Author: Maarten Walraven-Freeling

1.2 billion children were learning at home instead of in their classrooms during the first phase of lockdowns last spring. This gave the e-learning market a 36.6% growth year-over-year in 2020. Overall, the global e-learning market size is projected to reach $374 billion by 2026. However, the global market size for online music learning is only projected to reach $143 million by 2025. It looks like there’s a massive gap as music education plays such a big role in many childrens’, and indeed people’s, lives. Where are the opportunities? Why haven’t they been capatilized on yet?

Digital disruption

Online educational technology disrupts, or has the potential to disrupt, offline music learning in two main practices:

1. Solo learning, or the amateur or professional musician who uses technology to further their knowledge of an instrument or music theory.
2. Teacher-based, interactive learning, or the more official branch of music education where one teacher has a class, or a single student, to teach a specific instrument or music theory.

In the first practice there is historically more focus on collaboration, but with the internet ‘solo-learning’ isn’t necessarity solo as it’s easily shared as user-generated content or across the user-base of a specific app.

Solo learning

There’s basically two ways to learn music on your own over the internet: 1) through video services that provide video training, teachers, and tools to learn an instrument; 2) apps that allow you to learn broadly, and often in a playful way, how to play an instrument.

Video services

Let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way: there’s a million – if not more – videos on YouTube that help you learn to play guitar, violin, piano, etc. There’s also a bunch of institutions who have created freely available music tutorials. The London Sinfonietta is one of them, see for example this video for Steve Reich‘s Clapping Music, which I invite you all to learn this week.

Now, of course, all this freely available stuff stands in the way of monetizing music e-learning. But there’s still plenty of options and a lot of room for growth.

Some of these services have been around for a while. For example, the imusic school, or iClassical Academy. Both of these platforms provide a raft of instruction videos and lean heavily into some of the advantages that online learning provides:

• It’s cost effective to use, paying a set subscription price to access the entire catalogue of videos
• Being available 24/7, these services allow students to learn at their own pace and at times they want
• It’s easy to switch it up. It you’re learning to play violin, for example, you can go back to a previous lesson with one click if you can’t remember something or want a primer to get back into it. Similarly, you have many teachers to choose from across various platforms
• Everyone learns differently and it’s easy to set your own pace, but there’s also a lot of different options in methodology

The two services mentioned above still focus on what can be called a traditional method of learning, albeit via video. But there’s so much more e-learning can offer. Take, for example, Primephonic‘s Ludwig, it’s “a 10-week digital crash course in classical music that involves a weekly podcast, bi-daily email lessons, [and] playlists on key composers and genres.” It doesn’t teach you an instrument, but the focus on audio over video and the variety of interactions position it closer to a gamified study environment than the time-honored teacher-to-student methods of an imusic school or iClassical Academy.

App-based learning

There are so many piano apps that searching for ‘piano’ in the App Store or Play Store will leave you flabbergasted. And there’s an almost similarly distorted amount of articles if you search Google for ‘best piano apps’. Looking at these apps there’s broadly two sets: 1) apps geared towards kids and which allow learning via the app or with a real piano (example: Piano Academy); 2) apps that involve elements of the video-based learning described above (example: Hoffman Academy).

Another example of the first set is Yousician, developed with a massive funding injection from the European Commission. It was part of the EC Horizon 2020 project aimed at the next billion musicians. The idea behind it was that by making music education available to basically everyone with a smartphone or tablet this would lead to growth across the industry due to more demand for lessons and instruments.

The key element with Piano Academy or Yousician’s piano app is that of play and gamification. This attracts and rewards users and has an interesting extension into popular culture through Netflix‘s Sing On karaoke competition. If you’ve not seen Sing On, it’s basically another variation on the talent competition format. Contestants sing wellknown songs as if they’re in a karaoke bar. Success, however, is measured through something called a vocal analyzer.

Viewers can follow along on screen how well each contestant is hitting the notes and timing their lyrics. The feature is so visually attractive that the show’s creators found that: “more than half of the people love watching the lower-third graphic.” Moreover, the feature resembles that of vocal-training apps like Yousician for singing. Gamification thus not only allows people to learn better, it attracts them towards music more broadly speaking. The more this will infuse pop culture, the more it will lead to people picking up an instrument and paying for fun lessons on the go.

Teacher-based, interactive learning

The pandemic forced music school across the world to go online. A good example comes from Manila, where Sounds Kradle had its teachers and students as well as working directly with schools to reach more children. As soon as the lockdown started, the team set up their own online learning environment: The Applied Music Platform.

Everything is done one-on-one with group lessons currently on hold. This is, of course, intense for the teachers, but it’s also worthwhile. In an interview with The Manila Times one of the founders says that: “we have a surprising 97 percent attendance rate every week.” And it’s that number that makes this type of teaching-based learning so interesting for both teachers and schools.

Paid tutoring and online classes

When it comes to schools, it involves tuition fees. For a large part, such fees pay for the physical schools and the infrastructure needed to support them. By going more direct and online, a lot of those costs can be cut making music lessons more affordable. Here, music education can expand on the steps taking by platforms like Udemy. There are already many courses available on Udemy that focus on music: from the guitar to Ableton music production. Of course, being on a platform like Udemy gives you scale and a ready audience looking to learn. But you don’t ‘own’ these students as you would those students that you may find in your local town or city. And as any creator can tell you, it’s always better to be in control of the flow, mainly of money.

EdTech for teachers

This is where the tech comes in. Just going back to last spring again, several major tech companies opened up their virtual classroom technologies to the public. Dingtalk, Alibaba’s e-learning platform, did it, so did Google and Microsoft. Google’s Classroom app is still today the most downloaded app in, for example, the UK App Store. In other words, the tech is there, teachers just have to use it. When they do, there’s three things to pay attention to:

• Bandwidth: not everyone has a good bandwidth connection and there’s plenty of ways to take this into account. For example by limiting video quality (or just focusing on audio), having fewer people per class (one-on-one has an extra benefit here), and using other features like an online whiteboard to explain things that don’t require video.
• Don’t just copy an offline class: research has shown that knowledge retention rates rise from 8-10% in offline learning environments to 25-60% in e-learning settings. The idea is that students can more easily learn at their own pace and thus pick up new information more quickly. When creating an virtual class, a teacher has to take this into account and keep it challenging. This also allows for a shorter class than an offline one would usually be. Expect more focused interaction in an online class coupled with some more ‘entertaining’ elements, such as flash cards or a more playful use of an instrument.
• Focus on process over curriculum: similar to what many bands and artists are doing with their recording process (e.g. Selena Gomez) there are opportunities to innovate when it comes to song-writing in online collaboration. One teacher had his class write songs in groups, each ‘band member’ tasked to record themselves in their own home. He encouraged them to try out the acoustics in various spaces with just one condition, that they all play in the same key, in the same tempo.

Growth opportunities

It seems that the technologies are there for online music education to grow exponentially in the coming years. Traditional schools can reach much broader audiences and involve a wider array of teachers while implementing more differentiated lessons. Similarly, for people wanting to learn a new instrument, or have their kids learn one, there’s endless options. Some geared towards students who crave gamification and rewards, others geared towards more traditional teacher-student interactions. With all this tech available and a global population accustomed to online learning through enforced lockdowns there’s no reason that the industry shouldn’t just aim for a billion users but also a billion dollar market size.

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