CU Boulder to offer music production beginning in 2025

Feb. 15—The University of Colorado Boulder will offer a specialization in music production beginning in the fall of 2025, creating a path for students seeking a modern, non-traditional music career.

Music producers develop, record, edit and mix recorded music for distribution. John Davis, dean of the College of Music, said a degree with a focus in music production opens up hundreds of potential occupations, including being a manager, legal representative or songwriter.

"I'm so proud that it's meeting the 21st century and it's what students are asking for," Davis said. "We're not lessening our focus on our music performance degrees, we're not lessening our focus on our music education degrees, but we're now opening our doors to more new students than we've been able to do in the past. That's why it's so exciting."

Carter Pann, professor and chair of composition at CU Boulder, said the demand for music production is high.

"About 70% of the students applying to my department are interested in creating popular music, be it songs or EDM (electronic dance music), and they're all wanting to be songwriters," Pann said. "They all want to develop their own brands for releasing their music online digitally via Spotify, Tik Tok or Apple Music."

In the College of Music, students can pursue music education, a performance degree in which they can specialize in a certain instrument, or a more general degree focused on liberal arts.

The emphasis in music production will be a new option with CU Boulder's bachelor arts in music degree. The new music production emphasis does not need to go to the CU Board of Regents for approval because it's not an entirely new degree program.

Davis said the music production emphasis will eliminate two barriers for new students: a lack of diverse degree paths and acceptance through an audition. Until the new emphasis begins, all students are required to pass a performance audition to be accepted into the College of Music.

"We couldn't offer students some of the diversity in offerings that they were seeking and we were limited by the need to do an audition," Davis said. "This new degree emphasis is significant because there is no audition on an instrument required."

Davis said music production is the beginning of additional offerings he hopes to expand on within the College of Music. Early ideas for additional degree concentrations under consideration include songwriting, recording arts and cross-genre studies.

Jeremy Smith, professor of musicology, said the music industry today demands a lot of skills. For students to be successful, they need to be flexible and involved in all aspects of the music.

"In music today, it's very hard to have a simple conservatory skills or rock music skills. Musicians need to be adept and need to be flexible," Smith said, "... We have the chance now finally to really meet the students where they're at in terms of contemporary music. The idea of a music production program ... gets students at the cutting edge of what they do in studios today."

Mike Barnett, composition and music theory professor, said the days are gone when a violinist can go college, play violin for eight hours a day, graduate and have a predetermined career path.

"There's a lot more to music than just that," Barnett said. "... That's what the universal musician is about, being able to navigate the modern world of music and it gets more complex and challenging all the time for artists."

Added Pann, "We're hoping this really diversifies the type of music studied at the college of music and the diversity of the study body."