’re the armored car in the model mentioned above. And after they collect those mechanical royalties, they deliver them to a publisher, or if you’re self-published, to you directly. And currently, that rate is 9.1 cents per song. So, for example, if you have a platinum-selling album with 10 songs on it, you have 9.1 cents, times 10 songs, times a million dollars. That’s a nice chunk of change.

One of the other ways that songs generate money is through performance. When a song is on the radio — the traditional terrestrial radio we call a radio station — that song generates a royalty. That’s called a performance royalty. The armored car that collects that money is a PRO, or performance rights organization, like SESAC, BMI, or ASCAP. They collect that money, and they deliver it to your publisher, or if you’re self-published, to you.

The royalty rate does fluctuate, and it’s fractions of pennies. However, it does add up, especially with something like a big pop song on Top 40 radio that usually crosses over to other formats. A Beyoncé song, for example, could generate a million dollars just from being played on the radio. There’s a fact to motivate you as you continue your online music education!

In the music industry, when it comes to trying to get traditional press for what you’re working on, a lot of artists make one of two common mistakes. The first is to get an email list of all these music journalists, essentially spam them, and just hope that one of those emails gets their attention. Doing so isn’t a very good idea because it can give you a bad reputation. But more importantly, if you took the time to actually just learn a lot about a few specific journalists, you could be a lot more detailed. That’s a much smarter personal strategy.

The other mistake that a lot of us make is that we start out shooting a little bit too high. For example, if I’m a brand-new act, I don’t have a lot of fans yet, but I would love to be on Pitchfork or in The New York Times. That’s shooting really high, and it might not happen.

What you can do, though, before you start choosing who you want to reach out to, is to create a map of what you want to achieve and where you want to be at a certain point in time. For example, you might say to yourself, “In the next year, I’d like to be on Pitchfork.” Then, you can think about what sources are smaller and accessible to you, sources that Pitchfork is maybe getting story ideas from, and map your path to them. That could be a shortcut to getting to that top source, rather than trying to start there.

One way to do this is by looking at the digital breadcrumbs left on the internet. A really amazing tool is Google’s Timeline. Something I always recommend is that if you find an article in a big outlet like The New York Times or Pitchfork, that’s breaking an artist, you can look at the date when it came out, put that into your Google Timeline search, and search for that artist to see who was talking about them before the article came out. Nine times out of 10 you’ll find that there were other blogs, people on Twitter, people who were talking about them before the story went to that big outlet, even when the big outlet takes credit for discovering them.

So, I recommend that you take note of the smaller outlets that don’t have millions of readers but are showing up in those search results. Then, do it again with another article by the same writer. What you’ll start to see is that every time they’re breaking a new artist, there are these smaller sources that keep coming up shortly beforehand on the timeline search.

What this shows you is that these are probably places where those big outlets are getting story ideas. I recommend that you start your press path on a map where you’re only taking the time to reach out and connect with the outlets and journalists that could get you to those bigger ones.

By exploring the world of online music education, you can learn much more about getting recognized by outlets and journalists and building your career in the music industry. Don’t wait any longer to start getting the music education that you want and need.

A question that’s asked often is, “How does a music producer get paid?” That answer has shifted dramatically in the music industry the last few years because, historically, record producers got paid based on album sales. They received a royalty anywhere between 3% and 5% based upon their stature and the number of sales that have been made on the record.

That model has changed because sales have decreased. Now, producers get paid a percentage of income. They get a percentage of licensing if they haven’t written the song. They may also get a percentage, in some instances, of any kind of endorsement deals that come out of the song and the success of that song.

That being said, because producers aren’t making the same money and have the same revenue streams, oftentimes, producers will ask for publishing on songs they didn’t write. If you’re in a situation where you’re not able to pay a producer or a producer is producing for you for free, that’s often a great tradeoff. You give a small percentage of the publishing where the producer gets a piece of the songs that they’ve worked on without accepting money. But if a producer hasn’t written those songs and the producer is being paid for their work, asking for publishing is a definite red flag. Make note of this as you continue your online music education.

The first records were essentially documents of performances. It was essentially just a matter of sticking a microphone in front of a singer or a band and recording that performance, then preserving it and playing it back.

However, as technology began to mature and get a little more sophisticated, some record producers began to use that technology to influence and shape the way that music sounded on a record. An early pioneer was Les Paul, who worked with record cutters, record lathes, and early tape machines to do things like sound-on-sound recording and overdubbing, as he did with Mary Ford’s “How High the Moon.” This was the beginning of a whole new era for the music industry.

About 10 years later, a young record producer by the name of Phil Spector literally used the acoustics and electronics in the studio to create what he called a wall of sound in the record “Be My Baby” by The Ronettes.

The mid-1960s were when the idea of the record producer really started to mature. George Martin, working with The Beatles, used all kinds of electronic trickery to make their recordings sound really, really interesting. Whether it was the use of tape loops, interesting new musical instruments, or placement of microphones, everything was used to shape the sound of music.

Currently, music education, including online music education, offer music producers even more ways to play with sound and create new and interesting effects for recordings.