Music has always been sourced from a variety of different places. When I started out, I would stuff physical envelopes with CDs and handwritten notes. I would try to make them stand out by putting them in bright pink or purple jiffies in hopes that they would somehow make it to the top of the stack. I really did have a strategy. It was a little funky but logical. It’s overwhelming to think about how many envelopes people in this industry are getting every day.

Sourcing and Streaming in the Music Industry

The way that we source music now has changed over time. Now the digital download and streaming services are king. In a sense, things were easier before because there weren’t infinite possibilities living within two clicks of a mouse. Now you can get songs instantly on your computer, laptop, phone, iPad, or any other device that you use. So, I think now it’s about curation and filtering.

Certain companies like Spotify have done well to create playlists for people based on the songs and artists they have listened to. I know this is an algorithm, but there is someone programming that. They have figureheads that do research and create lists based on what’s happening around them.

Radio Is Not Dead

A lot of this research is still built around things that have been around forever. One example of this is radio. There are a lot of charts on Spotify that mirror what’s happening in radio. Some people say that radio is dead but that’s not true. Radio is still a great tool for getting music to the masses when physical artists can’t be in a specific place at a specific time.

I believe that streaming services and insourcing are continuing to hone in on this method of curation with better filters. However, I still think there needs to be some sort of human connection or human aspect. Having a human behind the scenes provides emotion, which draws in many listeners. Emotion can’t be captured in an algorithm or on a computer.

Algorithms Can’t Compare to Humans

Do you know that thing on Spotify that shows related songs and artists to the ones you are currently listening to? That feature has a lot to do with human and technology working together.

Studies are claiming to be able to figure out exactly when and why people are skipping specific songs. But, as far as sourcing goes, it’s still about person-to-person relationships and recommendations. However, the way that we do these things has changed over time. Curation is still the most important part of all of this; we just need to dial it in a little more.

The history of the music industry is an important piece of any music education or online music education. What many might not realize is how early folk artists heavily influenced the modern music industry in ways you wouldn’t expect. It began with mobile recorders traveling to find otherwise undiscovered talents.

Reebee Garofalo talks about a division in the music industry and that there was a carriage trade, as he called it. What he meant by that was a very upscale market for music and a cracker barrel trade, which essentially is a downscale market for music. There were sections of the music industry that really catered to this sort of downscale market, and they sought out, essentially, the sound of the common folk or folk music.

What were the songs that eventually made it onto the records? Entrepreneurs like Ralph Peer crossed the country with mobile recorders in an attempt to find hillbilly artists and blues artists to record. These were local singers and songwriters who would not have been known to the outside world otherwise.

As one example, Ralph Peer was the first person to record Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter family.

Hillbilly songs and sounds later became known as country or country and western. Two other towering figures of this time were John and Alan Lomax. They were folklorists who managed to record lots and lots of blues tunes from all over the country.

John and Alan Lomax discovered artists like Lead Belly. Alan Lomax was later very much a patron and supporter of Woody Guthrie. Alan Lomax taught a lot of these songs to a young man named Pete Seeger, who then, in turn, mentored somebody named Bob Dylan. There is a genealogy of popular music that can be traced back to the work of these early field recording music entrepreneurs.

At the beginning of each semester in this music education class, we have the students write down all of their favorite performances and why they were their favorite performances. Then, we have them write down all their least favorite performances and why those are their least favorite performances. And then we have these tools to look at for the rest of the semester that really shape what we think is good and what we think is not so good about certain performers.

Before you go on stage, you should be able to look at this list and say, “Oh, well, I’m not going to not care about what I’m doing,” or “I’m not going to be off key when I’m performing,” or “I’m not going to just stand there and look at my feet.” If these were things we didn’t like about other people, then we shouldn’t do them ourselves.

One of those qualities I see year after year is that students don’t like it when the person doesn’t feel into it. What we want to focus on is really getting lost in your music and what can make you do that. Some people need the music to be really loud on stage. Create that for yourself. Tell the sound engineer you need it louder.

Some people say, “I don’t want to hear myself that much. It takes me out of it.” Then, turn yourself down on the monitors. These are all things that we learn so that we can really feel as lost as we can be on that stage and in the music and exactly where we want to be in the music industry.

As producers, one of the most important jobs we have in music is to preserve an artist’s voice. This is done by maintaining or exposing the idiosyncratic nature of a particular artist’s voice. This could be their physical voice or the voice of their message. An artist is the last person to know what they are all about. So often, in a creative sense, the people around the artists understand them before they understand themselves. It’s our jobs, as producers, to keep them in a place that is representing what the artist wants to represent.

