The visual pillar of performance is probably the most fun. Sometimes, as musicians, we forget about this part of our artistry. That it really comes from a deep feeling.

We want to paint. We want to touch. Sometimes, with music, we don’t get that sense. We don’t get that motion. When we’re creating electronic music.

Get students to feel comfortable getting dirty. You want them to feel like the energy they’ve put into creating a set or creating costumes is going to give back to their audience. Like it is going to make them feel more connected with the work that they’re doing.

What is the story you want to tell? You must make sure that you are wearing the costume of that story, of that main character. What is the character of the set? Is that a sun setting? Or is it people in a protest?

If you never bring up the idea of people in a protest, but you’ve got images behind you of people in a protest, it evokes a feeling from the audience. It’s these subliminal messages that we’re giving to the audience that make them feel connected to what we’re doing.

There are many ways to do this for a performance with a track. For example, to feel more alive, one of those is through movement and choreography. Another one of those is creating or combining a live element with your track. Sometimes, people add live drums, and they’re not even miked.

The idea of moving their body along with the rhythm of the music is something that the audience can really connect to. They feel, oh, they’re moving. I want to move too.

That’s what we must look at. Like there’s really a mirror right there. What you are doing is what the audience feels OK to be doing back to you. If you’re dancing, they’re dancing. If you’re introspective and looking at the ground, they might be too. Decide what you want your audience to do, and they’ll mirror you.

One common question music professionals get is “how does a manager in the music industry get paid?” Historically, a manager typically gets between 10% and 20% of the gross. However, that number changes depending on what the situation is. For example, a female solo artist or a male solo artist may be paying 20%, but if you’re a rock band of five or six guys, for a manager to make 20%, they’d make more than any individual member of the band. Generally, any manager who’s smart and wants to have a good relationship with their artists is going to take less than that.

Some managers make less than touring based on a touring history, but 15% to 20% is a general rule. Any manager who’s worth their weight and has a great history and good experience is going to want 15% to 20% of the gross of everything that you make. It’s not an unreasonable amount of money because there are many times when a manager is working hard on your behalf. They aren’t making any money during the times that you’re dormant, recording, etc.

It’s hard to talk about the music industry without talking about some of the pitfalls of the business. Because there weren’t music education programs 20, 25 years ago, all of us who grew up in the music industry made mistakes and learned by either making those mistakes, getting ripped off, getting screwed over, or getting somehow cheated, unfortunately.

Thankfully, things are different today. However, the pitfalls still remain the same. That is, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Don’t fall for the hype. Don’t go for the quick buck. Instead, go for the long term. So, why do I say that? Many people think that fame equals a career, but that’s not the case. The list of one-hit-wonders, flashes in the pan, people who had their short moment in the sun, is significantly longer than the list of those who have had a real career.

Always be open-minded. Always be thinking about where you want to be in five or 10 years. Don’t be thinking about how to get as many ‘likes’ as you can today. Think about how to get as many followers as you can long-term. If you think about even the arc of Facebook and how it was used, in the last five years it went from the number of followers being the most important thing to followers no longer amounting to excitement, interest, or passion.

So, if I were a manager, I wouldn’t really care how many followers you have. Instead, I want to know how many people are talking about you. It’s a very different dynamic. It’s a very different algorithm. But ultimately, having real fans is what it’s all about. Don’t go for quick fame, and don’t confuse fame with a career, because they’re two completely different things.

Another important thing is, don’t make the mistake of signing contracts without having them looked over. Standard music industry contracts are not usually in the artist’s favor. And honestly, it may never be completely in your favor; however, it should always be within the confines, norms, and boundaries of what’s acceptable among artists.

When you hear those horror stories about old artists being ripped off or selling their music, or when you wonder how Michael Jackson owns part of the Beatles catalog, that’s because artists were signing bad deals at the time. Fortunately, that’s easily avoidable now with good advice. Remember, just because somebody asked you to the dance, it doesn’t mean that’s the only person who wants to dance with you.

If you’ve got ‘the goods’ and you’ve got things going on, you don’t have to take the first deal that comes your way. Be patient and wait for the right deal to be presented to you. If what you’re doing makes a lot of sense and people really like it, there will be more than one company, one person, one bit of interest in what you’re doing. There will be a lot of it.

