Are Music Colleges Still Failing Their Students? Twelve Years On

Written By Joel Garthwaite

In 2014 I asked whether conservatoires were preparing students for the careers they would actually lead. The post travelled widely in the classical music world. Here’s what’s changed – and what hasn’t.

In October 2014, I published my first blog post. It was a short, opinionated piece asking whether UK music colleges were doing enough to prepare their students for the real world. I’d studied at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and I worked out that over five years of conservatoire training I had received roughly 775 hours of performance classes and individual lessons, and 28 hours of arts management lectures. The ratio struck me as absurd, given that most of my income at the time – and most of the income of every working musician I knew – came from something other than solo performance.

The post was supposed to be a small thing – a personal blog in an era before social media had given everyone a platform. Instead, it was viewed more than 4,000 times and shared more than 100 times, with replies from the United States, New Zealand, Australia, Germany, France and the UK. It clearly touched a nerve.

One of those replies came from the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester in New York. Larry Arbeiter, the university’s Associate VP for Communications, wrote to point out that Eastman’s Institute for Music Leadership – founded in 1997 – was designed precisely to address the concerns I’d raised. At the time, a significant proportion of Eastman’s students took courses through the programme before graduating. He offered it as a counter-example, and I updated the post to reference it.

Twelve years on, I find myself returning to the question after a decade building businesses, data infrastructure and AI tools in the commercial world. I’ve recently spoken to a couple of recent conservatoire graduates who came to me for business advice. The questions they were asking were recognisably the same ones we were asking twelve years ago.

Why this matters now

In 2026, universities face growing public scrutiny over the value of creative degrees. The government’s rhetoric around “high-value” courses, the AI transformation of creative practice, and sustained pressure on higher education funding have sharpened the question of whether creative higher education delivers sustainable careers. The DCMS Creative Careers Programme – scaled to £3 million for 2025–26 – shows policymaker attention to the issue, but it targets school-age children. The gap between aspiration at school level and preparation at conservatoire level is where the problem sits.

This is no longer just a music-sector concern. It is part of a national conversation about what higher education is for.

What has changed

I want to be fair. Conservatoires have not stood still. Several institutions have developed career-focused programmes since 2014, and some of them are genuinely good.

The Royal College of Music’s Creative Careers Centre, originally established in 1999, has expanded significantly. In 2023, Eric Whitacre was appointed as its Ambassador for Creative Careers, and its RCM Accelerate scheme – supported by Nicola Benedetti and the Benedetti Foundation – offers grants of up to £5,000 to help graduating students launch creative projects, social enterprises or business ideas.

My former college, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, ran its Creative Entrepreneurs programme from 2013, a 12-month incubator in partnership with Cause4 that supported over 40 businesses and social enterprises – though the programme has since ended. The Royal Welsh College now offers postgraduate seminars covering networking, tax, funding applications and social media for independent musicians.

At the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, Dr Luan Shaw has produced the most rigorous academic research on this topic – peer-reviewed studies involving more than 100 participants, seven academics from six English conservatoires, and 66 senior leaders from Music Education Hubs – documenting how students develop pedagogical skills and, crucially, how the stigma around teaching as a career persists.

The standout is the Royal Northern College of Music. RNCM now has a full-time Head of Enterprise, received £902,000 from the Office for Students for its StART Entrepreneurship Project, and has embedded enterprise and entrepreneurship content across a third of its degree programmes. In 2023 it won the Times Higher Education Outstanding Entrepreneurial University Award – the only conservatoire to have done so. Elsewhere, the Royal Academy of Music has embedded Artist Development across all undergraduate programmes, and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland runs freelance clinics and seed funding through its Creative Enterprise Development Office. Several other conservatoires now offer employability seminars, alumni mentoring and small innovation funds.

These are real achievements. But examine the pattern. RNCM is the exception, not the norm. RCM Accelerate supports up to six graduates a year out of a student body of approximately 900. Guildhall’s incubator took around nine per cohort before it closed. Much of the provision across the sector sits in careers services, alumni schemes or optional seminars rather than in the assessed, timetabled core of the performance curriculum. Shaw’s research has transformed understanding, but it focuses specifically on the teaching pipeline, not the broader question of how to prepare students for the full range of careers they will actually lead.

