Event-based research for music industry learning environments: Two case studies

Kristina Kelman; Philip Graham; Yanto Browning

Scholars in the music education field argue that skills and knowledge required for success include entrepreneurship, professional networks, technology skills and community development. However, there are few studies of learning environments that are designed for this purpose and which could test their claims. In addressing this gap, this paper presents two case studies of innovative, real-world learning designs that have been deliberately engineered to foster collaboration, with grounded, realistic opportunities. The first case study, Youth Music Industries (YMI) is an organization, operating since 2010 that was established by the teacher/researcher in collaboration with her high school students. The teacher's aim was to establish a social learning environment where students could develop music industry and entrepreneurial skills experientially in a community of practice. The students' aims were to create opportunities for young musicians across Queensland to perform, record, publish and network, with a bigger vision of building a youth music scene. Some of their initiatives included running an all-ages venue for emerging bands (Emerge), an annual four-stage, ten-hour music festival (Four Walls Fest), regular networking sessions, and an annual youth music industry conference (Little BIGSOUND). The second case study is a practice-led, large-scale annual event called Indie 100 led by the Queensland University of Technology since 2010. The event produces one hundred new songs in one hundred hours over five days. It involves local and national industry figures, between three hundred to four hundred local musicians, and around seventy students from music, management, marketing, law and entertainment industries. The aim of the exercise is to bring students into personal contact with professional producers, local artists, to induct them into the intensity of a commercial production environment, and to showcase and promote their efforts globally following the event. Our cases use iterative cycles of development, implementation and study, allowing us to gather more information that might lead to improve future iterations. In this paper we use the experience of both YMI and Indie100 in which we acted as both researchers and educators to observe the interconnections between learning and industry practice in this work. These studies have both a pragmatic element and a theoretical orientation with the researchers’ intent to produce new theories, artefacts and practices that potentially impact learning and teaching in naturalistic settings. Communities of practice theory, in particular the concepts of engaging, imagining and aligning (Wenger, 1988) and social capital concepts - bonding, bridging and linking capital as explained by Putnam (2000) not only informed our designs but provided a lens for our investigations. Our research has found that both “classrooms” welcomed triumphs, failures and the challenges of professional musicianship in creating a learning ecology where new relationships were formed, insights into student motivations and potentials were gleaned firsthand by faculty, and students’ positioning within their chosen field of professional practice were accurately gauged by both the students themselves and by the faculty.

Event-based research for music industry learning environments: Two case studies

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