“I was at a crossroads, an intersection in the digital media business where a new formation was showing signs of convergence between music, tech, and copyright framework,” reflects Vivek Paul, digital music and social entrepreneur. Paul had just become head of Sony Music’s digital business in India. He was watching the intense, rapid change in his home market and knew he needed pull his ideas together.

“I wanted to consolidate my thoughts, focus my hunches, and drill deeper on the shifting landscape in the media consumption which was in migration from consumption economy to engagement economy,” he notes, “as I was tapped to make innovations in direct consumer connections and build new business lines. Berklee was the perfect place to do that.”

Already a seasoned professional, he enrolled in Berklee Online, digging into assignments, substantive interactions with his coaches and instructors, and intense online discussions with his fellow students, all while mastering the art of time-zones. He embarked on a grueling schedule, adding devoted hours of study and discussion to his already packed work life. Yet Paul has no regrets: “I can safely say, there couldn’t have been more diverse, engaged, and insightful structure for validation than being at Berklee.”

Paul’s career has been remarkably diverse. With a background that spans journalism, marketing, live music, digital innovations & entrepreneurship, consulting, and the old and new music industries, he hails from the generation of Indians who grew up in homes without televisions, phones, or the internet, yet who now operate on the bleeding edge of mobile and other digital technologies. The breadth of perspective afforded by this rapid change comes in handy: The Indian music market, with its strong ties to Bollywood and film music and with its volume-rich, value-poor nature, present fascinating challenges and opportunities for entrepreneurial thinkers and digital trailblazers like Paul.

“The whole idea of creating a self-sustainable and scalable market opportunity that can help create a bridge between the creator and consumer through innovations and digital commerce, new monetization models and forming a new structure for reinventing the conventional music business, was as real as it could get at that time,” recalls Paul. “It was the first time the global and local music industry was trying to converge on the rights management and a shift in power back to the artist, in addition to a radical shift in technology, applications, and devices that will become digital consumption touch points.”

Seeing how certain problems—from digital distribution to intellectual property concerns—were handled in the US and other markets proved invaluable. “I learned that the future of music would lie in the artist-fan direct ecosystem, in fan monetization models, the concept of a super fan, the engagement economy, the publishing industry, the value of live performance in the artist’s career, and the notion of the artist as epicenter, as a brand, an ecosystem and would soon deliver not just creative works but aggregated music audiences,” Paul reflects. “I think coming from diverse experience in the media industry, I was able to relate to the linear shift from content being in the center to the consumer being in the center, and realized that there is value to be unlocked by the industry from the context alongside direct content usage.”

Finding this center meant taking steps in several different directions at once. Paul used his knowledge to build Sony India’s direct to consumer digital business integrated with the Sony’s Mobile eco-system, but he also used his growing familiarity with copyright and intellectual property law to contribute to India’s new copyright law, passed and implemented by 2013. He also launched several independent ventures, including a live venue in Mumbai based on what he took away from his live music-related classes, artist consulting for musicians who fell outside the film-powered mainstream and working with multiple startups that were on the brink of forming a new industry model. “We want to empower the creator, nurtures the content-consumer relationship, and finds new economic models both in transaction and equity holding,” explains Paul, “creating corridors for new customers and content collaborations between India, the US, and Southeast Asia. It’s an interesting gap in the industry, an opportunity that was visible after the formation of physical business, a necessity in embracing technology by the content industry.”

He has also joined forces with multi-talented Farhan Akhtar (film star, director, singer, songwriter, entrepreneur, movie producer) and entertainment mogul Anurag Rao to support MARD Initiative (Men Against Rape and Discrimination – http://therealmard.org). Thanks in part to Paul’s savvy, the project focused on gender equality and women’s empowerment is collaborating with Google as part of their Helping Women Get Online program (http://hwgo.com) aspiring to make a difference to the lives of 50MN Women in India alone. Farhan has recently been named UN Women’s First Male Goodwill ambassador, under the HeforShe (http://heforshe.org) initiative.  “Infusing music as a communication channel to spread awareness was the underlined objective,” add Paul.

