Music Business and Management
Course 12: The Creative Process

While this is not a course in music production, it is worth spending some time to get to know the process of creating the product. The better you understand each phase of making music professionally, the better equipped you can be at making a meaningful connection with the artists you will be working with. And the more you know about the process, the more you will know about how to promote, market, and sell their product.

You’ll learn how a song is first created, and how a songwriter takes inspiration and creates the melodies, harmonies, and lyrics. In some cases, that’s as far as the songwriter goes, leaving it up to the producer or arranger to finish the vision. If the songwriter is writing the song for themselves, they’ll be involved in the production of the song as well as the demo and recording.

Course 12 will cover the demo stage, where the song takes form, many versions are recorded, and the artist or band may even perform the song live to get a feel for how an audience might react to it. During the recording stage, an audio engineer is brought in for fine-tuning. This is often the most expensive part of the process because more people are involved and you’ll need to rent a professional studio, potentially a backing band, backup singers if need be, and so on.

Once completed, the song is then sent to marketing, distribution, and sales–that’s where you come in potentially. Your assignment for this course is to create a schedule for a two-month-long rollout of a new song, including the production period, post-production timeline, as well as marketing and release date.