Student Hope For Industry
By Joshua Chaffin
Published: May 8, 2008
Last month, Clive Davis, the golden-eared hit-maker behind such artists as Janis Joplin, Whitney Houston and Alicia Keys, was nudged aside as head of Sony BMG’s BMG music label group.
To fellow music executives, the demotion of Mr Davis represented the tumbling of another long-standing pillar at a time of continuing crisis in the industry.
Yet his fall did not seem to damp the enthusiasm of a group of aspiring music moguls on the campus of New York University. There, on a recent day, a group of them could be found in a classroom, bent over computers and keyboards, headphones covering their ears as they practised the art of synchronising music with advertisements. These were the proud – and somewhat shaggy – members of the class of 2011 at NYU’s Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music. Five years ago, Mr Davis established the school with a $5m grant. His vision was to create a department that fused the creative and business sides of the industry, tutoring students in everything from composition and sound engineering to promotion and marketing.
The school’s hallways feature totems from Mr Davis’s famous friends, including a guitar signed by George Clinton, the Godfather of Funk. People such as Mark Ronson, the producer behind singer Amy Winehouse, drop in for guest lectures.
Each year, students have been invited to sit in on a board meeting at Mr Davis’ label, where they might pick up titbits about the art of radio promotion or artist and repertoire from the master.
“It was pretty awesome,” Golda McCormack, a second-year student, said of her visit. “We got to see a day in the life of Clive Davis.”
The Davis department is another example of the professionalisation of the media industry, in which jobs such as newspaper reporting, once learned at the elbow of more seasoned practitioners, are now taught in formal academies.
The great irony of the Davis department is that it is thriving at a time when the industry it serves is in turmoil. Last year, album sales fell 10 per cent in the US, continuing a seven-year decline that has no apparent end in sight.
Against that gloomy backdrop, the Davis department still attracted more than 300 applications for the 28 slots in its incoming class, making it one of the most selective departments at NYU. At a time when record companies are shedding jobs – including as many as 2,000 this year at EMI alone – those students are each paying about $50,000 a year for tuition and room and board.
“It ain’t cheap,” acknowledges Jim Anderson, the Davis department chairman, whose office is strewn with some of the nine Grammys he has won over the years. Nonetheless, Mr Anderson argues that the school may be more essential than ever in an environment in which leading record companies have fewer resources to carry young staffers on the payroll while they learn the trade.
It has not been easy educating students about the industry at a time when many of its foremost executives are still confounded by the digital forces bearing down on it.
Two years ago, Mr Anderson altered the curriculum to try to keep up with the times. A class about legal issues was downgraded while new emphasis was added to marketing, music publishing and entrepreneurship. “The way the industry is now, the idea is for the students to be more entrepreneurial,” Mr Anderson says.
That lesson was driven home – albeit unintentionally – after a popular guest lecturer from one of the big labels lost his job between campus visits. “We definitely all think about it all the time,” Ezra Tenenbaum, a second-year student, says of the industry’s travails.
Mr Tenenbaum, a born music lover, says it was eye-opening to learn about the industry’s history. Those studies – along with his youth and ease with technology – have left him optimistic about the future.
“The music industry is taking a hit right now,” he says. “But, you know, when radio came along, it was a much more severe crash and then radio became the biggest source of sales for music.” Why should the internet not eventually provide the same windfall, he wonders?
At 76, Mr Davis, a former lawyer who chanced into the music business, is probably not the most likely candidate to dream up those new business models. Nonetheless, he can still take heart that a graduate of the school he helped create may one day contribute to the industry’s rebirth. Perhaps someone like Ms McCormack.
“We’ve grown up with this philosophy of doing things on our own,” she says. “So I feel like people in our generation won’t be as affected as people from 10 years ago who relied on [a music] company.”
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