MusicLessons.com

What MusicLessons.com is

MusicLessons.com is a teaching platform built only for music. Its platform overview calls it "A Musician-Specific Learning Platform for Teachers, Organizations, and Students", and the company describes itself as musician-founded and committed to building high quality educational experiences for students and teachers. Everything on the platform happens through a studio, a customizable website that each account gets on signup. A personal studio is a musician's own space for files and songs; a teaching studio adds the tools to schedule lessons, archive lesson recordings, communicate with students, track progress, accept payments and sell subscriptions.

The FAQ describes the platform as "an open, non-exclusive teaching platform" that invites music educators and music education organizations around the world to teach on it. That makes it useful to two readers in this directory. A music teacher or a music school uses it as a course and lesson platform. A student uses its search to find a teacher, which is why it also sits under tutoring here.

Finding a teacher

The homepage opens with a teacher search by location, instrument or teacher name, plus a map. The instrument index shows how deep each list runs: it counts 442 teachers for piano, 427 for guitar, 245 for voice, 204 for bass guitar, 202 for violin and 169 for drums, with long tails for instruments such as banjo, mandolin, oboe, sitar or theremin. Teacher cards list a location, mostly in the United States, though the latest additions on the homepage also include teachers in the United Kingdom, Nigeria and Turkey. A teacher who prefers not to be found can set the studio to private, and the FAQ explains that a private studio drops out of the search results and the map, so students reach it only by invitation.

Teaching on the platform

A teaching studio covers four kinds of work, as the platform overview lays them out.

Private lessons. Teachers teach in person and remotely while keeping session recordings and assignments organized. Lessons connect directly with Zoom or work with any remote meeting application, sheet music and other media can be uploaded, and an embedded discussion carries messages between live sessions. Student payments can cover any number of lessons or time periods.

Classes through Meetups. A Meetup is a page for a public or private class. Teachers can schedule as many sessions as they want over any period, keep an always-on discussion running between sessions, and once a class is finished, save it and sell access to the archive. The pricing page says Meetups are fully integrated with Zoom: teachers create Zoom meetings from the Meetup, record to the cloud, and the recordings download automatically into the sessions. Its feature list also includes a Pro Zoom account, which it describes as an integrated Professional Zoom account that comes with a teacher's studio.

Pre-recorded lessons and courses. Teachers build media-rich lessons and organize them into courses, so students can work through the basics on their own and the teacher reinforces the material in live sessions. Each lesson carries a discussion for every student with access.

Engagement. Each studio has a discussion forum, public or limited to students, for assignments and announcements. Teachers can import student contacts, send and track emails from the studio, send invitations to new lessons or courses, write blog articles, and track which products draw the most engagement. A testimonials page collects student comments; the teacher is notified of each one and decides whether to show it. Studios can carry a friendly address such as www.musiclessons.com/MyStudioName/, list several business locations, and be embedded on an outside website when public.

The musician tools sit underneath all of this and are available in every studio: a song library combining YouTube videos, uploaded audio, video, PDFs, images and MusicXML sheet music, tab and notes; set lists; and a media player with loop control, bookmarks, adjustable playback speed and private notes. A browser extension called YouTube for Musicians adds the same loop and bookmark controls to YouTube itself.

Selling and getting paid

Students pay through the teacher's studio for lessons, classes and pre-recorded publications. Subscriptions let a teacher combine offerings and sell access to exclusive Meetups and publications on a monthly plan. Payouts go by direct deposit: the homepage says teachers can initiate a payout whenever they have a positive balance and that the company partners with Stripe for all payments, and the pricing page names the Stripe Connect service for the deposits. Teachers can track income and expenses and download them into accounting software.

Two terms matter before relying on this. Service fees are deducted at the time of each sale, at a percentage set by the plan. And the pricing page states that the payment service "is available to US customers only", with an up-to-date US W-9 tax form submitted through the studio settings. It also says a teacher who uses their own payment system pays no service fees.

Plans and prices

The pricing page lists four plans:

• Personal, free, for students and anyone who plays music, with 10GB of storage.
• Teacher, free, described as simple learning management tools for music educators, with 10GB of storage, a 12% fee on subscriptions sold and a 12% fee on product sales.
• Professional, $19.95 a month or $200.00 a year, for educators taking online teaching further, with 100GB of storage and fees of 7% on both subscriptions and product sales.
• Organization, $49.95 a month or $500.00 a year, for organizations that provide music education, with 100GB of storage, 7% fees, and teacher collaboration for 5 teachers. Additional seats can be bought as needed.

The storage figures come with a note on the same page that storage is currently unlimited and that extra storage for a monthly fee is "AVAILABLE SOON". No payment is required to start: the pricing page invites teachers to sign up for free, take as long as they need to set up the studio, and activate a subscription when ready to go live. The FAQ adds that a personal studio can switch to a teaching plan in the studio settings.

Organizations

The Organization plan is aimed at music camps, nonprofits, schools and ad-hoc groups of teachers. An organization can provision its own teachers or invite independent teachers who already have an account, give all students one online portal, and audit the student experience through full access to every teacher interaction. It can invoice students incrementally for any period and track student revenue automatically for accounting and tax reporting. For camps, the overview describes an online version of the camp for in-person and remote attendance, with archived camps sold afterwards. The FAQ notes that one person can also run several separate teaching studios, each managed on its own.

Support

Support runs through a contact form with request types from general questions to purchase and copyright issues, plus help pages and the FAQ. Email to support@musiclessons.com gets an answer within 24 hours, according to the support page, and the FAQ says the team will help set up and configure a teaching studio.

Who it suits

MusicLessons.com fits private music teachers who want one studio for lessons, recordings, sheet music and payments, and who like starting on a free plan, with the option of Professional and its lower 7% fees as sales grow. Music camps and community music schools get a shared portal and teacher oversight at a modest flat price. Students looking for a teacher by instrument and town will find a large searchable list, with most of the teachers shown on the homepage based in the United States.

It suits less well a teacher outside the United States who wants to take payments through the platform, since the built-in payment service is limited to US customers, though the pricing page leaves room to use an outside payment system instead. Educators in subjects other than music will find every tool shaped around songs, sheet music and instruments.