One of the catchphrases I use with students in many of my classes is “Make sure you’re possessed by your music every time you step on stage.” I kind of coined that term while watching “Stop Making Sense” by the Talking Heads, which is a 1984 live music performance film that features The Talking Heads.

David Byrne from the very first song is really just possessed by the music. You can see it in his body movements, facial expressions, voice performance and instrumentation. Every part of his performance reveals a person who is completely embedded in their music and their process.

Music Education

I use that film as a teaching tool in not only the persona class but in classes throughout the semester because it really focuses well on stage setup, instrumentation, sequencing and collaboration. The film displays literally every aspect of the music industry and associated careers that we cover in classes. An online music education can reveal to you more about opportunities in the music industry beyond this topic. A formal education can help you narrow down your career choice and consider everything required of you to achieve success.

In recent years, the biggest thing that has happened to the music business has been social media. And streaming, of course. Everything’s changed. Streaming music, when I was in school, we talked about this. We knew that it was happening. It was just a question of what the music business was going to do about it.

So, while waiting for the answer, musicians needed to find other means of income. I love the fact that you can be an independent artist — for real. Being able to own your distribution. Being able to own your narrative of your brand. Being able to own everything that surrounds the ecosystem of how you make money. That is important. If you’re an artist, you’re going to want to do that.

Granted, you can phone it in and have the label be a sort of consigliere for everything related to you. But that’s not the best way to do it. The label is just a big bank with a marketing team and a PR team. With the right capital, you can do all those things on your own. And you can have your own teams that you hand-select — teams that get your brand and get your vision. And you can have a lot of success doing these things on your own.

This is what Beyoncé figured out. This is what Chance the Rapper figured out. This is what Wu-Tang Clan figured out. This is what all of these huge names in music have figured out for themselves.

One of the biggest ways that the music industry has changed has been the democratization of the industry for the little guy, as well as the older talent that’s out in the world and trying to reclaim the narrative of their music.

If you’re interested in using music education to learn more about finding success as an independent artist, but aren’t sure you have the resources or time, consider giving online music education a try. It may be exactly what you need to get a jump start toward the career that you desire.

All of the concepts around authenticity inside of yourself also relate to your authenticity as a community. Your story is a big part of this, as your story helps you find your community and, as my colleague Michael Thurber says, your tribe. In life, we move along from one career to the next. We move along from one day to the next. During all of this, who are the people that we reach out to all the time? Those people are our community.

The final project for my class, “Creating a Compelling Live Performance, Part Two.” is centered around booking a show, inviting friends and creating an evening-length performance. The most important part of the show is figuring out how many people can attend and what venue will make the best setting. My students really have to question who their community is and how many people will be willing to come out. This practice can be really challenging for some of them, because it can be difficult to know how many people—how many friends and family members—are willing to pay money to watch them perform live.

For me, developing a community is all about finding the ways in which we unite together. They can be historical, political or emotional, but all of these ways that we are self-aware within our community can bring us together closer and closer.

In my case, it has really been political, finding a connection that we are all driving towards. For example, feminism was, for me, a huge way to create and maintain a community, because it led me to people who wanted to be smart, academic and intellectual, and also have fun. Together, we developed a sound as a community and set up shows with each other’s bands. More and more people started showing up because they needed it. They needed this historically. They needed a place to come together. So, let’s create a space where we want to come together.

To learn the skills and concepts for creating a community in the music industry, both standard music education and online music education are great places to begin.

A lot of times in the music industry, we think that the only way to market ourselves as artists is to always position ourselves from the standpoint of music, and nothing else. We tend to think that our fans must only be looking for people who make music, and that just isn’t true. One of my favorite examples is a singer-songwriter named Eileen Quinn. Very few people are familiar with her work.

However, since the 1980s, she has sold hundreds of thousands of records. She has done very major partnerships, all without the help of the traditional music industry. And all of this stemmed from one clear decision that was really antithetical to how most musicians would think, which was choosing to make music about boats. She wrote her songs about boats. I believe she even recorded some albums while on boats. Obviously, it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but that’s just fine. It did, however, have a niche element to it.

