To degree or not to degree? That is the question facing many people looking for a way to get into the music business. Some people believe in just jumping in there and getting your hands dirty, learning the business from the ground up, while others suggest that the tools you pick up while pursuing a music industry degree at a good school will be invaluable to you in your future music biz career. Which path is the right way may be a difficult question to answer, but one this is for sure - if you want to get a music education, you can hardly do better than Berklee College of Music. Here, a Berklee grad give the inside scoop on what it is like getting a Berklee education and how it has served her long after school was out.
Question: For starters, can you please share a little bit about your experiences at Berklee? What was the best part about being in school there? What kind of support does the school offer to its students?
There are so many great things about being at Berklee. The experience at Berklee is so unlike one at any other college. The greatest part for me was meeting all different kinds of people from all different walks of life and knowing that we all share a deep love for music. We have different majors and different instruments, but it is very far from a school where an art history major will be sharing a dorm room with a biology major, for example. Some of us may want to score films while others want to manage bands while others want to be touring with their own band, but at the end of the day, it’s all about music in one way or another. For this reason, Berklee students have a really great sense of community, even despite the fact that we have no real “campus” (unless you count the corner of Mass Ave and Boylston as a campus). We’ve all had to struggle through Ear Training, and we’ve all been up until at least 4 a.m. working on a Harmony or Counterpoint project. We’ve had 2 a.m. recording sessions the night before a 9 a.m. class. We’ve waited in line for ensemble rooms and spent hours in practice rooms preparing for proficiency exams, the often-dreaded final exams on your principle instrument. Berklee is a lot of hard work, but those who make it bond together. It was absolutely one of the best experiences of my life!
The school will offer you support from the second you walk in until well after you leave. They are very dedicated in making sure that you not only receive the best education possible, but that you find a job or career path that will help you use your education to the fullest extent. Their alumni services are stellar which include job listings and online communities.
Q: Good music business degree programs can be hard to come by, leading many people to try to learn the ropes by going for any job they can get and working their way up from there. In what ways do you feel your education at Berklee specifically prepared you for entering the music industry work force that taking a different avenue would not have?
I think the most unique thing about the Berklee music business program is the faculty. The professors are all people who have already had successful careers in the music industry and can offer raw insight to the inner workings of this business. You learn things from them that you will never find in a textbook or learn in any other classroom. These professors have been managers, accountants, attorneys, publishers, performers and more. They are extremely keen to the logistics of the industry in the sense of being “book smart” but they have their own experiences and “street smart” that really makes it a unique education. I felt very confident going into my internship because I knew that my professors had prepared me for anything that could be thrown my way.
Q: Many people have an idealized notion of what working in the music business must be like - all fun times, easy money, parties, glitz and glamour. What rude awakenings did you get about the music business while you were at Berklee?
Any idealized notions about the music industry are always eliminated rather quickly. Most people who come into Berklee already have some idea what it’s really like – I mean, there’s the music industry that’s portrayed on MTV and then there’s the real music industry. MTV is always showing the huge stars with multi-million dollar homes and rows of Bentleys, but I think a lot of us understand that this lifestyle is reserved for the top 0.5%. Anyone new to Berklee will realize this pretty quickly. Pick up a Billboard or a Rolling Stone and you can start to see some of the reality – artists, record companies and managers suing each other left and right, cancelled tours, poor album sales, band break-ups – that’s the reality. The music business is a great thing to be a part of, but when you break it down, it’s still a business.
Q: . Berklee must be a great place to debate the major issues facing the music industry. What do you think the most important issues for the industry are, and where do you stand on them?
I actually took a great class at the beginning of my senior year called Current Events in the Music Industry with the chair of our music business department, Don Gorder. There are only 12 spots in the class and we spend the majority of the semester participating in panels on various issues, getting the opportunity to serve both as a panelist and as a moderator for these discussions.
There are a lot of really hot issues being tossed around right now. One of the big ones is regarding digital rights management or DRM which determines what digital tracks can be played on what devices. For example, all tracks downloaded on iTunes, until very recently, could only be played on iPods due to the DRM that was encoded in the tracks at the time of purchase. Some debated whether or not this constituted a monopoly, and we’re beginning to see some changes.