If you’re interested in learning much more about concepts like these surrounding the world of professional music, you should seriously consider exploring online music education.

Staging and costumes are all about the way things look. As part of your online music education, let’s go back to Art History 101 to learn about composition. What is most pleasing to our eyes? What colors work best when you want to create an intimate atmosphere? Do you want warm colors like red, or cool colors like blue? This is all a trial-and-error process, but it’s best for us to see how the characters from earlier in the story fit in with these color-blocking ideas and the composition of the canvas as our stage.

Staging Philosophies
In the same way that we think of instrumentation with a song, color-blocking is a good way to impose splashes of color onto a stage that look good next to one another. Sometimes the juxtaposition of these colors can create a really interesting tone in itself. Using lights, we can really make them take on a whole different shape. So, for example, if you have a red light onstage and a blue backdrop, it’s going to change color as it’s turned on and off. The ability to see color and the way that it plays a role within the stage setup is important to know as you continue your music education.

Creating a conceptual identity for your product is something a lot of people are doing nowadays. Some people decide that they want to be a monster in another world. When you walk into this venue, you want to feel like you are a monster in another world, and you’ve never met someone else that is a monster from another world.

So how do we make that happen? What does the set design look like? How do we implement these ideas in the performance of our work? Do we speak to the audience? Do we start on the floor? Do we perform from the audience, with the audience themselves on stage? Original interpretations of what everything means and flipping the script on yourself is a really incredible way to understand yourself better as an artist.

My art teacher in high school used to say, “Do you belong to the school of squint?” And this helps me all the time when I’m thinking of visual elements for my live performance. What she meant by that was, if you squint and you see just the outside of everything and the composition of the larger pieces in color-blocking, you’re going to be able to see what it looks like from far away. This is what’s important for us as performers because it should look just as good in the front row as it does in the back row.

About Costumes
We want to create costumes that have really great profiles. We want apparel that makes us look the way we want to look, and that creates a color that pops out from the set itself and gives the audience something to be excited by. We can create so many different stories with costumes. They can be abstract shapes. We can reimagine our bodies as other-selves in this moment. But when it comes down to it for us, the entire conceptual performance is really focused on how to bring the costume, the set, the songs, and the choreography all together in wondrous harmony.

A costume doesn’t have to be some crazy Halloween thing at all. It’s just about what you put on that day that is your work outfit. And for some people, that’s going to be jeans, a T-shirt, and some Converse. And for other people, it’s going to be an evening gown, some makeup, and an up-do. But the truth is that you should always be wearing something that’s really comfortable to you that screams, “This is my authentic self.”

What we put on our bodies and how we present ourselves can shape the way we feel about our performance to a great extent. We want to be comfortable. We want to feel safe. This is all the puff-up, shrink-down thing again. If we act like something we are not, we are not going to be comfortable. We are not going to relate to our audience the best way that we can.

Another use of the costume is that it’s a personal prop. Being able to use something that you wear on your body as a through-line of a story that you tell on the stage is really important. We see this with James Brown with his cape. There are so many ways in which that cape means something more than just a piece of clothing. And his performance with this cape is something that I return to over and over again with my students in order to explain how to use props and how to use your body onstage in order to tell a deeper story.

How The Knife Uses Staging and Costumes
One of my favorite bands is called The Knife. They’re a Swedish electronic band. And every performance they do is wildly different from the one before. Creating this new world for them to live in is something that the audience loves. This is why people keep coming back; because they know that what they’re walking into is going to be a whole new world than the last time they saw the band.

Their last performance included choreographed dances with around 12 bandmates on stage. The lead singer wasn’t always even the one singing during performances. They had costumes and instruments they built themselves, plus new technologies around percussion instruments and wind instruments. Everything about the night was an experiment in pop music performance and what an audience is.

The opening band was an aerobics instructor. They got the crowd up and moving. It was a great way to create an amazing story throughout the night. It was new and different, and the audience is shocked to experience it. These are the kinds of performances we remember. They also make an impact on us in the world of music.

