On this page, you can find the Culminating Experience (CE) Projects for all graduate students from the Berklee College of Music master’s program Global Entertainment and Music Business (GEMB) from 2015 – present. Click on any title for more information and access to the full paper and other deliverables (if available).
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Music and Coffee: How does background music affect the value of a cup of coffee
Dik Sun Lai
2016Growing up in a hectic and hustling city like Hong Kong, many citizens consume caffeine to energize themselves to deal with the everyday workloads ahead, either from studies or work. This year, when I am studying in Europe, I discover that the culture of drinking coffee is even more prevailing. This huge demand in the coffee market attracts the visions of businessmen, triggering a trend of small coffee shops and cafés opening. However, due to the keen competition from large-scale chain coffee shops such as Starbucks and Pacific Coffee, it is difficult for these small coffee shops to survive and sustain. This phenomenon contributes to my thoughts of possible ways to increase their value. Simultaneously, a literature, which manifests the positive relations between background music and taste of wine triggered my research. In the following research paper, I am going to investigate into the relationships between the value of a cup of coffee and the background music.
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TEDx Berklee Valencia: Connecting the Dots
Rangel Toussaint
2016As one of the two Sponsorship Coordinators, now known as Partnership Coordinators, for the 2016 TEDxBerkleeValencia Team I, along with the rest of the team, will be bringing to fruition the Connecting The Dots TEDx Event on April 16th, 2016. It is common knowledge that connecting the dots is a form of puzzle containing a sequence of numbered dots that when connected in relative order depicts a certain image and that is, in a metaphorical sense, what the 2016 TEDxBerkleeValencia Team has aimed to accomplish come April 16th. We will host speakers, singers, and individuals from multiple disciplines that will come together to invite us into their world. By combining diverse ideas with new and creative ways of thinking and pushing the limits of expectations we will “connect the dots” and share with our audience a more enhanced and profound way to understand the world we live in.
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Externship for Midem Artist Accelerator
Jonathan Watcher
2016I received the opportunity to work as an extern for the Midem Conference. The position was with a particular arm of the conference called the “Midem Artist Accelerator”, which invites 12 bands from around the world to learn from top industry executives as well as perform at the associated Midem festival. Because of its close alignment with my professional goals and interests in the music industry, I accepted the offer to work as an extern. The details of this externship are the topic of this paper, as this job was my Culminating Experience. Below, I will describe the Midem Accelerator, the job position, expectations for this position, as well as the work that I completed.
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Woo Management
Kaylen Woo Poretzky
2016Woo Management is a rebranding and expansion of the existing company Patty Woo Management. Based in Los Angeles, California, Patty Woo Management is currently a sole proprietorship theatrical talent (actors and actresses) management company. This business plan proposes a rebranding initiative that would expand the type of talent represented to also include creatives in the music industry (artists, musicians, composers, producers, etc.) while maintaining a reputation of firm honesty and a dedication to only work with quality talent. Our mission statement is to protect and advise creative clients as to how thrive in the cutthroat entertainment industry.
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How to Build a Market Presence in China?
Jingjing Zhou
2016To launch of a music business that directly introduce foreign independent artists to China's music industry. The business provides consultancy services on market education, direct marketing and fan building, music publishing, licensing and distribution, as well as channels of monetizing music in a different market.
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What Tune Does the Bluebird Sing?
Wesley Trevor A'Harrah
2015What Tune Does the Bluebird Sing is a work of original research. In this study, I collected and examined Twitter usage and Next Big Sound data that covered 3000 professional musicians, representing hundreds of major music acts. The purpose of this study was to identify how music acts of varying genres utilize Twitter in distinct ways, and to differing effects. Finding trends in usage by specific genres, I came to several conclusions based on subjects from audience demographics and segments, technological fluency and workplace culture.
