If you’re a musician, you’ve likely already been confronted with the problem of how to make a living with your art form. Is it sufficient to build a career off of, or should you do something else? And if you do want to turn it into your job, what does it really take to get your career launched? The reality is you’ll need to know more than just how to play music really well. You need to learn the business side of the music industry, too.
Fortunately, there’s no need to be a starving artist. Instead, you can learn how to get a career in music going thanks to Centennial College. Music is a language, but so is business, and the Music Industry Arts and Performance (MIAP) program will make you fluent in both.
You’ll learn how to have a career
Centennial’s three-year MIAP program teaches you how to take your love of music and turn it into a sustainable living. You’re still playing music, both one-on-one and in an ensemble, and you’ll graduate as a versatile performer. But on top of that, you will pick up the business and tech skills to actually work in the industry. You’ll also learn more subtle career skills, such as how to work, collaborate and perform effectively with other people, and how to perform in a variety of different styles. Technology, entrepreneurship and business skills are equally important, and are also taught here. In the third year of the program, you can specialize between Music Creation and Business Stream, or a Music Creation and Technology Stream, based on where you want your career to go.
Don’t worry, you still play music
In order to enrol in MIAP, you need to have either vocal or instrumental experience, and you need to audition as a part of the application process, so you’ll still be playing a lot of music. In fact, you’re mentored by professional musicians, both one-on-one and in ensemble rehearsals, but more on that later. The important part: It’s an ideal balance between developing your creative side and learning career skills. And in a unique addition to the musical side of the program, Indigenous musical traditions are taught throughout the curriculum, on top of international and other styles of music.
Learning to work together
Collaboration is important to career success, which is why both inside and outside Music Industry Arts and Performance, you’ll be working with people who aren’t musicians. MIAP is offered at the Story Arts Centre, home of Centennial’s film, broadcasting, journalism and advertising programs, among other subjects, and there’s opportunities for collaboration with those students. And in the final semester, you get a six-week field placement, letting you take your skills outside to collaborate with real-world pros. And speaking of real world pros….
The teachers are industry pros, who are actively releasing music
There’s no better people to learn from than those who’ve already made careers for themselves, and the MIAP program is stacked with professional musicians. For example, Artie Roth teaches music both solo, and in ensemble. He’s a jazz musician, and has just released his fourth album, Resonants. You can read more about him (and his career) here. Meanwhile, program coordinator Jessie Feyen releases heavy metal music under the name Ancient Relic. You can read about that here.
Plenty of students have already benefited from it
Music Industry Arts and Performance has been setting musicians up for career success for years now, and Centennial College has been collecting the stories of some of them, starting with Akeem Raphael, one of the program’s first students, who went on to work with a collective of socially-minded artists. We profiled him here. Meanwhile, Adekunle Olorundare, or Kunle, used his experience to become a regular fixture of the music scene in Toronto, even going on tour in Europe as he recounts, here. And there’s Andres Galindo Arteaga, who used the knowledge he gained to make a film score for a movie, In Despair. His score became one of the first-place winner for Best Original Score – Non-Fiction at the 2021 SOCAN Foundation Awards. As told here, he specifically credits the opportunity to collaborate with filmmakers at the Story Arts Centre as key to his success.
Bottom line: It’s all about getting a career going
There’s a lot of places you can go to learn how to play music, but there aren’t many resources out there for teaching you how to take control of your career. That’s what Music Industry Arts and Performance does: blends music with business, with an eye towards making your music career sustainable, so you can live off of the auditory art you create.
Written By: Anthony Geremia