The 1960s brought lots of change and innovation to the music industry. It’s an era of music frequently studied in music education and online music education.

The influential artists of the 1960s are almost too numerous to mention. On the soul music side, we could talk about the genius of Aretha Franklin.

We could also talk about James Brown, a soul artist who fostered a whole other set of rhythmic innovations that came to be a new genre called funk.

We could talk about Stevie Wonder, who helped incorporate the synthesizer into pop music.

We could talk about Jimi Hendrix, who pioneered a new way of relating to the electric guitar, and in many ways helped to ignite another genre called heavy metal.

In this first module, “Building Your Image,” we are going to talk about how we build our audience. We need to define why you do what you do. In the unit “Marketing Your Music in the New Economy,” we look at embracing your first followers. We’re going to think about these areas especially:

• How do we try to guarantee a certain amount of traffic before putting our music out?

• How do we track the sources of big newspapers and blogs to try to get on their radar even when we are still small?

• How do we utilize social media to share stories and empower our fans to market on our behalf?

Leveraging Social Media

I have 1.8 million followers on Twitter, 1.5 million on Facebook, and 1.2 million on Instagram. The fans are more powerful than almost any music industry label. They post my music. They find other people who are searching for new music and send them mine. People pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to get this kind of promotion.

A lot of artists do not need deals. If they can establish a solid touring foundation, they can make money and pay their bills. They crave that freedom. I feel like a lot of artists lose their freedom when they jump straight to a major label.

Choosing the Moment

In regards to the timing of when marketing actually happens, it’s a really big question to ask. On one hand, some of us might think, “I want to be a perfectionist. I want to wait until the song is totally done to ever tell anyone about it.” Some of us might be more open to getting feedback, and we share every version of it.

The truth is that there really is not a right answer. There are different ways of making a decision about it.

Music Education

Our next plan is to look at three different examples of people who have all marketed themselves super-successfully but have chosen very different times to do so.

Quick reminder: These and other modules provide you with a well-rounded online music education that helps you to learn the ins and outs of bringing your sound or songs into the world and sharing your passion with others. They are also designed to guide you in your chosen industry career so that you can achieve long-term success.

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.

All of the concepts around authenticity inside of yourself also relate to your authenticity as a community. Your story is a big part of this, as your story helps you find your community and, as my colleague Michael Thurber says, your tribe. In life, we move along from one career to the next. We move along from one day to the next. During all of this, who are the people that we reach out to all the time? Those people are our community.

The final project for my class, “Creating a Compelling Live Performance, Part Two.” is centered around booking a show, inviting friends and creating an evening-length performance. The most important part of the show is figuring out how many people can attend and what venue will make the best setting. My students really have to question who their community is and how many people will be willing to come out. This practice can be really challenging for some of them, because it can be difficult to know how many people—how many friends and family members—are willing to pay money to watch them perform live.

For me, developing a community is all about finding the ways in which we unite together. They can be historical, political or emotional, but all of these ways that we are self-aware within our community can bring us together closer and closer.

In my case, it has really been political, finding a connection that we are all driving towards. For example, feminism was, for me, a huge way to create and maintain a community, because it led me to people who wanted to be smart, academic and intellectual, and also have fun. Together, we developed a sound as a community and set up shows with each other’s bands. More and more people started showing up because they needed it. They needed this historically. They needed a place to come together. So, let’s create a space where we want to come together.

To learn the skills and concepts for creating a community in the music industry, both standard music education and online music education are great places to begin.

A lot of times in the music industry, we think that the only way to market ourselves as artists is to always position ourselves from the standpoint of music, and nothing else. We tend to think that our fans must only be looking for people who make music, and that just isn’t true. One of my favorite examples is a singer-songwriter named Eileen Quinn. Very few people are familiar with her work.

However, since the 1980s, she has sold hundreds of thousands of records. She has done very major partnerships, all without the help of the traditional music industry. And all of this stemmed from one clear decision that was really antithetical to how most musicians would think, which was choosing to make music about boats. She wrote her songs about boats. I believe she even recorded some albums while on boats. Obviously, it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but that’s just fine. It did, however, have a niche element to it.

For example, in her song, “The Anchoring Dance,” Eileen Quinn sings: “Up on the foredeck, see them prance when they do, do, do, do the anchoring dance.”

And so, rather than sending her tapes or CDs at the time to “Rolling Stone,” or “Paste,” or the places we associate with music, she went the other way, and sent her stuff to yachting weekly magazines, and started doing partnerships with boating companies. Most likely, the first question you’d ask yourself is, how many singer-songwriters are also mailing their stuff to yachting magazines?