The Voice of an Artist Is Very Complex

An artist’s voice, their inflection of speech, and the timbre of sound coming from their throat all contribute to the sounds that the microphones pick up. These are just a few of the many small pieces of music that people can be sensitive to hearing. The average listener isn’t even aware of the sounds that they are sensitive to. We do our best to help the artist express all of these small things through pronunciation, timbre, vocal-through phasing, and even vocabulary.

Timbre

Timbre is defined as the combination of elements that make a sound. For example, if you take all the harmonic and amplitude aspects of sound and combine these components, you will get a unique sound. Timbre is the composition of all the elements that make sound resonate in your ear.

Throat-singers can perform with different timbres of their voice by doing various actions. These variations come from the way the singers open their mouths, the way they clench their jaws, the way they open or close their throats, or the way they breathe. This is similar to the way that we yell “help, police!” versus the way we say “I love you.” When you cry for help, the timbre of your voice lets people know that something is wrong. When you tell someone you love them, the timbre of your voice lets them know that they mean something to you. Believe it or not, there is an entirely different set of harmonics coming out. We are reacting to those harmonics subconsciously. We don’t know that they are harmonics or amplitudes of overtones, but it is what’s happening.

Phrasing

Phrasing has to do with how a vocal artist or counter melody from an instrumentalist plays a passage or theme. Is the melody marked staccato or legato? It’s how they release the rhythms with accents and stresses. Vocal phrasing can alter how we understand the narrative or story that the singer is singing, rapping, or talking.

Think of the way that Sia sings the song “Chandelier:”

I’m gonna live like tomorrow doesn’t exist.
Like it doesn’t exist.

What I like the most about this is that it’s unpredictable. For example, sometimes Notorious B.I.G.’s sentences are long, and sometimes they are very short.

In the Notorious B.I.G song “Hypnotize,” he raps:

Dead right, if the head right, Biggie there ery’ night
Poppa been smooth since days of Underoos
Never lose, never choose to, bruise crews who
Do somethin’ to us (come on), talk go through us (through us)
Girls walk to us, wanna do us, screw us
Who us? Yeah, Poppa and Puff (hehe)

Paired with an instrumentalist and a solo, vocal phrasing can express urgency. It can direct a sense of legato or relaxation with many different emotions. It is also incredibly important how vocal phrasing affects rhythm by hitting or dancing around a downbeat.

Cadence

Different rappers are known by their cadences, and this is really how they dance around the rhythms. Rhythms are going to be the quarter notes: “tack, tack, tack, tack.” What is the rapper doing around those quarter notes? How are they stretching or truncating their lines and phrases, so we get both narrative and sense of motion?

Here is an example by rapper MF Doom called “That’s That:”

Cornish hens switchin’ positions, auditionin’ morticians
Saw it in a vision, ignorin’ prison
Ignoramuses enlist and sound dumb
Found ’em drowned in cows dung, crowds flung

MF Doom will have entire bars that rhyme. The entire setup bar of this song rhymes every syllable in the punch line bar. That is incredible.

Everyone is fighting for attention right now, because there is so much music. It’s all accessible. If you have any kind of access to a streaming service, you can listen to millions and millions of songs and so many different types of artists. So, it’s really hard to market music simply to get someone’s attention or simply to have somebody pay attention. It’s interesting, because on the one hand you have fewer gatekeepers actually getting your music out there.

If you want to publish music, you have fewer barriers to overcome. But, on the other hand, because everything is so accessible, it’s hard to really market that and have not only writers and music journalists pay attention to that music, but also consumers — having people really figure out what your aesthetic is, what your reason is to pay attention to you.

It’s difficult. It’s something that those who market music, those who position music, are increasingly trying to figure out. Social media is incredibly important to what we do. It’s interesting, because 10 years ago you would be in a situation where you had to pay attention to Twitter, you had to pay attention to Facebook. Now, in this year, you have to position articles, videos, anything really that you produce, with social media in mind. You have to understand how a tweet should function when thinking about linking to a cover story, linking to a video, linking to an essay or a news story.

You have to think about Facebook, and especially Instagram, as Instagram becomes increasingly more important. You have to embrace the role that social media plays as a gatekeeper. And obviously that extends to search and optimizing your stories or your content for search engines. But social media is such a key component of what we do, because it’s a means of discovery, more than anything. If you want to have something read, it needs to be able to be shared. And the way that happens now is social media.

Coming from the artist side, digital editorial coverage and social media is massive. Social media is the easiest way for you to get in front of millions of people without having to be on the radio, without having to physically go places to play these giant arenas and things like that. It’s not easy to reach this amount of people on social media, but it is possible. There are platforms like YouTube that have broken huge stars, Justin Bieber. And Vine, which is no longer an app, played a big part in Shawn Mendes’ career.

