Building a successful music career requires more than musical skills. One must also excel at the business and production of music, which is why the LA College of Music has spent the past decade instilling those skills in students.
“Our main demographic is middle school to high school and early 20s,” said Erin Workman, executive vice president and head of the songwriting and music business departments at LACM. “This year, we have somebody in their 60s. These are people who either always wanted to work in the music industry and life just didn’t have that path for them or they’ve always wanted to learn an instrument or get into the recording studio. It’s really enriching because they get to come and do something they’ve dreamed of for years.”
The camp experience opened its 10th year this week in Pasadena. It is a three-week program where experienced professionals in the industry share the secrets of how to break into the business and forge a career.
The professionals have worked with some of the biggest names in the industry. Workman, who is a songwriter, has lent her talents to the likes of Miley Cyrus, Zac Efron, Selena Gomez, Ashley Tisdale and Emma Roberts. The instructor for the “Rap & Hip Hop Change the World” course, Jameel “JProof” Roberts, has worked with Usher, Lizzo and Ariana Grande. Instructor Kasia Livingston worked with Britney Spears and the Pussycat Dolls.
The camps are open for people ages 12 and up. Students live on campus in an immersive program that includes such classes as music performance, songwriting, music production, composing for visual media, media entrepreneurship, independent artist study, pro music and “Bandwidth Jazz and the Journey.”
Ten years ago, when Workman arrived at LACM, the program was small and focused on performance. In the decade since it has tripled in size and taken on more of an industry and business perspective.
“At that time, there were not a lot of schools dipping their toes into the songwriting and production space specifically,” Workman said. “And nobody was really doing an entrepreneurship program like we have. We have nine separate programs now, three per week.”
Participants come from all around the world to get a taste of Los Angeles and LACM.
As for the instructors, Workman said they require that they are currently active in the industry.
“We’re very industry-centric,” Workman said. “We are editing our curriculum constantly to make sure it is lining up with all the very fast changes that happen in our industry. So having faculty that know that up close and personal and are working in the field is pretty critical. Then, obviously, it’s wonderful if they have classroom experience or they’ve taught in the past, but if we don’t, we have a really great training program.”
Jameel “JProof” Roberts takes his rap and hip hop students into the studio during the immersive summer camp program at the Los Angeles College of Music.
(LACM/Submitted)
Each week of the program takes a different focus. The camp starts with an emphasis on performance, getting students into the recording studio and helping them learn to perform. At the end of the first week, they put on a show with the music they’ve created and they walk away with a few tracks that they record in the studio.
“Our minimum age is 12, so there are plenty of students that have never been in a recording studio before and have never performed before,” Workman said. “That’s no small feat, to get comfortable so they can be really successful in that show and in the studio.”
The second week moves into songwriting and advanced production. That’s also the week that they have their rap and hip-hop program. Each student is put into a songwriting collaboration group on Monday and by Wednesday, they have a song they have written and they record it. Then the process repeats and on Friday they perform all their tracks.
“For songwriters, writing that quickly is really challenging,” Workman said. “Many of them have never written on demand like that. It is one of those industry skills that as a songwriter, you really have to be able to write to assignments.”
The third week is music entrepreneurship and composing for visual media. Students build a business plan throughout the week and take classes on publishing, licensing and music supervision. At the end of the week, they make a presentation on the plan they have created.
The composition track has composers creating music for film clips while the pro artist track is a blend of entrepreneurship and marketing.
Roberts has been teaching the rap and hip hop class for three years. The program partners with the Subvers!ve Music Foundation, which gives out $10,000 in scholarships each summer. The foundation was founded by the parents of a young rapper, Harrison “Subvers!ive” James Dunnet who was going to participate in the program, but died from an overdose shortly before the camp began.
“His family created this Subvers!ve Foundation in his honor to give students the opportunity to study hip hop and rap and study music at the school,” Roberts said. “The caveat is that the music has to have some sort of positivity. He passed away from something that’s not positive. A lot of music talks about drug use and glorifies it, so we keep that in mind and don’t let them rap about anything that is drug use or anything of that nature.” Roberts said his students run the gamut of those who have already launched a career as rappers or hip-hop artists and those who are neophytes and come into the class knowing very little. The classes are kept to a small number to provide each student with individualized attention.
“We work with them on all sides of the table,” Roberts said. “I teach a class where we talk about sampling and looping and different things of that nature. I have a co-faculty, Mike Xavier, who is a pretty accomplished rapper himself. We do freestyle workshops to get their minds on different rhymes and different cadences. We do the rapping parts of things and also the tracking and creating music as well.”
Roberts, who hails from Pennsylvania and went to school in New York, tells his students that it really is possible to make it in the industry if they are willing to do the work. He describes how from 2012 to 2015 when he signed his first publishing deal with Sony, he was in the studio six days a week. His production partner would literally bathe in the sink at the studio and stay there all night.
“There are plenty of artists who make an amazing living for themselves and you and I never know who they are,” Roberts said. “That’s because there is so much music.”
The workshop — along with the others offered by LACM — hopes to give its students a leg up by teaching them the tasks that need to be done to succeed in the industry and encourage them to pursue their dreams.
While he teaches the business aspect of art, Roberts does encourage people to support the arts because we live in a world where everything is commodified.
“Capitalism is about making lots of money and sometimes that gets in the way of art,” Roberts said. “We make art to sell it but no matter what anyone tells you, there’s still room for art for art’s sake, because that’s what gives us our humanity.”
