Future Of Music

You want to be a renegade. Take a great idea and run with it, before everyone can ask what you are doing, and then explain it all later.  This is a much better operating mode than asking for permission.  Far more can be accomplished in a shorter period of time, and often with unexpected and wonderful results.

In 2001 we brought our online music school at Berkleemusic to market and began a transformation in how music is taught and who could participate in both the teaching and learning experience.  At the same time we developed Berkleeshares as a platform to freely distribute music lessons around the globe.  Now some 8 years later, many millions of free music lessons have been downloaded from Berkleeshares and tens of thousands of students from around the world have studied music with Berklee from afar.  Our online lessons are in use in hundreds of schools around the planet likely influencing hundreds of thousands of music students.

Our YouTube channel has become one of the most visited educational channels on YouTube, fueled by music and passion and people who chase the dream of becoming a musician.

I came across this article in Fast Company on the EduPunks, and how they are transforming higher education.  It made me realize that we have already taken the first step in remaking the music business from the inside out, as we train the next generation of digitally savvy musicians, songwriters, producers and music business people.

“The transformation of education may happen faster than we realize. However futuristic it may seem, what we’re living through is an echo of the university’s earliest history. Universitas doesn’t mean campus, or class, or a particular body of knowledge; it means the guild, the group of people united in scholarship. The university as we know it was born around AD 1100, when communities formed in Bologna, Italy; Oxford, England; and Paris around a scarce, precious information technology: the handwritten book. Illuminated manuscripts of the period show a professor at a podium lecturing from a revered volume while rows of students sit with paper and quill — the same basic format that most classes take 1,000 years later.”

The scarcity that has propelled the music business for the past 70 years or so is not unlike the scarcity that has propelled the education business.   Schools have a lot to learn from the music business and they better pay attention.  When most of the value of an experience can be reduced to ones and zeroes, the entire bottom can fall out of the business, faster than you can even imagine.  This is what is starting to happen to education.

“Colleges have become outrageously expensive, yet there remains a general refusal to acknowledge the implications of new technologies,” says Jim Groom, an “instructional technologist” at Virginia’s University of Mary Washington and a prominent voice in the blogosphere for blowing up college as we know it. Groom, a chain-smoker with an ever-present five days’ growth of beard, coined the term “edupunk” to describe the growing movement toward high-tech do-it-yourself education. “Edupunk,” he tells me in the opening notes of his first email, “is about the utter irresponsibility and lethargy of educational institutions and the means by which they are financially cannibalizing their own mission.”

The edupunks are on the march. From VC-funded startups to the ivied walls of Harvard, new experiments and business models are springing up from entrepreneurs, professors, and students alike. Want a class that’s structured like a role-playing game? An accredited bachelor’s degree for a few thousand dollars? A free, peer-to-peer Wiki university? These all exist today, the overture to a complete educational remix.

The architects of education 2.0 predict that traditional universities that cling to the string-quartet model will find themselves on the wrong side of history, alongside newspaper chains and record stores. “If universities can’t find the will to innovate and adapt to changes in the world around them,” professor David Wiley of Brigham Young University has written, “universities will be irrelevant by 2020.”

Well – for me this means that we better keep peddling hard at Berkleemusic, and continue to experiment with new technologies and modes of teaching and learning so that we don’t end up without any real business, like the situation that the major record companies are in today.  Expect to see new products and services from Berkleemusic in the coming months and years that align with the changing digital marketplace.  Afterall, if we are not willing to change with the times and improve what we do at Berklee, how can we expect our students to do the same thing?

Read more on the Edupunks here at FastCompany. The comments at the end of the article are fascinating.