A lot of what is taught is related to mental health. You have to stay sane and strong if you want to approach this industry. You can begin to feel alone out here. As much as we have a community and a family, and a tribe, we have to make sure that we’re safe and we have to make sure that we’re well.

“It doesn’t make you weak to ask for help,” says Billie Eilish. “It doesn’t make you weak to ask for a friend to go to a therapist. It shouldn’t make you feel weak to ask anyone for help. And you should be able to ask anyone for help. And everyone has to help someone if they need it. Make sure to stay in tune with yourself because it really will benefit you in the end.”

Suz Paulinski explains, “I work with music professionals of all types – mostly musicians, but sometimes managers, label executives, and producers. I help them really take a moment to just step back, hit pause, and really think about where they’re headed, why they’re headed there, and if they need to make some adjustments.” She continues, “There is still a taboo, especially in this industry, about therapy. And I have to be grateful for my boss…for pointing out that I needed to go seek help. I was not well and I was just really overwhelmed.”

I had been in therapy for 10 years before I decided to be a mindset coach. I realized what a stigma it was. So, I just started kind of asking questions. I would meet with an artist and say, “Well, how’s this working for you?” And I’d let them come to their own conclusions that what they were doing wasn’t working for them and just kind of point out how even though they were hustling and were grinding – we were doing everything that the music industry tells us to do – it wasn’t working.”

Music Education: The Role of Substance Abuse in the Industry

How can we manage substance abuse and self-sabotaging?

“You know,” Paulinski says, “I like to point out to both musicians and the music professionals behind the scenes, a lot of the managers and the producers – listen, I’ve walked into studios before. I’ve seen the drugs. I’ve seen what people do.”

There was this wonderful interview with Missy Elliot. She was so honest about getting into that studio for the first time sober and not producing a record high. She didn’t even know if she’d have it. She believed that magic was in the pot that she was smoking, and she thought that without it she’s not going to have her edge. She realized, “oh my god, no.” She had so many more hits and so much success being in the studio sober. So a lot of artists feel – and even other professionals, too – that the drug is what’s causing their talent when really it’s just the drug maybe allowing you to relax and do that. You can relax with meditation, with yoga, and just finding your confidence. If you can work on that, you don’t need the drugs, and you’ll work better. You’ll enjoy it. You’ll remember it a bit more.

“And really, what I say to artists,” according to Paulinski, “We’re not in the rock ‘n’ roll era anymore because you don’t have a label doing everything for you. You have to do the legwork, and you have to be focused to do it. I always say to them, ‘If you want that rock and roll life, then I really hope you have a day job during the week to make up for it because you’re not going to get very far. It will be a very destructive hobby. And that’s all it’s going to be.’”

But if you want to be the Macklemore and Chance the Rapper and make it on your own – you know, they run a business. Like, they are CEOs. And so you have to show up and you have to put in the work. And in order to have that focus and that energy level, you gotta cut the crap.”

A lot of the struggles that entrepreneurs, in general, face is just the emotional roller coaster. “And I mean,” Paulinski continues, “I go through it everyday. I have a successful business. I pay my bills. It’s the only work that I do. But I have a panic attack or stress, you know – balled up on the couch crying at least once a week. And that’s par for the course. That’s just how it is. I don’t stay in the rut nearly as long as I used to and I don’t get as deep in it as I used to. It’s like a real roller coaster. If you’re on a roller coaster and you know that dip is coming, you can brace yourself. And then before you know it, you’re on the upswing. It’s the same thing emotionally. If you can tell yourself, ‘Ok, this sucks right now, but I got here pretty quickly so I can get back up pretty quickly.’ So tomorrow’s a new day.”

Focus on Making Progress, Not Perfection

If you can just remind yourself that it wasn’t always like this and that it’s not usually the same problem. You’re making progress if you’re not crying about the same thing over and over again. Then, you know you’re at least making progress.

Paulinski says, “I think the thing that made me a successful entrepreneur is, I’m like, ‘bring the mistakes on.’ Like, I own my hot mess-ness when it happens. I’ve done presentations online where all the tech falls apart. You just got to laugh your way through it and then say, ‘Alright, now that it’s over, what can I do differently?’ And so when you’re making mistakes, just know you’re getting to your goal faster because you’re going to learn those lessons. If you constantly – I call that perfection paralysis, where you’re so afraid to take action. That’s why my first business failed. We just kept tweaking and tweaking and tweaking. We didn’t produce anything that the public got to see because we were so afraid that we’d mess up.”

