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.