Abstract
As the field of arts entrepreneurship education has developed, so has our collective understanding of the nature of arts entrepreneurship theory and pedagogy. At the same time, critical differences exist between the various arts sectors, with music entrepreneurship embodying a number of specific characteristics more or less unique to it. This essay identifies and explores five such issues and discusses the programmatic, pedagogical and theoretical implications of each, offering insights into how entrepreneurship education can benefit music students.
Highlights
Though the field of arts entrepreneurship education is going on 20 years old, it is still common for colleagues to ask me, “What is arts entrepreneurship, and how does it play out in music?” And it is not easy to give a concise answer; if I tried it would be disingenuous: there are too many variations, too wide a range of contexts, too vast a scope of possibilities to get anywhere near a simple answer
It was immediately clear that within that student body was a wide diversity of career aspirations; the scope was even broader when a non-music major interested in the music business would pay me a visit
I quickly began to identify a set of niches within the complex and intertwined ecosystem of music careers and paths which, in turn, set me out to determine how to deliver coherent instruction in the midst of so much diversity. It was not an easy task, but I came to see that entrepreneurial principles were the key to solving my dilemma
Summary
One of the challenges of defining what entrepreneurship means within the arts is that most of our institutions (faculty, administrators, and students alike) ascribe a variety of things to “entrepreneurship” that those of us in the field do not necessarily see as belonging there. Entrepreneurship becomes the thread holding these diverse elements together, able to generate meaningful results in each case This approach results in a much wider swath of the student population acquiring the basics of entrepreneurial thinking and action while giving students some universal skills that they can take with them regardless of where their career leads them. True to the entrepreneurial spirit, we can turn this challenge into a benefit: addressing so many different topics is a golden opportunity to bring in outside experts who can teach from the standpoint of their own experience This helps keep a class or one’s co-curricular programming fresh and diverse, while bringing our students into contact with a range of role models who put a “real world” face on the concepts discussed in class. Knowing where we are in the diverse music entrepreneurship landscape at any one time allows us to teach more efficiently, more effectively and has the added bonus of raising the visibility of our programs within our communities and beyond
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