You just got to roll up your sleeves and do it. In this industry, in particular, if you think about the film industry, they’re creatives too. But the actors get rejected playing somebody else and reading somebody else’s lines. Musicians, when they get rejected, it’s usually if they’re writing their own songs from somewhere deep down inside. The vulnerability is just a lot heavier and it hits a lot more, which is why there’s so much substance abuse. A lot of what they do is “fraud talk,” where we say, “Why did I even think I could do this? Or you see somebody else get ahead, and you say, well, then they took my spot.”

That doesn’t exist. There is no true competition in this industry because everybody is so different. Learn to ride the coaster, and the minute you hear fraud talk, call up a friend who always compliments you or gives you a boost. Spend time with people who make you smile. It’s been proven in science that smiling can actually – just the muscles and the energy and the hormones going through you – will actually change your mindset. So take a step back, walk away from whatever is making you feel really crappy that day, and get yourself in the right mindset. That’s why it’s so important because that will help you keep going. You’re not going to avoid the bad days. You’re just not. So embrace it and keep going.

Artists and repertoire (A&R) professionals exist to take care of the artists and their repertoire. That means you are making sure that they make the proper records. You got to have an ear musically to make the correct records in any music industry.

The game has changed a lot, and artists are getting signed because they have many followers. A&R has become a popularity contest. The guys doing A&R usually don’t deserve their jobs. They got their jobs because they were homies with somebody at the record company. Also, they know how to find YouTube numbers.

If that’s the case, it’s the reason when you pick up an album, you like two songs instead of enjoying the whole album anymore. Projects aren’t based on the entire package. They’re based on the two singles that they will try to push.

What’s happening with so many artists is they’re getting single deals. Yeah, you can make some money, but the record company is getting burned. It is because they’re not looking for whole albums anymore.

I would have to say hip-hip-hooray for the artist getting paid for your spins. It is preferable to wait until publishing clicks back Spotify paying quickly. It includes all the streaming money that’s there to be made. It’s a great time for artists now if they make great music. If they make great music, it isn’t even a record deal.

You don’t sell your music. No, it’s free. How do you make money? I’m on tour right now. I’m a touring artist. As the music grows, there are always better approaches of releasing. These can include visual albums, concerts, or broadways. There are many ways in which music moves amongst people. I feel like trying to force music into an album intended to be for-sale is obsolete.

There are guys making millions of dollars without selling records. Do you know what I’m saying? Some guys are giving away their albums and making millions of dollars like they sold albums. Some guys are becoming so crucial with their music that they’re giving it away for free. At some point, a kid won’t equate being a real fan unless they’re buying an artist’s merchandise. Some kids will bootleg an artist album in any way they can, from streaming, stripping, downloading, or finding it somewhere. They will not feel like they’re attached until they buy all merchandise.

There are many ways that artists can get right to it, especially without a record company that the game is super-duper wide open. It’s also super wide open for bad music. You had an A&R that had 2,000 tapes on their desk back in the days. They listened to the 2,000 tapes and picked the four that were good. You didn’t have to hear the 1,996 terrible tapes. Now you got to listen to it all.

Considering your attention span is down to eight seconds, you might have something unique in front of you. Then, you don’t hear it because you’ve been going through so much bad music. Once you get to that, you don’t give it a chance. It is because your attention span is gone. You don’t have the time to sit around going through all the bad music again.

We are in a new age, where the artist is in control. The days of finding a manager to save you and get you a deal are gone. You must figure out all the business and make music. It would be best if you found yourself in a position where you’ve been able to generate enough interest and income. You do this to get a bigger fish on the line, to help catapult your career to the next level. Any music education, regardless of it being a physical class or online music education must teach artists to be authentic and independent.

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.

For anyone taking part in music education or trying to forge a career in the music industry, it’s important for students or artists to figure out how to think about themselves, and to formulate a plan for the way that they’re going to connect with an audience. So, first and foremost, they need to understand that self-awareness is going to be the key to their success.

In some ways, we have to start from this self-awareness and confidence-building and ability to see your own faults, and also to see all of the possibilities that you have within yourself before you push yourself forward and find your outlet. Finding your intention as a performer is really about looking into yourself and realizing what you’re capable of.

Personally, for some of my music students, I like to have them fill out personality quizzes. The reason for this is that in reality, they allow you to answer all of these questions about yourself that you might not have thought about otherwise. Some people figure out that they’re people pleasers. Some find out that they’re introverts. And the good news is, none of these traits keep you from being a good performer. All of it is really about figuring out what both your weaknesses and your strengths are, and playing to them.

