BA (Hons) in Commercial Songwriting – ACM London / Birmingham

The 3 YearCommercial Songwriting Degree with Real-World Practical Industry Connections.

The Commercial Songwriting programme provides its students with the knowledge, skills and experience necessary to discover and channel their inner-songwriter, covering a combination of lyric creation, score production, music industry studies, song arrangement, writing for original artists, co-writing, writing to brief for Film, TV and Sync, recorded music production, audio design for video games, music publishing and rights management.

ACM London / Birmingham Degrees are validated and awarded by Falmouth University, the UK’s ‘highest ranked arts university’ (Guardian University Guide 2017).

Course Overview

BA(Hons) Commercial Songwriting is a full-time course; typically, students should expect to spend 35 – 40 hours per week on a combination of taught and self-directed study. Each module is delivered over a 15-week Study Block, typically comprising of 12 weeks of learning and teaching and 3 weeks of assessment and feedback.

Students will engage in a variety of learning activities, including lectures, seminars, private and group tutorials and specialist workshops.

Assessment tasks include portfolios, written coursework (eg: essays, case studies, reports and dissertations), projects and live performances.

Commercial Songwriting Modules

In the first year of the programme, students will study the following compulsory modules. All compulsory modules must be passed in order to complete the award.

• Live Performance for Songwriters
• Songcraft
• Lyrical Development and Song Topics
• Producing Scores and Charts
• Composition and Technology
• Music Industry Studies

In the second year of the programme, students will be required to complete the following compulsory modules, together with two elective modules. All compulsory modules and the chosen electives must be passed in order to complete the award.

• Song Arrangement
• Co-writing Processes and Project
• Writing to a Brief: Commission, Film, TV and Sync
• Performance and Technology

Elective Modules:

• Education and Training
• Music Journalism
• Advanced Music Theory and Analysis
• Audio Design for Video Games
• Recorded Music Production
• Composition for Audio-Visual Media
• Tour Management
• Freelance and Musical Direction Skills
• Experimental Sound and Music
• IP Rights and Publishing

In the final year of the programme, students will study the following compulsory modules. All compulsory modules must be passed in order to complete the award.

• Exit Project
• Songwriting Diary and Critical Reflection
• Portfolio
• Dissertation

Entry Requirements

All candidates will be required to attend an audition/interview.

**LONDON | 3 YEAR DEGREE BIRMINGHAM | 2 YEAR ACCELERATED DEGREE

Minimum age18

All candidates should hold two A-Levels or an equivalent full Level 3 qualification.

We normally require Grade C GCSE (or an equivalent qualification) in English. Candidates should be capable of using the English language fluently, and able to structure arguments and present evidence to a standard appropriate to study at Level ‘4’. Where the application materials appear insufficient to form a clear judgement on the candidate’s fluency, additional documentary evidence (e.g. recent essays) may be required.

Applicants for whom English is a second language are required to have achieved IELTS level 6.0 or equivalent qualification.

Please note that if you live outside of the EU or EFTA and require a Tier 4 VISA to study in the United Kingdom, we thank you for your interest in ACM but we are unable to accept your application at present for our full-time Further Education and Higher Education programmes.

We welcome applications from those who might have completed alternative qualifications and/or have prior experience. In the instance of no Level 3 qualifications being held or the conditions not being met, we will ask for additional material to be submitted in support of your application. Details for this will be provided to you upon successful audition.

Why Choose ACM? The Learning by Doing Ethos

ACM understands how the music industry works today and has created an immersive and comprehensive learning environment, which connects directly with the industry. Our learning by doing ethos helps simplify how the industry works and produces a clear view of career paths and options. This clear and practical approach accelerates learning.

The detailed exposure to all aspects of the industry as it happens (live!) reveals options and destinations, which greatly assists our students in making clear choices and building the maps they need to guide them there. If you are a producer you will know that you need a fundamental grasp on song structure and songwriting, but you also fundamentally need to know about revenue streams and intellectual property, from which you will draw income.

