Musical Infrastructure in an International Context

Course goals

The students will work on their network in the industry, work together on a group presentation, and create a business plan. All the while, they will learn to situate their thinking, findings, and work within diverse, current academic discourses. The course also brings traditional infrastructures and technologies into current perspectives and engages with recent developments in both music and tech. The course will resonate with the adjacent Musical Knack Lab courses where additional practical skills are trained.

Content

The course Musical Infrastructures in an International Context helps you understand how the music industry functions. You’ll learn what the main structures are that underpin the industry. The most important is copyright, but it also involves financing, marketing, community building, and more. Finally, the course looks at how emerging technologies are impacting, changing, and disrupting how these infrastructures exert their pressures on the people operating in our music industries.

It all starts with the question of what the product is in our music industry. Is it the music, the artist, the record, an experience, or something else entirely? There’s lots of different visions active all at once and aimed at creating the music everyone loves. How do these come to life? In this course, we’re looking at answers to these questions by looking the infrastructure on which the industry is built. We’ll learn that there’s not one infrastructure, just like there’s not one music industry, but multiple. There are already so many institutions (concert halls, orchestras, ensembles, bands, pop festivals, broadcast organisations and the like). The course encourages students to address topics such as institutional aims, agencies and artistic profiles as well as their audiences, their position within the overall culture industry, the ways in which they are financed, how their products are distributed and consumed and received.
 

Additional information

This course is open only to students enrolled in the MA programme Applied Musicology

Career orientation:
Knowledge of history and contemporary position of international musicians and musical institutions; knowledge of how they operate, how they are financed, and how they are organized.