Skills are at the heart of any job description. The employer uses it to voice wishes for the perfect employee. Reading a job description oftentimes sounds like you basically have to be a ‘swiss army knife’.
Here is the deal: like in every part of the professional world, even here trends exist of what skills are fashionable right now. As with any trends, they can change. For example, if technology in large changes.
30 years ago, being able to write on a typewriter without mistakes was a huge bonus. Nowadays its more important that you’re skilled in the blockchain technology.
What is the bottom line? The job search engine LinkedIn has done the research for 2020 and found out what’s up and coming in skill trends.
The top 5 skills needed in 2020
A lot of those names sounds very tech-savvy. However, they’ve already become a reality in the music industry.
If you are job hunting in the music industry right now, this is the right post for you. Step by step you’ll learn what those fancy names mean and how you can apply them to the industry as well as to your portfolio.
Blockchain is at the top of the hard skills list for 2020
Not only is blockchain in use for cryptocurrencies but it is also very handy for the music industry. As a matter of fact, it can help store metadata in a safer way. Equally, the money flow from streaming platforms can massively profit form blockchain.
Data is shared across a network, and everyone in the network has their own identical copy of it. If anyone changes the data, it shows up in all the copies within minutes, or even seconds. That makes it more difficult to attack a blockchain database than a single one, where the data is all in one place.
*source PWC
Here is a hard skill training program from LinkedIn for blockchain.
Cloud Computing is on the skills list too
Likewise, it is not a surprise that cloud computing is at number two of the list. Most companies store data and computing processes in digital clouds.
People who can work their way around all things cloud computing are very popular. In addition, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, IBM Cloud Computing or Adobe Creative Cloud are just some of the popular cloud computing providers.
There are different kinds of cloud computing. As an illustration, there is aaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service), PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service), SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) or simple Data Storage, Database and Applications.
They all have various usages. For example, SaaS solutions include Google Apps, Dropbox or Slack.
One of the most popular ones when it comes to the music industry though is Spotify. Here, the music is only streamed to you from the cloud.
If you have a subscription you can use music on your device even without access to the internet. However, once you delete your subscription the music previously-stored remotely will vanish from your device.
You’re probably already using cloud-based computing on a day to day basis
Another key point is the nature of different clouds. In this case, Public Cloud and Private Cloud are on each side of the security spectrum.
On one hand, there is the so-called Public Cloud (the computing is happening on the location of a company that services the cloud computing to you); On the other hand, we have the Private Cloud (the hosting is taking place within your own system. This has the highest security level);
Notably, the usage of cloud computing is diverse and is still evolving. With this, you can create new apps and services.
What is more, it helps you to store, back up and recover data in an easy and time-efficient way. In fact, website hosting and blogging are heavily relying on cloud computing. As well as streaming of movies and music is.
Analytical Reasoning is again up on the list with top skills
Next on the list of tops skills that every job hunter needs in their portfolio is Analytical Reasoning.
Data has become the foundation of every single business. Organizations want talent who can make sense of it and uncover insights that drive the best decisions for the business.
* source: LinkedIn
In the music industry, you would need this skill for example when digging through big data or even raw data provided by streaming platforms. Or if you want to understand Royalty Statements. As well as dealing with metadata in general.
AI is a super hot topic for the music industry right now
AI or Artificial Intelligence is again a very tech-heavy name. It sounds like it comes out of a Star Wars movie but in fact, it has become a reality for a lot of processes around the world.
Artificial Intelligence is based on computers that learn constantly, as it is called ‘machine learning’. Uniquely making them understand patterns and using them every time they come across something new.
They also work this way to solve problems. For this reason, AI can be used to augment the capability of the human brain. Likewise, a computer can work day and night with a steady stream of a workflow.
Scott Cohen, the founder of The Orchard, has said at the Eurosonic Nooderslag conference that ‘there are 20,000 new tracks uploaded to Spotify every day and AI is critical for helping sort through the options and delivering recommendations to listeners based on what they’ve listened in the past.’
Here is a sweet list of online MOOC (massive open online courses) for AI.
UX Design is a very important skill
UX Design is short for ‘user experience design’. In other words, when a design team is thinking about the usability of the design.
Like, how the customers are going to use the digital product and how to design it so that the customer can use it intuitively. The average attention span of consumers decreases more and more.
For this reason, it is important for the success of an application like a streaming platform, for example, to be as easy to use as possible. If the customer can’t use a new digital product without ease, they will not use it at all.
Here you can find a job offer from Warner Music Group searching for a UX Designer. It’s no longer active. However, it gives a good example of how UX Design is used within the music industry.
Music Industry Is An Ever Changing Field
Even though job descriptions change over time, job hunting remains nerve-wracking as ever. Including the music industry, this ever-changing and evolving tightly knit system.
In this post, you’ve learned about the 5 top skills every job-seeking person in the music industry needs. Most people aren’t living job-descriptions.
However, if you find particular interest in a field it’s worth taking an online class. Maybe even an online university degree to further your knowledge in a topic like blockchain or cloud computing.
Even if you are already an established music industry professional with numerous years of experience. One is for certain, in a rapidly changing music industry, we all have to keep on learning and evolving our skillset.
I hope this post was helpful to you!