You will also need to understand how your music is monetised through live performance, songwriting credits and publishing, including sync and licensing. We will teach you all of this comprehensively at ACM by linking you with the teams that do this every day at Metropolis.

Equally, you could be a drummer, whose primary focus is performing and gaining as much experience as possible by playing sessions. In this case, you still need to understand how you get paid, and how, if you are influencing a track, you may potentially be co-writing it and aiding the creation of a product. In this case, session playing actually becomes writing. You will need to know the difference in how you get paid for playing and writing.

While you are learning, you will be building your portfolio, and we will help you understand how to leverage the body of work you create to build your own fan base, rather than just being a jobbing musician. This maximises your employability as a professional musician by making what you do desirable by simply marketing yourself as the primary asset. We will teach you this as we have the best industry professionals in place doing this every day.

Honing your craft as an artist in the hope of getting signed by a major label is an outdated concept and is no longer the way the business operates. Our goal is to instil into every artist that comes through ACM, the belief, the desire and the understanding of how to become a credible, self- sufficient artist. Once you are in that position, you will need to be equipped to discuss terms, with confidence, with a band, a producer, a manager, a label and a publisher. We will equip you to manage your own career, as opposed to you racing to sign with a manager on graduating without fully understanding how to manage your own career and opportunities.

Through our deep integrated relationship with Metropolis, ACM has its finger on the pulse, this helps to empower our students to determine their place within it. We know where the industry is right now because, at Metropolis, the teams work at all levels including the majors, independents and direct with signed and unsigned artists, brands, distribution partners and content creators.

ACM encapsulates the industry from end to end, where today and tomorrow’s music is written, produced, mixed, mastered, distributed, marketed and published. Our students do not learn from a book but by hands-on experience in the business of music. It is the intrinsic, living, breathing connection between ACM and Metropolis that gives our students this unique perspective and opportunity.

The intrinsic connection between ACM and Metropolis gives our students the opportunity to learn from the deals we make as they happen. Ian Brenchley, CEO of Metropolis, has run the studio for seven years, having previously worked for more than fifteen years at major labels including Universal. Through his meetings with professionals at the highest level of industry and the deals that result from them, Ian brings the most relevant insights and learnings directly to ACM students. Here are a couple of examples of embedding practical industry content into our student’s experiential learning in Ian’s words:

“I met Andy Ross and Charles Barsamian on a recent business trip to LA. They were both working on cutting-edge films and responsible for sync, music supervision and placing orchestral scores. They started a new company called Exit Strategy Productions, specialising in music supervision and publishing. We then took them on as consultants to generate publishing opportunities for us via Hollywood films and core business via orchestral scores for the studio we run in Doha, Qatar, Katara Studios by Metropolis. The learnings from the building of this new relationship and how we developed the strategy to benefit our core business from it were then used as masterclass content for ACM Business students. We will continue to update students on the further evolution of this Metropolis project in real-time. In addition to this the students from the Business School who join us at Metropolis as interns will help us in the development of real synchronisation catalogues, from which we pitch for the films we supervise.

We also recently met with Shazam who we asked to help us to promote our gigs in the studio. This resulted in the company offering us their brand sales team to sell our two TV formats to blue-chip brands. They will also power our Virtual Vinyl app. This will give us access to 600 million consumers. This is a perfect example of how we work in collaboration with other brands and organisations in order to commercially exploit what we are able to offer and amplify its impact. Collaboration is key to the effective working of the music industry as it operates today. In this case, the learnings will be presented to ACM students via my weekly podcast, which they can watch, with a view to analyse how the business was done, and then have the opportunity to engage with me via a live Q&A. They will be able to suggest their own content ideas, which will be considered when we are creating our future products in collaboration with the biggest players in today’s industry.”

Ian Brenchley CEO Metropolis Studios