For example, in her song, “The Anchoring Dance,” Eileen Quinn sings: “Up on the foredeck, see them prance when they do, do, do, do the anchoring dance.”

And so, rather than sending her tapes or CDs at the time to “Rolling Stone,” or “Paste,” or the places we associate with music, she went the other way, and sent her stuff to yachting weekly magazines, and started doing partnerships with boating companies. Most likely, the first question you’d ask yourself is, how many singer-songwriters are also mailing their stuff to yachting magazines?

Probably, she was immediately able to stand out as completely different from the other kinds of solicitations they were getting, right? So, there is one way that you can immediately differentiate yourself from your competition in terms of other artists you’re similar to, by not necessarily going for traditional musical press. And eventually, there will be partnership opportunities.

For Eileen Quinn, for example, for everyone who bought a certain kind of boat, they also received one of her CDs. So, by knowing who the audience is that’s going to love your stuff, there’s most likely something you can look at, whether it be in your lyrics, where you’re from, or something in your background, that you’d be comfortable utilizing.

These are all opportunities to find your initial audience in a way that doesn’t have to only rely on describing yourself as a musician. I would definitely encourage you to look inward at what you’re doing and ask yourself, is there a niche that you’re comfortable utilizing about yourself that will help people find your music?

Again, these are all starting points. However, if you can figure that part out about yourself and find some success there, you can then move on to the next level and make your way to the more traditional musical press. Overall, though, finding that niche or unique trait about yourself or your work can really be a great starting point.

You can learn much more about defining yourself as an artist, connecting to your audience, and how the music industry operates, with online music education. With the online method as an option, getting your quality music education doesn’t need to be a hassle or prohibitively expensive.

For musicians who are taking time off from touring and other projects, performing in the studio is a great revenue stream. Now, how do artists get paid when they’re in the studio? Oftentimes, artists get a day rate. That means they’ll pick, for example, $100 per day, or in major instances, $500, $1,000, or even $2,500 for the day. They record as much as they can get done for the day.

Artists can get paid for the time they put in at the studio. Many times, these artists are given a flat day rate. This rate may pay anywhere from $100 to $2,500, and artists will record all they can on that day.

The great thing about the day rate is that it is fixed. If a drummer contracts work for a $2,500 payday, then he gets paid that amount whether he performs on one track or ten. Studio work for a flat day rate is not something that is regaled to small or up and coming artists. Many “big time” artists are racking up time in the studio. This is a great way to have steady income as an artist.

When a singer takes a group of musicians on the road, the musicians in the act may get a flat weekly rate of between $250 and $5,000 per week. They often also have allowances for hotels and meals as well as a per diem rate. A well-liked and respected artist who is also versatile can make money – as much or more – than a touring musician.

If a drummer comes in and records five songs, they get their $2,500. Or if they record one song, they get their $2,500. And many big name artists are recognized studio musicians, who have played on many of the records you know and love. When you’re on the road, an artist normally pays their musicians a weekly rate, where they’re getting $200, $500, $5,000 a week, plus obviously, hotel and a small per diem. So if you are a well-liked and versatile artist, there’s a great model for you to make money performing in the studio, as well as a touring musician.

Online music education tells us that production companies have always been a tremendous asset to those in the music industry. Take for instance the presence of Berry Gordy. Using the Motown Model, Gordy would find an artist, bring him or her into the musical family at Motown, and then use the same sets of musicians and writers to write and record many of the hits of notable artists such as Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross, and a wealth of other Motown artists. This successful model still exists today.

However, musicians today seem to be participating in more collaborative projects. In this form of collective music, artists from various types of media will get together and collaborate on projects. Noted rapper Dr. Dre collaborated with other producers and sound artists to create multiple hits by breakout artist Eminem. Not only did he produce a number of Eminem’s songs, but he also took part in the music making process and he appeared in numerous Eminem videos. Artists are enjoying being creative in other ways in addition to working with other talented individuals.

Music education should include teaching artists about the entrepreneurship of the music business as well as how to improve upon their personal craft. All artists should learn how to think outside the box and how to build each other up so that they can make the best business decisions for themselves. Newer artists should learn the success of the Motown model just as they should learn about other methods of creating the superior sound of success. The Rockefeller model is another profitable method of creating successful music. Artists such as Kanye, Camron, and Beanie Sigel have all benefited from the use of the Rockefeller way.