There’s a concept called product-market fit, and it’s one of the most important elements in finding your audience, finding customers, in anything you ever want to do. It may sound self-explanatory, but it’s actually pretty complicated when you learn about it in online music education. A really helpful way to think about product-market fit is to think about it as a moment in time.

If you think about the moment when someone is saying the words coming out of their mouth, or when they play you a song, at first it all sort of has infinite potential. One could play a song right now and, in theory, 7 billion people on the planet could love it. But that doesn’t actually happen in the music industry, does it? But as soon as that product interacts with any sort of market, the potential for it starts to fall. This happens even with the greatest things of all time.

But at a certain point, hopefully what happens is it stops somewhere. So that song has infinite potential at first, then it starts falling down, and suddenly there’s some consistency to the group of people that like it. This actually happens with most things that come out. What a lot of entrepreneurs and artists miss, though, is actually doing the analysis to figure out what the commonalities are about where it stopped.

So the story goes that an artist has been playing concerts, and it seems like these five specific people keep going to every show, even though they’re not friends. Is there anything they have in common? You’ll find that it’s usually not random. They actually all like the same five artists. They all listen to music on Spotify but not TIDAL. They all use Android but not iPhone. It can seem very random at first.

But as soon as you notice these patterns, you’re starting to find your product-market fit. You’re starting to be able to define exactly who your target audience is. It’s always recommended, to make a John or Jane Doe profile of who your person is, so you can put a name to your fan. So saying, “My fan is someone who shops at H&M, lives in Canada, is in this age range, and likes these kinds of artists,” is great information to have.

This is really important to do because artists are people who make their own things out of nothing. They are usually not the best at actually predicting who their audience is. It’s been seen time and time again. Usually, what we want to do is make our target audience a mirror of ourselves. So it could be tempting for me right now to say, “My target audience is 32-year-old men who live in New York and who have beards, right?”

But if I actually look at my SoundCloud data, it would reveal that a lot of my fans are 45-year-old women who live in Europe. Which is great, but it’s not exactly me. And it’s actually taking the time to look at where and who my music is resonating with, and finding out what’s common among them. That’s your target audience.

So finding product-market fit is something that will take you a very long time to master as you study music education, but you need to constantly be thinking that it’s kind of a waste of time for you to do a lot of marketing, advertising, and trying to get the word out until you find your product-market fit.

Not finding your product-market fit is how labels and artists waste upwards of millions of dollars by these very expensive experiments of doing Facebook ads to anybody, rather than knowing who they’re selling to. We know that the product-market fit is comprised of people that love these three artists. We’re only going to go there. So it’ll save you a lot of time, money, and emotional heartache by waiting to actually market and do these creative ideas you hopefully have to get the word out until you have found your product-market fit.

One of the essential things about authenticity while making music is knowing yourself. That self-awareness can come from all kinds of self-help books but also exercises where we can look at ourselves in the mirror and project exactly what we want to see. Looking in the mirror is one of the most critical elements about learning how to perform well and perform authentically.

Each day, you must go to the mirror, and the first thing you must do is confront yourself. It means you’re looking in the mirror, and the moment that you’re about to say, “Oh, my eye, oh, my hair, oh, my face, oh, I need to…,” you must confront all those things. Even when you’re standing there, and you’re thinking, “This is silly. I don’t know why I’m doing this;” you must observe. It would be best to observe all those things. Understanding your inner self should be taught as part of music education also in online music education.

The idea is to see who you are, and you begin to observe them and pay attention. Then, you’re comfortable within yourself. At that point, when you step on the stage, you’re able to make that connection. Do you know what happens? You connect with the audience, and the audience feels your authenticity. It’s essential that they feel your authenticity.

As an artist, you are working through who you are and what you want the audience to feel when you are on stage. That connection that you’re trying to make with the audience, you must do some work where you understand who you are, why you are, how you are, and the purpose of you being that artist. The only way that that can happen is if you have and learn to have that intimate connection with yourself.