“From India's standpoint, we're in the middle of an amazing transition. We’ve jumped technologies, and we should soon be at global par,” muses Paul. “There are a massive number of youth online, including the early birds, the 4 and 5 year-olds with access to a connected device at home. We’re seeing a huge shift in the space of a generation, consumption, engagement, and commerce. There cannot be a better time than this, and there cannot be more comprehensive learning than Berklee. It allowed me to understand the gravity of the shifting landscape, sharpening my skills, intellect, and instincts to be able to see through the divisions. The most fascinating part of Berklee’s education program was in the encouragement I got from my tutors Mike King and Chris Stone in Particular, the involved participation I received from my classmates, and above all their long-term friendship.”

“Berklee allowed me to accomplish a dream,” he concludes. “I was able to write and build out a new device-connected business model in hybrid music consumption, which went live to market soon after and became a multi-million dollar boon for the music industry, eliminating painfully fragmented and divided digital eco-system for the music fans.”

About Berklee Online

Berklee Online is the online continuing education division of Berklee College of Music, delivering access to Berklee’s acclaimed curriculum from anywhere in the world.  Berklee Online’s award-winning online courses, multi-course certificate programs, and degree programs are accredited and taught by the college’s world-renowned faculty, providing lifelong learning opportunities to people interested in music and working in the music industry.

Berklee Online Courses taken by Vivek Paul

Online Music Marketing: Campaign Strategies, Social Media, and Digital Distribution
Copyright Law
Artist Management
Online Music Marketing with Topspin
Music Industry Entrepreneurship
Music Business 101
Music Marketing 101
Music Business Trends and Strategies
Concert Touring

“I tell my students that they have been in business their whole lives,” exclaims E. Michael Harrington, instructor at Berklee Online, Music Business Program Faculty Chair at SAE Institute Nashville, and music business renaissance man, “they just didn’t know it.” Harrington knows what being in the business means in this time of transition. He ties together the art, craft, and commerce threads that give context in uncertain times.

One of the world’s leading experts on music copyright, Harrington has used his broad knowledge to act as consultant and expert witness on a dizzying array of cases involving everyone from the Dixie Chicks to Tupac Shakur. He has pondered how copyright affects Pintrest, how medieval composition practices speak to contemporary rights issues, and how to keep copyright as a force for encouraging, not quashing creativity. Using music history as a guide, he has advocated for more thoughtful approaches that better reflect the way musicians make music, including a blanket license for samples.

“Artists are leaving money on the table or simply lining lawyers’ pockets. It’s not that people who sample recordings can’t create things themselves; sampling is part of their creative process,” explains Harrington. “You can trace this back to the parody mass of the Middle Ages. The tenor line had to be note-for-note from someone else’s piece. That was the law, which could not be more different from what we have now. The Dixie Chicks, for example, got sued over three words.”

Harrington’s varied interests spring from where music and technology inform one another. Technology has long been apart of his creative process: He was an early adopter of computer-generated notation, and one of the first to use it in a doctoral composition project. He continues to be a curious and passionate user of social media, fascinated by the digital world’s social and artistic repercussions. And he savors teaching online.

“One of the great things about teaching online is its asynchronous aspects, matched with live interaction. You can cycle back, reexamine what’s been discussed,” Harrington reflects. “In a physical classroom, I can be there from one to three in the afternoon, and leave nothing behind. You need both, the on- and off-line relationships, to empower people.”

The students Harrington works to empower hail from all walks of life: “A hip hop guy from Virginia, a woman who’s a manager in London, a guitarist in Tokyo,” to name a few. “The diversity really adds to the conversation, and the knowledge base is astounding. I get their input on, say, how a guy can sell band merchandise better in Buenos Aires.”

Harrington harnesses this divergent backgrounds to generate new and intriguing ideas for students’ projects. “The fun comes from the diversity,” he reflects. “If someone knows nothing about hip hop, I encourage my students to let them hear that hip hop track and listen to their left-field input about sales. It’s not their world, and for that reason, they have fresh suggestions."

Harrington relishes his students’ projects and encourages out-of-the-box thinking. One example: A student working with a Philadelphia classical ensemble decided, with input from his classmates, to push the group to make merchandise. The classical musicians resisted the idea of shirts and mugs at first, but then began to think seriously about it.

