Students with a passion for music may now choose to declare their minor as music industry.
The music industry minor is run by Terry Tompkins. Tompkins has worked in and taught students about the music industry for 25 years. He’s from Philadelphia and has taught at Drexel University, St. Joseph’s University and Millersville University in music industry programs. Prior to that, he was an A&R rep for Columbia Records in New York, an artist manager, a talent buyer for music festivals and music venues, a journalist for a rock magazine and more.
The music industry minor currently has three courses. The survey of the music industry class talks about the basic fundamentals of the music industry. The Music and Sound in Entertainment and Broadcast Media class comes from a historical perspective, and looks at culture and technology and how it has affected the industry over the last 150 years.
The Artist Management and Promotion class explores the functions and responsibilities of a musician or recording artist manager and discusses what they do and how they impact an artist’s career or image. New courses are going through the approval process now and will be available next year.
The music industry minor courses are available to all students.
“In my survey class, I have students from 10 or 12 different disciplines. We have (majors including) communications, business, especially those that are focusing on marketing, to journalism- anybody who is interested and loves music and is interested to learn how the industry works,” Tompkins said.
The minor is gaining more students. Last year, before Tompkins was here, he believes that there were under a dozen students in this minor. “We’ve increased maybe 50%,” Tompkins said.
“We hope for the minor to turn into a major and I’m working on a curriculum proposal for that now. So when it becomes a major there will be some performance criteria. Right now there are no criteria at all to be in the minor as far as performance or theory,” Tompkins said.
Students in the survey the music industry course are in the process of starting a Music Industry Club (MIC). Erika Nalow, President of MIC and a senior majoring in Jazz studies and Music Performance, said “the general purpose (of MIC) is to create opportunities for students who are interested in working in the music industry for them to be able to build their own opportunities. So if people want to be a manager we want to have access to opportunities for them to be managing artists now while they’re in school.”
Cole Highhouse, Treasurer of MIC and a sophomore with an undecided major, said “right now is live events and we’re hopefully expanding onto other aspects of the music industry like recording.”
MIC is in the process of planning an open-mic night and looks forward to holding this event in November. “We’re gonna try to bring in a band that’s already been established to bring people in that might be interested,” said Alyssa Rosselot, Marketing and Promotion Manager of MIC and a sophomore majoring in communications and pop culture.
As of right now, MIC meets every Wednesday at 3 p.m, but they hope to start meeting only twice a month. MIC is not limited to Music Industry Minors. Anyone from any major is welcome to join.
“I think there are a lot of students that have an interest in this world of business and we’ve never really had any guidance, so now with Terry Tompkins coming in, he is the first person we know who knows what he’s talking about. We had a general idea of what the music industry was like, and now we can break it up and understand all the aspects of it. It really helps you to figure out what specifically you want to do (in music) and it kind of teaches you about things you might not have even known were an option,” Rosselot said.
“I’m really excited about (the minor), I think it has great potential. Since it is such a new program, we’re not very exclusive so you can come from knowing absolutely nothing but knowing that you have a love for music and knowing that you want to be part of this world of music and you can start from scratch and they’re allowing that because you don’t have to do an audition or have experience,” Nalow said.