One of my favorite authors, Brené Brown, talks about authenticity a lot. I find it to be helpful to look at one of her examples. She often uses the phrase, “Don’t puff up. Don’t shrink down.” Sometimes when we’re in a tense situation, we try to make ourselves more confident than average. Or we try to make ourselves smaller because we feel like we’re acting. We’re taking up too much space.

The truth is that if someone dislikes you for doing either of those things, you’re going to feel worse about yourself. If they dislike you for being who you are, you’re still going to feel good about exactly who you are. The critical idea is to walk out of that situation and know that you didn’t try too hard to mold yourself into what you think someone would want you to be. We want to sit with ourselves in precisely the space that we are.

I speak about not the space of when you think you’re putting on. That’s the mask you wear so that people know you as this when you step out. We’re talking about when you’re alone and you’re standing in front of that mirror. You’re looking at yourself, and you’re taking in all the voices that are inside your head.

To me, a good musical performance is about three things. One is being comfortable with your body. One is being comfortable with your breath. And one is being comfortable with yourself.

One tip I give my students is to listen to their music while they walk around the city, or ride their bike to work, or even take a bath. By allowing your music to, in a way, infiltrate your entire being, you can feel like it’s really inhabiting every cell of your body. Walking out on the street, dancing throughout the day—all of these things are enmeshing the music and your identity together, which is a really important part of your growth as a performer.

Another thing I suggest is to listen to music while you’re working out. If you go to the gym, there’s a musical exercise you can do while on the treadmill. As you’re going at a nice slow pace, for about three to five minutes, just start singing to yourself, “la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la. La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la.” Sing these notes in time with your breathing, and it will allow you to feel your breath.

Alternatively, you can do the same exercise, but instead of doing it on the treadmill, you can do it while you’re doing sit-ups. Either way, it will allow you to feel connected to your breath. It’s about the breath, and it’s all about understanding how your body works.

During a performance, you’re speaking very quickly. The volume sometimes has to be very loud, and it’s also rhythmically challenging. As a result, the tendency for singers and also for hip-hop artists/rappers is that they sometimes forget to breathe. Then, what happens is that the breath becomes short. No air is getting down. All of a sudden, you’re gripping from the outside, and eventually, the voice reaches a point where it can’t take it any longer, and the performance falters.

We’ve got to breathe deeply and move on that breath. And move on that breath, and move on that breath, continuously. We find the rhythm within the breath. The breath truly sets up the rhythm—really, it’s the breath that creates the rhythm.

I usually tell my students that they should be able to sing their entire set while they’re running, doing sit-ups, on the elliptical—during all of these different types of physical movements that we’re so used to doing. We should be able to do them while singing and listening to our own music.

And eventually, at a certain point, the rehearsing of these movements together will make it seem like second nature. We don’t ever want to walk on stage feeling like we aren’t prepared, so preparing through all of these everyday activities will help us feel like it’s no big deal. It’s just breathing.

With online music education, you can learn much more about improving your musical performances, as well as a wide variety of lessons about building a career in the music industry. Your high-quality music education is right there, waiting for you to seize it.

Many bands don’t even bring a crew on tour; it’s just them. They do everything themselves. As you start to get bigger, though, you might need someone to sell merch for you. You might need someone to run the sound at the front of the house, or someone to run the monitor mix. As you continue growing bigger, you might need a wardrobe person. You might need a production assistant, a production manager, a tour manager. All of these people are very expensive to hire.

So, these are really some things to think about as you start to gain momentum in the music industry. For the most part, your manager is going to help you with this. As for needing a manager, you don’t need one until you need one. If you find that you can’t handle everything by yourself, that’s when you need a manager. At the beginning though, I recommend that you try to do it on your own.

Obviously, selling tickets for your show can benefit you financially. In some cases, though, you’ll really only be making money from alcohol sales at the bar, or from a guarantee that the venue has already given you. This is typically a certain amount of money that you’re guaranteed to receive after the show, no matter what. For instance, a venue may give you a $500 guarantee to play a show, and if they do, it won’t matter how many people are in attendance—you’ll receive the $500 regardless.

Another way that some venues might do it is to give you a guaranteed amount, plus a percentage of ticket sales after a certain amount of money is made. So, for example, after you’ve already made $1,000, you would receive $500, plus ten percent of ticket sales. You might get offered a deal like this as a way to incentivize you to promote the show and bring along as many people as possible.

