Look outside your Musical Genre to Develop Stage Presence

“If you want to be a headliner, you better put on a headline show.” - Jay Z

How interesting (and reassuring) to read about this enormously successful artist struggling with his live show in the early days. I've often thought musicians should be able to adapt ideas they can learn from other kinds of performers and use the best of them in their own shows. Rouse the Crowd for example, contains certain crowd-pleasing ideas inspired by a successful magician  but which work brilliantly to ignite any band's gig audience.

If you'd sooner not stray too far away from music for your inspiration, here's Jay Z again talking about how he looks to broaden the spectrum, soak in what he can from artists from all genres of music and use that for his own shows:

“In hip-hop, there's not many great performers.  I look outside the genre, measuring myself against others. I look at Madonna's production and envy that.  Daft Punk's set, I'm like, what the… And I look at the way U2 can command an audience.  Bono's a performer pretty much like I am. He's not a dancer; he's not jumping around.  He's having a conversation.  He's using his stillness as movement.