These shifts in thinking, the openness to trying something new lie at the heart of entrepreneurship, and Harrington’s broad and deep thinking proves an excellent guide. “I tell students, these are the greatest times,” he enthuses. “You may not come to the same conclusions an hour from now. There are all these disparate resources, but they can all go so well together. You can’t imagine just doing one thing professionally anymore.”

Watch Dr. Harrington discuss the wild world of copyright and its history, as part of Berklee Online’s Faculty Open House series

About Berklee Online

Berklee Online is the online continuing education division of Berklee College of Music, delivering access to Berklee’s acclaimed curriculum from anywhere in the world.  Berklee Online’s award-winning online courses, multi-course certificate programs, and degree programs are accredited and taught by the college’s world-renowned faculty, providing lifelong learning opportunities to people interested in music and working in the music industry. 

Now, students can receive an online bachelor degree with a focus on Electronic Music Production and Sound Design, Interdisciplinary Music Studies, or Composition for Visual Media

For Immediate Release

Continuing its commitment to providing high-caliber online education and forward-thinking training for adult learners, Berklee Online has launched its second round of Bachelor of Professional Studies degree majors, including two in music creation (Electronic Music Production and Sound Design and Composition for Visual Media) and one interdisciplinary degree (Music Studies). The online school now offers five different bachelor degree majors.

Berklee Online has evolved quickly since its inception in 2002, moving from single courses, to certificate programs, to full online degrees this year. Now it’s the world’s first accredited non-profit music institution to offer bachelor’s degrees online. The new degree program will support students from around the globe, from a wide variety of backgrounds, as they seek new opportunities as music supervisors, composers, producers, or music business professionals.

More than simply a rough online equivalent of brick-and-mortar courses, Berklee Online utilizes state of the art technology to bring the best of Berklee to students around the world.  Courses are written and taught by Berklee faculty members, and through the integration of audio and video feedback and weekly live chats, online students can build a personal relationship with their instructors and fellow students.    

It’s this atmosphere of human interaction that sets the online school’s experience apart. “Connections between students and collaborative projects are key to the way we envision courses,” explains Carin Nuernberg, Berklee’s Dean of Online and Continuing Education. “Students start connecting via social media, even before the academic semester starts. You’ll see folks getting to know one another, sharing their music, and even beginning to collaborate on projects. Berklee is all about making life-long connections with people, and we’re seeing this play out online.” The spirit of openness and mutual support, Nuernberg feels, is further encouraged by the instructors, who foster a strong sense of shared purpose among students, an environment that encourages better academic outcomes.

In launching these three new degree majors, Berklee Online looked to students and their needs. “We were looking at music industry trends and aligned them with what we heard from students,” explains Nuernberg. “We do a lot of surveying, of current, past, and prospective students, of people who take our massive open online courses. And we listen carefully to the results.”

Though the inaugural degree class at Berklee Online started in September of this year, the degree-granting program can already boast its first graduate: veteran sound designer Larry the O, who worked with LucasArts, and composed music for video games. Though he attended Berklee in the 1970s, he never completed his degree, a fact that nagged at him. Now, as a seasoned music professional, he hopes to teach a new generation of sound designers and composers. His degree, completed via Berklee Online by earning prior learning credit, will allow him to do that.

“41 years for an undergrad degree start to finish is a little extreme, but better late than never. At the moment, it tastes pretty sweet,” reflects Larry. “I really appreciate the people at Berklee Online for showing me the way home.”

Larry, as well as several other students poised to graduate in May 2015, will be walking at the Berklee Graduation this spring.

“Supporting students throughout the experience is at the heart of what we do,” says Nuernberg. “It runs through everything we do, from advisors and course developers, to support staff.”


About Berklee Online (online.berklee.edu)

Berklee Online is the online continuing education division of Berklee College of Music, delivering access to Berklee’s acclaimed curriculum from anywhere in the world.  Berklee Online’s award-winning online courses, multi-course certificate programs, and degree programs are accredited and taught by the college’s world-renowned faculty, providing lifelong learning opportunities to people interested in music and working in the music industry.

Fall Semester begins September 28, 2015. Applications are being accepted online now through May 15, 2015.

