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.