And then there is the Eastman counter-example I cited in 2014. The Institute for Music Leadership is still active – running peer career advising, student grants, internships, a podcast, and an Arts Leadership Certificate – and Eastman was again named a Billboard Top Music Business School in 2025 for the third year running. But even here the picture is mixed. The MA in Music Leadership has been placed on a brief admissions pause, and the Leadership Bootcamp has been suspended for summer 2026 while the Institute plans for its 30th anniversary. The positive model I was pointed to twelve years ago is not disappearing, but its flagship programmes are in flux.

Internationally, some peers have moved further. The Sibelius Academy in Helsinki renewed its Master’s in Arts Management, Society and Creative Entrepreneurship in 2021 and launched a new Music Business master’s in autumn 2025. The New England Conservatory in Boston founded its Entrepreneurial Musicianship department in 2009 – the first of its kind at any conservatoire – offering curricular courses, career advising, grants of up to $30,000 and professional internships. The Escuela Superior de Música Reina Sofía in Madrid has embedded an Entrepreneurship and Social Innovation Programme within its Master’s in Musical Performance since 2016, covering budget management, digital marketing, production and teamwork. These are not peripheral add-ons. They are structural commitments within the core training. Some UK conservatoires now offer separate undergraduate degrees in music business, and these are welcome – but they serve a different cohort. The question is whether the student on a traditional performance pathway encounters serious career preparation as a core, assessed part of their training. There are now clear examples of career preparation being embedded in core training. In the UK, with the notable exception of RNCM, it remains rare on traditional performance pathways.

What the data now tells us

In 2014, I had my own experience and my own tuition-hours breakdown. I had no national data. That has changed.

The first UK Musicians’ Census, published in 2023 by Help Musicians and the Musicians’ Union, surveyed 5,867 musicians across the country. Its findings are sobering. The average annual income from music is £20,700 and 43 per cent of musicians earn less than £14,000 a year from their craft; only 40 per cent earn all of their income from music. More than half – 53 per cent – need work outside the industry to sustain their careers, and 75 per cent of those say they do so purely for financial reasons.

The typical working musician holds three to four different roles, works across four to five genres, and plays two to three instruments. Eighty per cent consider themselves performers, yet performance is only one part of how they earn a living. The Census confirms what most professional musicians already know: this is a portfolio career, whether or not anyone uses that phrase.

Seventy per cent of the musicians surveyed hold a degree or higher. Half have a music degree specifically. They are qualified. The question is: qualified for what?

A longitudinal study at RNCM by Pennill, Phillips and Phillips (2022) found that 80 per cent of the institution’s graduates were engaged fully or partly in portfolio careers – and that students felt least confident in business skills such as managing finances. The researchers recommended that degree design should foreground career preparation from the beginning, with mentors, placements and guest speakers. Even at the conservatoire with the strongest enterprise provision in the UK, graduates reported weak confidence in the financial realities of working life.

Meanwhile, HESA graduate outcomes data shows that creative and performing arts graduates have among the lowest average earnings of any subject group, and some of the highest rates of low-skilled employment. They also have the highest rates of self-employment and freelance work – 21.5 per cent, compared with 6.8 per cent across other subjects. HESA data covers all creative and performing arts graduates, not conservatoire alumni specifically; the absence of conservatoire-level longitudinal data is itself part of the problem. But the direction is clear: creative graduates build portfolio careers, and higher education is not preparing them for the reality of doing so.

The human cost is not abstract. The Musicians’ Census Mental Wellbeing Report found that 30 per cent of all musicians report negative mental wellbeing – rising to 41 per cent among students and early-career musicians. Those with low wellbeing are twice as likely to say they will leave the industry within five years. Forty-seven per cent of those with poor mental health cite a lack of clear career progression as a contributing factor.

