Through the culmination of years of research and instruction, the online music education platform Soundfly has launched Headliners Club. Soundfly’s formula pairs high-quality content with dedicated mentorship by experienced musicians. The site eschews passive learning and business hacks, the dominant approach and subject matter of online instruction. Instead, it offers pinpointed targets, active involvement with a mentor, and new ideas tailored to the musician.
“Concretely, you outline a project or goal with your mentor,” explains musician, founder and CEO of Soundfly Ian Temple. “Let’s say you’re a producer and you dream of getting a song placed in a TV ad. We’ll pair you with a mentor who has done that before and set a concrete target for the next four weeks. Then the mentor breaks that goal up into weekly challenges you’ll take on to get there. You might analyze a song from a favorite ad of yours, adopt some of that song’s tricks, and then get consistent weekly feedback from your mentor on how to make your track reach the same level of professionalism.”
The service has established a set of best practices for mentors, focusing not on communication channels, streamed lectures, or collections of videos, but on benchmarks, teacher response times, and meaningful custom assignments. “There is some science behind the way we set things up,” notes Temple. “They are similar to what personal trainers use: small wins, constrained activities, regular and appropriate validation, and targeted specific feedback.”
The Headliners Club builds on Soundfly’s existing menu of free and tuition-based courses — ranging from orchestral arranging to Ableton-based production to indie tour booking — as well as its rich trove of content on the business and art of making music on its Flypaper blog.
For more, visit soundfly.com/headliners-club
