USC Thornton School of Music: Music Professions Index (MPI)

Situation

It is natural for a college student to worry about whether their degree will ultimately lead to a job. Parents are often even more mindful of this. Given the competitive nature of the music industry, music students are among the most concerned about the realistic viability of a career should they pursue studies in music. The USC Thornton School of Music heard and sought to address this concern in their recruitment efforts on an almost daily basis. In addition to recruiting to the school, to a certain extent the staff also had to recruit to the profession.

Solution

In fact a music career is highly viable, we just needed to validate that fact empirically and then figure out how to promote it effectively. We conducted a 2-year research project that involved interaction with countless groups: current students, prospects, alumni, faculty, industry leaders, a review of the literature, and on and on. We learned that while on one hand a career as a music performer or teacher is certainly viable, it’s also essential that musicians consider their overall music career differently than was traditional. In other words, it’s not enough to be the best instrumentalist at the audition; rather a music career is a series of interconnected jobs or an overall body of work.

We distilled everything we learned into a powerful and (just as importantly) digestible core message, and then captured that onto a poster. The poster had several important parts:

• The core message: We succinctly framed the core idea (essentially that literally anyone can have a successful music career, but it requires multiple simultaneous revenue streams) on the outside of the folded poster so that it was the first things someone sees.

• On one side we included an alphabetic list of almost 400 music-related jobs, color coded by group or family within the music industry. In other words, these are all the jobs in which musicians could make an income.

• On the other side we placed a beautifully-designed, proprietary representation of various music jobs sampled from the first side, clustered by family in order to show how they overlap. We used concentric colored rings around those jobs to add a third dimension to the information. Notably, we used the Performance family as the center group because that’s the main goal of most musicians and essentially the entire point of the music industry. We wanted to recognize and emphasize that.

Success

Almost overnight we changed the conversations that recruiters were having with students and families. The Music Professions Index became a key part of the USC Thornton School of Music identity. In addition to its value to students and families, it has become immensely popular with organizations: schools, arts organization, and even competitor institutions! (You know you have created something valuable when your direct competitors are displaying it prominently in their own buildings!) The school has had it on re-print constantly since inception, and distributes it widely. Due to demand, they have even expanded to include a run of rolled posters (unfolded) to go straight to the wall (particularly for organizations).