As one respondent put it: “I work 5 days a week and I literally can’t fit any more work in yet even with nearly 20 years’ experience as a community musician I still make less than the average UK salary.”

When a third of musicians report poor mental wellbeing and nearly half of those with low wellbeing cite a lack of clear career progression, treating career preparation as an optional extra is no longer defensible. The Healthy Conservatoires network has begun connecting occupational, financial and broader wellbeing to sustainable careers – recognition that this is not just an employability question, but one of institutional duty of care.

What hasn’t changed

In 2023, Dr Luan Shaw’s research at Birmingham Conservatoire gave a name to something musicians have known for decades. Her paper was titled, bluntly: “If you’re a teacher, you’re a failed musician.” Her research found that some conservatoire students still perceive they will be judged by families, tutors or peers if they pursue a teaching career. Employers described conservatoire pedagogical training as inconsistent and outdated. The stigma persists – not because individuals are cruel, but because institutions have been slow to dismantle a culture that treats any career path other than performance as a lesser outcome.

The Conservatoires UK Strategic Plan 2024–2029 – the sector’s own five-year strategy document for its eleven member institutions, representing approximately 10,270 students – is revealing not because the sector never talks about portfolio careers, but because its strategic document does so little with them. The word “entrepreneurship” appears once, in a list of defining features, with no supporting detail. The words “portfolio career” do not appear. Nor do “business skills,” “career preparation” or “graduate outcomes.” The plan does not cite any graduate employment data. It explicitly states that CUK “does not have over-arching Key Performance Indicators.”

The plan focuses on advocacy, lobbying, conferences and external relationships. These are legitimate functions. But the QAA’s own Subject Benchmark Statement for Music, updated in April 2025, now explicitly states that music graduates “are frequently self-employed, and often have portfolio careers.” When the quality assurance body has recognised the reality, the sector’s strategic plan cannot afford to be silent on it.

Why it’s hard to change

I understand why structural reform is slow. Performance hours are often tied to degree validation requirements – reducing them to make room for career skills can threaten the academic standing of a programme. Conservatoires compete on reputation for performance excellence, and admitting openly that most graduates will not become soloists can feel like undermining the brand.

None of this means performance faculty should be expected to teach career skills – that would be unreasonable, and it misses the point. The answer is to bring in external specialists: founders, portfolio-career professionals, arts managers and entrepreneurs who are actively working in the fields students will enter. In my experience, practitioners who are still immersed in real-world businesses and markets deliver far more relevant, up-to-date teaching than anyone who has been institutionalised for years. Conservatoires that rely solely on permanent staff for this provision risk offering career advice that is already out of date.

There is also a deeper cultural issue. If the institution’s implicit promise is “you could be the next Nicola Benedetti,” anything that acknowledges the statistical reality – that, according to the Musicians’ Census, only 3 per cent of musicians earn more than £70,000 a year – can feel like a betrayal of that promise. The culture of exceptionalism is hard to reconcile with the data.

But these constraints are reasons to be thoughtful about reform, not reasons to avoid it.

What my own career illustrates

My own trajectory illustrates the structural gap. Since writing that 2014 blog post, I have led sessions for Live Music Now musicians who told me repeatedly that they felt underprepared for the realities of working life, and I worked as Head of Professional Development at the Incorporated Society of Musicians, where I led seminars and webinars on business skills for more than 11,000 members – many of them the portfolio musicians I was writing about. I worked in audience data and marketing at Saffron Hall. I took a commercial scale-up from £500,000 to £15 million a year. I founded two e-commerce businesses. I built a full business intelligence platform using AI tools. I held a VP of Marketing role at an AIM-listed software company.

None of those skills were taught during my five years of conservatoire training. All of them could have been – not as replacements for performance, but as complements to it. Financial modelling belongs within an applied project module. Audience data and marketing strategy fit within a unit on musicians and their markets. Project management can be taught through assessed real-world placements. Digital literacy and AI fluency are no longer optional for any career. Governance and strategic thinking could be fostered through case-study teaching.

