Actual Musicians

More than ever before, musicians need to know the basics of the business. That’s why in collaboration with Learnbase’s Neil Hammond, the Actual Musician Essentials guides you step by step through a music business plan and marketing strategy; defining brand, image and products, and how to position talent within the fast-changing music business.
More than ever before, musicians need to know the basics of the business. That’s why in collaboration with Learnbase’s Neil Hammond, the Actual Musician Essentials guides you step by step through a music business plan and marketing strategy; defining brand, image and products, and how to position talent within the fast-changing music business.
Project info:
This project was a collaboration with Learnbase’s Neil Hammond. He came to us with a proposal and we decided to work with him and invests time and energy into building this site. It is the first of what we hope to be a number of different video-based sites. The big issue we recognized was that learning design for online can sometimes be ineffective. And engagement needs to happen throughout an elearning experience. In essence, it can be boring. That’s why this project was designed to do something different.

The idea was to develop a series of videos that were interactive and allowed people to respond as the video was playing two different events. It creates a continuous learning environment. As well, it really spoke to the varied way people learn. It also allowed people to learn what they needed to learn, in a manner that Neil calls “dim sum learning”.

Music was a good choice because it is a fast-changing landscape. Actual musicians.org has several unique music industry learning pathways. The first was actual musician essentials which explores the core business skills that today’s musicians need. It guides you step-by-step through a music business plan and marketing strategy as well as defining your brand image and products. In the site you go through a number of richly interactive video learning events. These help clarify where you’re heading with tasks as well as encouraging you to commit to real measurable actions. As the site develops you’ll also be of the share in the pooled experience of all of the contributors. Eventually we will be introducing Mozilla’s open badges, which is a unique certification system that we believe will have further uptake. The reason is that certification is helpful for continuing education. Stuff like open badges is an effective way to represent new thoughts around how to capture this continuous learning.

The site was developed in Drupal and used Mozilla’s Popcorn video system to display interactively the videos, and give you a chance to interact dynamically.

• Client: Learnbase
• Year: 2013

• Category: TV, Film and Media, Youth Engagement