Ultimately, creating a successful performance or tour is about the following things: finding your true, authentic self, creating your intention, telling your story, finding your audience, and creating a visual element that will evoke a certain energy from the crowd. So, in that vein, there are a few things you really need to focus on deciding, and they are who you are, who you need to bring with you on your music journey, and what kind of story you want to tell. In many cases, exploring online music education can help you get started on the right path.

In the music industry, it’s crucial to find who your target audience is, and it’s important that it’s based on real data. So, what you should do right now is create a profile. Create that John or Jane Doe who you think would love your music. Even if you only have 10 fans on Facebook or any platform, try to look at what the commonalities are amongst the people who love what you’re creating. Whether it be the shoes they wear, or their age, or where they’ve gone to school, all of this stuff starts to paint a picture of where you’ll be able to find your audience in the future.

The next thing to really make sure that you’re doing once you start getting some sort of response, even if it’s only five people following you on Instagram or coming out to your show, is to really start embracing your first followers. You want to do this because those first followers have the potential to become the biggest evangelizers on your behalf.

As much as we can talk about potential marketing strategies that we can do, it’s also really nice to have your marketing happening while you’re sleeping. This is another reason that you want to really embrace your early fans and make them feel like there’s a reason they should be championing you on your behalf.

So, whether you’ve just started performing or whether you’re starting to get plays on SoundCloud, you should really make sure that you’re starting to know who your fans are. For example, if you have less than 100 fans on Facebook, you should try to know all of their names. The people who come out to your show—those are people you should try to talk to afterward.

One of my favorite related stories is about Beyoncé. If any of us went to go see her in a stadium today, she certainly would not stay afterward to talk to all of us. She doesn’t need to. However, if you look at footage from some of the first Destiny’s Child concerts from the 1990s when there were 20 or so people at a gymnasium, she’s staying after the performance and talking to every one of them. She’s taking the time to learn who they are, and she’s leaving them with a great impression. There’s no reason that you and I can’t do the same.

For anyone interested, there is far more to learn regarding a wide variety of music-related concepts by exploring online music education, which is by far the most convenient form of music education available.

Often, an artist in the music industry will approach a producer and look for assistance in having the songs that he or she wrote translate to an audience. And they have to translate over a really strange medium, which is this recorded-music medium. You can’t see the person. And you can’t really get a feeling for what they’re wearing or what they look like. There’s no other information other than what you hear, their music. And making that translation could be quite difficult. It could be quite tricky.

So, the first thing that a producer would really do is try to get to know what the artist is all about, what the artist is trying to express, what the song is trying to say. This is a key part of music education. How can we do that through sound alone?

Mark Plotkin is an American songwriter and award-winning artist, a Grammy shortlisted producer, Bloomberg Businessweek Top 25 Entrepreneur, and a professor at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. He’s existed both in the music industry as both an artist and a musician. He’s also been in the tech startup world. He’s excited to bring all those experiences together in music education and online music education.

One really important concept to digest before studying a lot of music marketing is the idea of orthogonal thinking. Orthogonal is a word that comes from the math world. It basically refers to where a right angle meets two lines. It’s a really helpful visual because one of the problems in music marketing is that we all sort of become lemmings and just kind of copy each other.

Orthogonal thinking says, “Let’s look at something that is directionally the same as what we’re doing but is actually in a completely different lane. A great example is if you’re in a band, and you think about who you’re musically inspired by. It’s not crazy to think that you might want to do the marketing things that that band did. However, the reality is that you’re probably existing in a completely different era from them. You’re not the same people as them. There’s a million variables that are different.”

An example of a model that is more similar to what you’re doing might be, let’s say, a technology company. Maybe you think that your band and Snapchat have nothing in common. However, if you started your band the same time as Snapchat, and your fans exist sort of more in that ecosystem than on MTV like the band you’re modeling yourself out of, it makes a lot more sense to study what Snapchat does from a marketing perspective than who you sound like. Plotkin has many examples outside of music. That’s where the orthogonal thinking challenge is going to keep coming up.