This is not about my career specifically. It is about the structural absence of any pathway that prepares conservatoire students for the careers the data tells us they will actually lead.

When I think of the most successful people from my years at conservatoire, many of them are not performing for a living. They work in arts education, learning and development, arts charities, arts management, or they have left the sector entirely and built successful careers elsewhere. That is not failure. It is exactly what a portfolio career looks like. But it was not what any of us were trained for – and the stigma compounds the problem. If the only institutional metric of success is a performing career, everyone else is left feeling as though they fell short.

What the sector should do

The evidence points to a set of practical changes that do not require dismantling what conservatoires do well.

First, embed career skills in the curriculum rather than bolting them on. Some conservatoires now offer the occasional lecture on tax returns or self-assessment – and that is welcome. But a tax lecture is not a career programme. Musicians need to understand how to manage a budget, assess the profitability of a project, find gaps in a market, price their work, make decisions under uncertainty and build a sustainable income from multiple sources. These are foundational business skills, not peripheral tips. Career preparation should be a core strand, running alongside performance training from the first year, not a supplementary afterthought.

Second, bring in practitioners. People who have built businesses, managed artists, run marketing departments, raised funding and navigated commercial markets bring a perspective that cannot be replicated by academics who have not done those things. Visiting lecturers, mentors and entrepreneur-in-residence schemes would cost relatively little and change the culture substantially.

Third, track real outcomes – and publish them. Disaggregated graduate destination data at one, five and ten years would tell the sector what it currently cannot answer: what are conservatoire graduates actually doing, how much are they earning, and how well did their training prepare them? The absence of this data is not a minor gap. It is a governance risk.

Fourth, address the stigma directly. Teaching, arts management, entrepreneurship and non-music careers are not failure. The institution has to believe this before students will. That means celebrating diverse career paths in prospectuses, alumni networks and public communications – not just in private conversations.

Fifth, create a genuine portfolio career pathway. Not a single module, but a track that runs alongside performance training throughout the degree, with professional placements, mentoring from alumni in diverse careers, and assessed projects that build real-world skills.

Sixth, diversify governance. Conservatoire boards need people who have built careers outside performing – people who understand commercial realities, data, technology and entrepreneurship. If every governor is a retired musician or an academic, the institution will keep reproducing what it already knows.

Where this leaves us

The UK music industry contributed a record £8 billion to the economy in 2024. It employs 220,000 people. It is one of the country’s great success stories. But 43 per cent of the musicians who power it earn less than £14,000 a year, and the institutions that train them have still not made career preparation a strategic priority.

In 2014, I wrote a blog post asking whether conservatoires were doing enough. The question went viral because musicians recognised it from their own experience. In 2026, we have national data, academic research and a strategic plan from the sector’s own representative body that, between them, confirm the gap I described. Conservatoires have built a patchwork of career and enterprise provision, and some of it is genuinely impressive – RNCM’s investment, RCM’s expanding careers centre, the academic work at Birmingham. But provision remains uneven in scale, status and curricular centrality, especially on traditional performance pathways. The core curriculum has not fundamentally changed, the stigma has not gone away, and the sector’s leadership has not yet made this a system-level priority.

Twelve years on, conservatoires have learned to talk about careers – but not yet to teach them.

Joel Garthwaite studied classical saxophone at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and performed with Lunar Saxophone Quartet and the London Contemporary Orchestra along side his work in arts marketing at Saffron Hall and the ISM, where he was Head of Professional Development. He has since built global commercial businesses from scratch, held a VP of Marketing role at an AIM-listed software company, and developed multiple commercially successful AI-enabled business intelligence softwares. He writes and speaks on arts leadership, audience growth, data strategy and the practical use of AI in decision-making across all sectors.

Joel is available to work with conservatoires and arts higher education institutions on curriculum design, career preparation programmes, visiting lectureships and board governance. If you’d like to start a conversation, please get in touch.

Sources cited in this article:

Joel Garthwaite
Next

The Arts Don't Have a Data Problem. They Have a Translation Problem.