“Berklee Online has led online music education in a way that the average person might not get,” exclaims composer, master keyboard player, and Berklee Online instructor Brad Hatfield. “You don’t just log on and read stuff and then upload an assignment. There is a big community weighing in, commenting on each other’s work, and supporting each other. I’m super impressed, and I’m not easily impressed.”

If Hatfield is not easily impressed, it’s because his own credentials are impressive. An Emmy Award winner, his songs have appeared in The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, ER, CSI, Saturday Night Live, Friends, and The Young and The Restless. His compositions and performances have been placed prominently in films from Mystic River to Borat. He regularly plays with the Boston Pops. He’s also created the curriculum and teaches the Music Supervision and Songwriting for Film and TV courses for Berklee Online.

An experienced in-person instructor, Hatfield is thrilled by what he can do as an instructor online that are impossible in a brick-and-mortar lecture hall. “Students can comment on each other’s work and really think about it,” says Hatfield. “We can’t do that in a traditional classroom setting; you just don’t have time,” he reflects. “People can sit in traffic or on a bus and click and listen to each others work. I often leave audio feedback, sing or play things back to them, which I couldn’t do in a lecture classroom. Students can play it back if they need to hear it again.”

Hatfield has noticed a common thread that binds many of his students: They were estranged from the music business, but are now raring to get back in. “A lot of students in my music supervision or songwriting courses were in the music business before. Some aged out, some got out of the game,” reflects Hatfield. “They are getting back in and bring a lot of experience with them. I love seeing students get fired up about assignments, watching them reconnect with something they’d left behind, as well as mentoring students new to the field.”

Though they may have backgrounds in the industry, many students are new to the world of music supervision and writing for images. Hatfield emphasizes that just because you have the chops, you need to remember that you are not calling the shots. Hatfield encourages music supervision students to be willing to play multiple roles, and to keep several options at the ready. He tells composers for film and TV that they need to take feedback constructively. “You are not the boss when you write for images,” he states. “There are several people higher up. There are budgets. You are only playing a small, if important, part in something bigger.”

He also guides students to focus on the essence of their pieces, and not get swept away by complex arrangements and orchestrations that may not work for the picture in question: “We all have these giant orchestral palettes. Try it with solo voice, or one or two instruments. You have to understand you’re playing a supportive role.”

Hatfield’s supportive role reveals a keen understanding of the conditions students will face in the professional world. To help make connections between two mutually benefitting groups—dedicated songwriters and hopeful music supervisors—he links both courses’ final assignments. “I unify the two courses,” he explains. “The final project is designed for music supervisors to utilize music that my Songwriting for Film and TV class has already created. I make an effort to get these two sets of people together. They need each other in a professional sense, and often great things come out of this.”

Great things are afoot for one of Hatfield’s current students, Eliot Hosenfeld, who is already working on his first feature film as a music supervisor: "I have never enjoyed a class more in my life and it is helping me out a ton in my current role as a Music Supervisor."

As a professional composer with experience on- and offline, Hatfield is continuously surprised by his online students’ commitment and passion. “People in my Berklee classes really want to learn. They are hungry,” he says. “They want to challenge you, too. They keep asking questions! Sometimes I have to dig down and learn something new to respond effectively, which is really exciting.”

Learn with Brad Hatfield

-Music Supervision
-Songwriting for Film and TV

About Berklee Online

Berklee Online is the online continuing education division of Berklee College of Music, delivering access to Berklee’s acclaimed curriculum from anywhere in the world.  Berklee Online’s award-winning online courses, multi-course certificate programs, and degree programs are accredited and taught by the college’s world-renowned faculty, providing lifelong learning opportunities to people interested in music and working in the music industry.

“This space feels like an oasis,” enthuses Berklee Online instructor, multi-instrumentalist, and multimedia artist Loudon Stearns. “What I see with my online students in my music production and composition courses reaffirms my faith in humanity. Seriously.”

The supportiveness of his students, Stearns says, and the on-going excitement of using serious analytical tools to dig into club music and digital production techniques make teaching online invigorating. “A lot of my online students are going back to something essential,” Stearns remarks. “They are compelled to make music, to please themselves. That’s a wonderful statement. It’s about making the process as full and beautiful as possible.”

