Mastering the Emergent Media Landscape:Professionalizing Your Writing & Storytelling Skills

Catalog description

Every student of recorded music—aspiring performers, producers, songwriters, journalists, and industry professionals alike—needs sharp writing skills in order to communicate clearly and tell compelling stories across all types of media. In this class, we’ll study the art of music writing in a changing media landscape, in order to gain perspective on the greater music media ecosystem as a whole. Music writers today face a number of obstacles similar to those faced by musicians: industries in upheaval, disrupted by the digital ad market and a small handful of algorithmically governed platform monopolies. But as the structures of the music media landscape change, the core values that make music writing valuable remain the same: the significance of putting artists and music scenes in context, telling powerful stories, driving discovery, offering sharp critique, research and reporting, and more. As the media environment grows more complicated, it’s up to us to ask the big questions. How do we use the tools, rather than having the tools use us? How do we continue to stay connected with audiences, tell powerful stories across platforms, communicate clearly and effectively? In this class, we’ll unpack the state of music journalism and the long-standing principles of quality music writing, examine the changing mechanisms of the greater music media industry, and hone in on strategies for upholding those principles in today’s media environment. This class will involve reading, writing, listening, and critical conversations. We’ll learn the timeless skill of writing clearly and effectively about music, what makes for a good piece of criticism, how to develop interviewing skills, and how to tell an engaging story, practicing these forms along the way. We’ll look at the challenges and changes in today’s media landscape that are having an outsized impact on music writing,…