After we figure out our personalities, we can then figure out what our intention is as an artist. This means answering questions like, what do we want to give over to our audience? Do we want them to be hopeful? Do we want them to be introspective? Do we just want them to enjoy themselves? Are we just all about creating a conceptual artistic experience that is abstract in nature? All of these questions are things we figure out when looking at our intention as a performer.

One of the best ways to go about taking these personality quizzes, I find, is to do them in a group or a class, and fill them out together. Then, everybody shares the results with each other, which can sometimes be pretty shocking. Oftentimes, people might take the quiz thinking that they’re an extrovert, and then discover to their surprise that they’re actually an introvert. These kinds of realizations can help people determine who they want to be as an artist.

Some people might find out that they’re a people pleaser, and wonder if that’s a negative thing. Some people might realize that they’re an extrovert, but not actually feel like one. Overall, these personality quizzes are a great way for people to get to know each other, and they can also help us discover the ways that we can best connect to an audience.

If you have a desire to learn more about how to discover yourself as an artist and how to best connect with an audience, consider giving online music education a try.

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.

Working in the music industry, a common occurrence for me is that an artist comes in and says, “I got 50,000 plays on Spotify,” or “I got all these streams on Apple Music.” And I’ll say, “Great, so are you making money?” And they’ll say, “I don’t know, am I?” The answer is yes, they’re making money. But without properly knowing their revenue streams and knowing where the money comes from and where it’s going, they have no way to collect it.

Part of your practical music education involves making sure that your song has direction when it comes to the revenue that’s coming in. When you think about revenue streams in the music industry, think about where the money is earned. There’s an entity that collects that money for you and delivers it to you, or to a publisher, or to a label on your behalf. I call it the “armored car model.”

Who is that delivery system that’s collecting money from your song and delivering it to you? In the case of a traditional record deal, where an artist is signed to a label, the label collects the money from record sales for you and delivers it to you per your royalty agreement. That deal is the same for labels of all sizes, whether it be an independent label or a major one like Warner Brothers.

When a song or an album is duplicated, multiple copies are made to be sold. There’s a fee that’s generated called a mechanical royalty. That is the money that a record company must pay to duplicate, which dates back to the old publishing days when song sheets were duplicated. That’s how songwriters made their money, and it’s very similar today.

There’s a company called the Harry Fox Agency that collects those mechanical royalties, and they’re the armored car in the model mentioned above. And after they collect those mechanical royalties, they deliver them to a publisher, or if you’re self-published, to you directly. And currently, that rate is 9.1 cents per song. So, for example, if you have a platinum-selling album with 10 songs on it, you have 9.1 cents, times 10 songs, times a million dollars. That’s a nice chunk of change.

One of the other ways that songs generate money is through performance. When a song is on the radio — the traditional terrestrial radio we call a radio station — that song generates a royalty. That’s called a performance royalty. The armored car that collects that money is a PRO, or performance rights organization, like SESAC, BMI, or ASCAP. They collect that money, and they deliver it to your publisher, or if you’re self-published, to you.

The royalty rate does fluctuate, and it’s fractions of pennies. However, it does add up, especially with something like a big pop song on Top 40 radio that usually crosses over to other formats. A Beyoncé song, for example, could generate a million dollars just from being played on the radio. There’s a fact to motivate you as you continue your online music education!

In the music industry, when it comes to trying to get traditional press for what you’re working on, a lot of artists make one of two common mistakes. The first is to get an email list of all these music journalists, essentially spam them, and just hope that one of those emails gets their attention. Doing so isn’t a very good idea because it can give you a bad reputation. But more importantly, if you took the time to actually just learn a lot about a few specific journalists, you could be a lot more detailed. That’s a much smarter personal strategy.

The other mistake that a lot of us make is that we start out shooting a little bit too high. For example, if I’m a brand-new act, I don’t have a lot of fans yet, but I would love to be on Pitchfork or in The New York Times. That’s shooting really high, and it might not happen.

What you can do, though, before you start choosing who you want to reach out to, is to create a map of what you want to achieve and where you want to be at a certain point in time. For example, you might say to yourself, “In the next year, I’d like to be on Pitchfork.” Then, you can think about what sources are smaller and accessible to you, sources that Pitchfork is maybe getting story ideas from, and map your path to them. That could be a shortcut to getting to that top source, rather than trying to start there.