Social media is helping these artists grow, and it helps them connect with people, whether you’re a new artist connecting with new people or a huge artist connecting with people on a day-to-day basis. I feel like I know some really big people because I see what they do on their Instagram stories every day. With digital content and articles and stuff like that, the process of picking up a magazine to find new artists is very, very different. I used to find artists by the small lines in CD catalogs.

It was, like, “Thank you so and so,” and that’s how I used to find new artists or people I didn’t know. But now we have things like “related artists” on Spotify and these playlists. You can be on “new music Friday” and you could have hundreds of thousands of plays just being a new artist, if you get that great placement on a playlist. So, there’s a lot of new aspects to the music industry with Spotify, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, especially.

And just like with all these different blogs and stuff, you can find new artists and you can help cultivate those artists with all this new digital content.

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.

When you’re planning to perform music in a show, one of the most important things is being able to sketch your performance ideas beforehand and then bring them to life on stage. To achieve this, it can be really helpful to get a look at the stage you’re going to be performing on and then build something from what you see.

Everyone can draw at least a little bit. Some people don’t think that they can, but the truth is, even they can draw a stick figure, and that can be enough to create your vision. One workshop I do with my students is having them look at the stage in front of them and then sketch out the ideas that they have for a show that would use it. This really helps them to envision ideas that they may have thought impossible—but in reality, they’re entirely possible.

It’s important that we look at a blank piece of paper the same way that we look at a stage: as a canvas for us to experiment. The blank stage is a canvas for us to create our wildest dreams—the blank stage can be anything that we want it to be. So, what are your wildest dreams? I want you to think about not only what you’re capable of in your performance next week but also what you’re capable of in the performance that you’ll be doing at Madison Square Garden.

When it comes to using sketching in music education, one thing I really try to help my students understand is that there’s always something that you can afford to help create your vision. For example, you can get sheets on Amazon for only $12. You can color them with paint that you get from the hardware store for $5. These things can help your show have a more defined and original fingerprint, which your audience will appreciate. By the end, they will be thinking, “you did all of this work for me, and I will forever love you for that.”

Keep in mind that online music education can go a long way towards giving you the tools that you need to find success in the music industry.

Many artists are collaborating with multimedia artists at this stage in our industry to create a truly unique and larger-than-life experience. It is critical to attempt to create something that has never existed before.

“The biggest thing about collaborating is completely removing your ego. When you remove your ego, you allow yourself to open different chapters that you may not know about that the person next to you may know about,” says Kendrick Lamar.

“I’m going to draw. You’re hearing the music and you’re flowing from your head to your hand,” states Shantell Martin.

“This is why we see many artists collaborating with different people—developing a new world to venture into, such as Beyonce, Sia, and Charli XCX. I try to make a lasting impression on my students by showing them videos of these performances actively including online music education,” continues Kendrick Lamar.

Sia, for example, works with a different visual artist for each show. This exposes her work to new communities and the creation of others in the music industry. And this type of audience sharing is the direction we see our music industry taking. So we must consider what we can gain from collaborating with others to build these relationships in music.

Playback is, in my opinion, one of the most important trends in technology right now in terms of performance. We’ve known about playback for a long time. It started with tape machines, then people in the “Talking Heads” film.

The very first song is on a boombox, which he plays. Then we moved on to CDs, minidiscs, DVDs, and everything else.

However, we now have multi-track playback equipment that greatly assists performers in being able to separate the tracks so that they may be observed blended as well. Triggering these playback devices is an art form in and of itself present in music education.

So there are a plethora of new controllers on the market from virtually every firm that will assist us in genuinely imagining movement within this procedure. As a result of this triggering, some people are developing dance performances.

Another example is the use of video. I know many artists who utilize their videos as the primary character in their performances. Anohni, for example, is someone with whom you’ll be watching an experimental video series. Off-screen, the singing is pleasant.

Sia’s Coachella performance was a prime illustration of this. Right now, the emphasis isn’t so much on the vocalist. It is concentrated on a broader presentation. We’ve seen this with holograms, such as Tupac. Sophie, an electronic DJ who uses lights. People are creating an experience rather than focusing attention on themselves. And I want my pupils to develop their ideas about how to use these multimedia tools.

Technology has drastically altered performance. On stage, you may now generate the sound of an orchestra with just one track. You may also trigger such things using a variety of instruments. Some of it is on display. Some of it is being performed on a saxophone and a piano.

At this point, we can make any item emit any sound. We may also experiment with images, videos, holograms, and costumes integrating MIDI. One person on stage can produce a louder sound than 20 people.

“Give you love, give you love, give you love, give you love, give you love, give you love, give you love, give you love. Oh, my goodness, you’re the one.” It’ll never be finished because the goals are so lofty. Emily Wells sings, “Mama’s gonna give you love.”

This is huge for electronic musicians. We can do everything ourselves, which can be financially beneficial to the artist’s economy.

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).