We wanted to share our successful model with as many musicians as possible. This form of music education is free; it is simply knowledge that helps all artists. Musicians and artists should want to see each other thrive and develop a family atmosphere.

Another important part of the music business is one’s staff within the recording industry. Staff is highly important. without a dependable staff, artists have to not only worry about their creative element but also the business part of the music business. A knowledgeable staff that is appreciated is a staff that goes above and beyond for their artists.

All elements of the music business must work together if artists will truly leave a legacy. The ability to collaborate with others and a supportive staff contribute highly to the success of an artist and a recording label as well as those who work in the studio.

I highly recommend looking into finding ways to collaborate with like-minded people within your friend group or your artistic group. You’ll find that you’ll get people playing on your records, or you’ll get studio time in exchange for, perhaps, doing a photoshoot (if that’s something that you do). Look for opportunities to trade your skills for other people’s skills in order to further your project along.

Thinking orthogonally again, a really great trend that comes more from the technology world but is a great one to also bring into the music world is this concept called growth hacking. The overlying idea behind growth hacking is this sense of taking areas of marketing and creating things that we’ve always described as completely disparate things. For example, being in the studio, getting my message out, advertising, doing data analyses, looking at who is resonating with my stuff — we’ve traditionally thought of these as separate phases and that they each happen only once.

Growth Hacking in Music Education

Growth hacking says, “Not so fast.” That process can be cyclical and going on all the time. If I have enough songs and am putting out a song today, I can look at how people resonate with it and who’s resonating with it, and that can influence the song that I’m putting out next month.

And we just keep going around. It doesn’t have to be so isolated. A really great example of who’s done growth hacking well is anyone who makes a change to their product that sort of does the marketing for them. Remember this as you continue your online music education.

Before releasing work in the music industry, something really important I recommend doing is called “quant-based marketing.” It’s basically this idea of literally plotting out how you’re going to get the amount of traffic that you would like to get before ever releasing music. What we really want to avoid is putting out a song, and then first starting to market it, and getting a certain amount of traffic. A music journalist or an influencer wants to feel like they’re getting to cover something new.

The first thing to do is to establish a goal. Let’s say you want to put out a song soon. Say you would like in the first four weeks to get, say, 50,000 streams. That’s totally cool. We just need to reverse engineer how you’re going to get that. So what I’m going to do is pick a few outlets, influencers, things I either have relationships to or people that I’m starting to build relationships with, and I’m going to look at their audience size. If you’re a student at a university, a great place to start is to see if there’s a school paper or a school blog at your university, even if you’re in online music education. Would it be relatively easy to look up the editor’s email address and send them a message, asking to be covered in it?

Next, I would look up the traffic amount; what is the audience size of that school paper? In music education, you’ll find there’s a great website called SimilarWeb. Amazon has a tool called Alexa, where you can check the traffic counts of different websites. So, let’s say your school is getting 100,000 unique visitors a month. Basically, you can think of it like this: if the school paper writes an article about me, in theory, 100,000 people could be seeing that article about you and your song.

The next part of it is sort of trying to guess how many people would actually convert from that. So even though 100,000 people might see that article, maybe only 10% will click on it. So that gets us down to 10,000 people actually seeing your article. Now, they’re reading your article. The question is how many of those people are actually going to click on the song? That was your goal all along. Maybe 10% of that 10,000, so let’s say a thousand people end up being converted to your song if you’re featured in your school paper. That’s amazing.

We know that beforehand, even if our goal is 50,000 hits and we just got a thousand, we’re on our way. Now, we just need to do that five, six, ten, fifteen more times with different kinds of outlets. Doing all that before deciding what the release date is is huge, because then the release date comes, and you know what? You can sleep really soundly knowing you’re not guessing. You’ve pretty much guaranteed the amount of traffic you’re going to get. This is going to be a very big difference between artists that are really disheartened by the response they get versus ones who know that it’s starting at a certain point and hopefully grows from there.