The process, for Stearns, straddles the digital and the analog, the on- and offline musical worlds. As a composer and bassist, Stearns grew up on the cusp of digital domination, which gave him both old-school musical technique and a deep love of the power of computers.

His own music education unfolded via distance learning, and suggested to Stearns how computers might change the way people studied and analyzed music. Growing up in a small town in upstate New York, he found only one way to study music theory as a teen: correspondence course.

“I’d send my assignments to Nebraska. It would take forever, and they would come back covered in red ‘verbotens,’” recalls Stearns, referring to the German term for “forbidden.” “I had notated things wrong, and the teacher on the other end didn’t like it.” Not surprisingly, Stearns was unimpressed. He realized he had to take things into his own hands.

He did so on his computer. A passionate programmer, Stearns taught himself the basics of harmony by, among other things, sequencing Bach chorales and figuring out their elements. As an autodidact, he gained a strong sense of the building blocks of musical ideas, and began to explore how to represent them as programming tasks.

“My composition and production of electronic music classes are designed for students like me, who approach making music from a programming perspective,” Stearns explains. “I had tools, but no formal training. I don’t necessarily use music notation.” Instead, Stearns approaches instruction from a programming perspective: “I break tasks down into essential components and define a rule set, then add them together and create something complex enough to be beautiful,” he recounts. “It’s as if I’m asking, how would I teach a computer harmony? What are the essential components? That works into how I teach composition.”

As a student at Berklee, he was one of the first to use his early, clunky laptop to record everything from class projects to bass practices. “It was innovative at the time,” muses Stearns. “Now students get a Pro Tools course in their first semester.” From his personal integration of computers into his study, he moved to helping faculty and students, as laptops became de riguer.

Now, Stearns focuses on sharing his vision of technology’s creative potential with his students. In his Composing and Producing Electronic Music courses, Stearns sets up programmatic ways for students to think about different electronic genres and subgenres. After delving into the history of current club sounds’ parent genres (from house to dub), Stearns sends his students out to find representative songs online, “because that’s where all this music is happening.”

Then, the songs are submitted for detailed analysis. Berklee Online has an amazing back end that analyzes the results and generates bar graphs, based on analysis we’ve done over the course of several semesters,” he notes. “Students learn what questions to ask: Where does the snare fall? What reverb or compression is used? Are there vocals? Then we compose in those styles.”

Many aspiring producers meet Stearns via his MOOC (massive online open course) and decide to leap into more advanced study. An online course can pivot fast enough to embrace changes in both production technique and club music trends and tastes, and encourages committed students to come together, people from all walks of life from around the globe. “It’s amazingly diverse,” comments Stearns. In Stearns’s online courses, a female trance music composer from Saudi Arabia may trade ideas with a producer from urban Korea or provincial Russia.

Digital tools can offer unique inspiration, just as online interactions can build an esprit du corps in a course. In his own work, Stearns had dedicated the last year to composing a “space opera,” a musical piece whose theme grapples with time and that will unite performers at different geographical locations across the US and Europe via live stream. “I’m composing the music for laptops and small orchestra. The most exciting technological challenge is to make the connections stable and get the latency down. I am consciously composing the music to make delays acceptable, treating it as a medium with its own limitations and potential.”

Stearns’ other skill set, as a highly trained instrumentalist and composer, balances his tech-savvy approach to teaching and creating. “Something I find myself telling students regularly is that they need to turn off the computer sometimes to compose,” Stearns says. “The melody needs to be singable. You need time and space, sometimes, to find the right way to express your idea. There’s no substitute for taking that time and working your ideas out.”

Learn with Loudon Stearns:

Berklee Online offerings

Composing and Producing Electronic Music 1
Composing and Producing Electronic Music 2
Advanced Music Production with Ableton Live
Introduction to Music Production (MOOC via coursera)


About Berklee Online

Berklee Online is the online continuing education division of Berklee College of Music, delivering access to Berklee’s acclaimed curriculum from anywhere in the world.  Berklee Online’s award-winning online courses, multi-course certificate programs, and degree programs are accredited and taught by the college’s world-renowned faculty, providing lifelong learning opportunities to people interested in music and working in the music industry.