Probably, she was immediately able to stand out as completely different from the other kinds of solicitations they were getting, right? So, there is one way that you can immediately differentiate yourself from your competition in terms of other artists you’re similar to, by not necessarily going for traditional musical press. And eventually, there will be partnership opportunities.

For Eileen Quinn, for example, for everyone who bought a certain kind of boat, they also received one of her CDs. So, by knowing who the audience is that’s going to love your stuff, there’s most likely something you can look at, whether it be in your lyrics, where you’re from, or something in your background, that you’d be comfortable utilizing.

These are all opportunities to find your initial audience in a way that doesn’t have to only rely on describing yourself as a musician. I would definitely encourage you to look inward at what you’re doing and ask yourself, is there a niche that you’re comfortable utilizing about yourself that will help people find your music?

Again, these are all starting points. However, if you can figure that part out about yourself and find some success there, you can then move on to the next level and make your way to the more traditional musical press. Overall, though, finding that niche or unique trait about yourself or your work can really be a great starting point.

You can learn much more about defining yourself as an artist, connecting to your audience, and how the music industry operates, with online music education. With the online method as an option, getting your quality music education doesn’t need to be a hassle or prohibitively expensive.

For musicians who are taking time off from touring and other projects, performing in the studio is a great revenue stream. Now, how do artists get paid when they’re in the studio? Oftentimes, artists get a day rate. That means they’ll pick, for example, $100 per day, or in major instances, $500, $1,000, or even $2,500 for the day. They record as much as they can get done for the day.

Artists can get paid for the time they put in at the studio. Many times, these artists are given a flat day rate. This rate may pay anywhere from $100 to $2,500, and artists will record all they can on that day.

The great thing about the day rate is that it is fixed. If a drummer contracts work for a $2,500 payday, then he gets paid that amount whether he performs on one track or ten. Studio work for a flat day rate is not something that is regaled to small or up and coming artists. Many “big time” artists are racking up time in the studio. This is a great way to have steady income as an artist.

When a singer takes a group of musicians on the road, the musicians in the act may get a flat weekly rate of between $250 and $5,000 per week. They often also have allowances for hotels and meals as well as a per diem rate. A well-liked and respected artist who is also versatile can make money – as much or more – than a touring musician.

If a drummer comes in and records five songs, they get their $2,500. Or if they record one song, they get their $2,500. And many big name artists are recognized studio musicians, who have played on many of the records you know and love. When you’re on the road, an artist normally pays their musicians a weekly rate, where they’re getting $200, $500, $5,000 a week, plus obviously, hotel and a small per diem. So if you are a well-liked and versatile artist, there’s a great model for you to make money performing in the studio, as well as a touring musician.

Online music education tells us that production companies have always been a tremendous asset to those in the music industry. Take for instance the presence of Berry Gordy. Using the Motown Model, Gordy would find an artist, bring him or her into the musical family at Motown, and then use the same sets of musicians and writers to write and record many of the hits of notable artists such as Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross, and a wealth of other Motown artists. This successful model still exists today.

However, musicians today seem to be participating in more collaborative projects. In this form of collective music, artists from various types of media will get together and collaborate on projects. Noted rapper Dr. Dre collaborated with other producers and sound artists to create multiple hits by breakout artist Eminem. Not only did he produce a number of Eminem’s songs, but he also took part in the music making process and he appeared in numerous Eminem videos. Artists are enjoying being creative in other ways in addition to working with other talented individuals.

Music education should include teaching artists about the entrepreneurship of the music business as well as how to improve upon their personal craft. All artists should learn how to think outside the box and how to build each other up so that they can make the best business decisions for themselves. Newer artists should learn the success of the Motown model just as they should learn about other methods of creating the superior sound of success. The Rockefeller model is another profitable method of creating successful music. Artists such as Kanye, Camron, and Beanie Sigel have all benefited from the use of the Rockefeller way.

We wanted to share our successful model with as many musicians as possible. This form of music education is free; it is simply knowledge that helps all artists. Musicians and artists should want to see each other thrive and develop a family atmosphere.

Another important part of the music business is one’s staff within the recording industry. Staff is highly important. without a dependable staff, artists have to not only worry about their creative element but also the business part of the music business. A knowledgeable staff that is appreciated is a staff that goes above and beyond for their artists.

All elements of the music business must work together if artists will truly leave a legacy. The ability to collaborate with others and a supportive staff contribute highly to the success of an artist and a recording label as well as those who work in the studio.

I highly recommend looking into finding ways to collaborate with like-minded people within your friend group or your artistic group. You’ll find that you’ll get people playing on your records, or you’ll get studio time in exchange for, perhaps, doing a photoshoot (if that’s something that you do). Look for opportunities to trade your skills for other people’s skills in order to further your project along.