One way to do this is by looking at the digital breadcrumbs left on the internet. A really amazing tool is Google’s Timeline. Something I always recommend is that if you find an article in a big outlet like The New York Times or Pitchfork, that’s breaking an artist, you can look at the date when it came out, put that into your Google Timeline search, and search for that artist to see who was talking about them before the article came out. Nine times out of 10 you’ll find that there were other blogs, people on Twitter, people who were talking about them before the story went to that big outlet, even when the big outlet takes credit for discovering them.

So, I recommend that you take note of the smaller outlets that don’t have millions of readers but are showing up in those search results. Then, do it again with another article by the same writer. What you’ll start to see is that every time they’re breaking a new artist, there are these smaller sources that keep coming up shortly beforehand on the timeline search.

What this shows you is that these are probably places where those big outlets are getting story ideas. I recommend that you start your press path on a map where you’re only taking the time to reach out and connect with the outlets and journalists that could get you to those bigger ones.

By exploring the world of online music education, you can learn much more about getting recognized by outlets and journalists and building your career in the music industry. Don’t wait any longer to start getting the music education that you want and need.

A question that’s asked often is, “How does a music producer get paid?” That answer has shifted dramatically in the music industry the last few years because, historically, record producers got paid based on album sales. They received a royalty anywhere between 3% and 5% based upon their stature and the number of sales that have been made on the record.

That model has changed because sales have decreased. Now, producers get paid a percentage of income. They get a percentage of licensing if they haven’t written the song. They may also get a percentage, in some instances, of any kind of endorsement deals that come out of the song and the success of that song.

That being said, because producers aren’t making the same money and have the same revenue streams, oftentimes, producers will ask for publishing on songs they didn’t write. If you’re in a situation where you’re not able to pay a producer or a producer is producing for you for free, that’s often a great tradeoff. You give a small percentage of the publishing where the producer gets a piece of the songs that they’ve worked on without accepting money. But if a producer hasn’t written those songs and the producer is being paid for their work, asking for publishing is a definite red flag. Make note of this as you continue your online music education.

The first records were essentially documents of performances. It was essentially just a matter of sticking a microphone in front of a singer or a band and recording that performance, then preserving it and playing it back.

However, as technology began to mature and get a little more sophisticated, some record producers began to use that technology to influence and shape the way that music sounded on a record. An early pioneer was Les Paul, who worked with record cutters, record lathes, and early tape machines to do things like sound-on-sound recording and overdubbing, as he did with Mary Ford’s “How High the Moon.” This was the beginning of a whole new era for the music industry.

About 10 years later, a young record producer by the name of Phil Spector literally used the acoustics and electronics in the studio to create what he called a wall of sound in the record “Be My Baby” by The Ronettes.

The mid-1960s were when the idea of the record producer really started to mature. George Martin, working with The Beatles, used all kinds of electronic trickery to make their recordings sound really, really interesting. Whether it was the use of tape loops, interesting new musical instruments, or placement of microphones, everything was used to shape the sound of music.

Currently, music education, including online music education, offer music producers even more ways to play with sound and create new and interesting effects for recordings.

As a professional in the industry, I’ve learned that whether they’re DJs, dramatics or bands, they need the ability to communicate with a production staff and tell them what’s going on, when it’s going on and where it’s going to happen. And the stage plot is an industry device that’s critical to that communication.

It’s the visual means of communicating between parties who will work together but aren’t with each other currently. Who in the performance is going to go where? How should their equipment be laid out? Essentially, the general use of space and the technology layout inside of that space.

Better Stage Plot Knowledge in Music Education Means Better Music Show Productions

The better those stage plots are, the more accurate they are, the more information they have about the performance, and the better the overall production will be. You’re allowing the artists and the production staff who make the show happen to communicate and meet each other’s expectations effectively.

As much as I’ve used all these pioneering technologies in very different ways and spaces they weren’t really intended, I’ve drawn from VR spatial capture, 3D modeling, and old-school architectural approaches and blend those together when I make my stage plots.

They enable me to have a top-down, 2D, floor-plan-based discussion with a technical team, then take that flat thing and look in three dimensions at scale before I have a production conversation with the artist. Visually, they can see that same space rendered in front of them in real-time.

Students in Online Music Education Would Benefit From Stage Plot Knowledge

I can drop in the staging, musicians, et cetera, and I’m having an active conversation over the visual space and place for which the artist is creating their work. It becomes a very powerful tool.

When all those ideas are out of their head, I’m able to weave that back into the stage plot, flatten that back down, and share the updates with the whole squad. Everything maintains its up-to-date-ness.

Stage plots are certainly supercritical to creative, professional work. I think the new technologies and tools that are available are not usually exploited to make them as multi-dimensional and as rich as they could be. But I love doing it all the time.