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The Music Industry in China: Analyzing Consumption, Marketing, and Historical Trends
Kyle M. Bagley
2015The project completed for my culminating experience was a research paper covering the music industry in China. My paper is an effort to provide a greater understanding of the country and how music is consumed and marketed. It starts with a literature review, which looks at historical realities in the country, first being the development of piracy in the country. Unlike the US, who views piracy as a digital issue, China has had problems with piracy going back to the 90’s, with illegal CD’s being sold on the black market. The paper also outlines methods of government censorship, in the form of social media control and festival closures. I also analyze how Western countries have influenced the music, through the opening of China’s borders, and through sovereign regions within China including Hong Kong and Taiwan. The second half of my paper outlines social media networks and habits. Platforms are analyzed individually by users, content, and trends to produce best practices and methods for success. Streaming services are also considered to measure current usage and provide an overview of the music technology market. Branding and sponsorships are briefly covered as an important method of raising money and awareness for artists and companies. Lastly, I discuss areas for growth and untapped markets within China, which include crowdfunding, and increasing merchandise and value added sales.
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How to Use Digital Currency as a Music Industry Standard? Connecting Currency with Music
Jennifer Buglione
2015The purpose of this research is to explore the world of digital currency and how it’s being used in the music industry. It’s not a secret that since the dawn of the Internet, the world as we know it is in a continuous state of change. Every industry is moving from physical to digital, including our payment systems. Consumers are spending more time and money on the Internet, which has led to innovations in digital currencies as recognized ways to pay for online content or physical products. These digital currencies may allow for innovation, and quite possibly revolution, in a music industry plagued by piracy, low royalty payouts and an overall indifference to pay for music, a once highly valued product. This research project aims to suggest how the music industry can use digital currency as a standard.
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PrimaveraPro Startups & Seed&Click
Isabel Cervera Aznar
2015This consulting project was created to provide an external advice for the firm Seed&Click, to help them improve business and organization results. Seed&Click is a young company created in 2013, as an investor network associated to a crowdfunding platform and it operates in three lines of business.
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Deacon Creative: An Entertainment Consulting Firm
Michael Deacon
2015My Culminating Experience project, developing a business plan, focused on this new company, Deacon Creative. This business, in its’ current developed form, is present as a boutique entertainment consulting firm, that specializes in bringing ideas into reality. It is designed to provide custom business solutions for artists and creative businesses, with a focus on being experts in simplicity.
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FLITS
Martin Erler
2015The initial goal was to write a business plan for the company Flits a real-time music event discovery platform (formerly known as WhatsOn). In addition to that, I set up the team, founded the company and we released an MVP. Therefore I see my project as bringing Flits alive.
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The Sound of Tomorrow: From Underground to Mainstream
Alexander Foing
2015This research project is intended to document the rise of an Underground Genre as it evolves and becomes a Mainstream attraction. The aim is to create a roadmap of the scene, and determine the underlying drivers of success (what factors are causing high levels of growth across the spectrum). The genre selected for this task is entitled “Future Bass”, a relatively new phenomenon that has become increasingly popular in America, Europe, and in the world of Electronic music. The sound is best described as a global melting pot of styles combining hip-hop, jazz & soul, and electronic music with signature EDM melodies, bass and synths. To provide a manuscript of its growth, a database was created measuring a multitude of social media metrics over a 6-month period (SoundCloud, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Instagram Followers). Almost 200 artists/labels were selected from 6 regions including: UK, USA, France, Australia, Canada, and Holland. Due to the heavy quantitative nature of this research, I used a quantitative inductive approach (where data are used to develop theory) in order to comment on the growth of this evolving sound.
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TEDxBerkleeValencia 2015
Michelle Golden
2015My Culminating Experience was taking on the role as Marketing Coordinator for TEDxBerkleeValencia, with the ultimate goal of strengthening the TEDx brand at the school, with the incorporation of this year’s theme, “Changing Currents,” and redefining the voice of TEDxBerkleeValencia across multiple platforms. The ultimate goal was to connect with the student audience and reach out to establish an extended audience outside of the Berklee community, into Valencia. I worked with Gwendolyn Alston, the Online Social Media Management Professor at Berklee Valencia, and the Founder of MocaMedia, a company that develops community engagement campaigns and strategies for independent films. We both shared the same goals, and on a weekly basis, spoke about how we can further increase exposure of TEDxBerkleeValencia to the school and neighboring community. In the spirit of innovation and community, the theme for TEDxBerkleeValencia 2015, Changing Currents, spoke to several notions of change: paradigm shifts; movement, both physical and societal; and new tendencies across multiple disciplines.
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Flits: UI / UX Development and Design
Fernanda Gómez
2015Concert navigation made easier. From its conception, Flits was designed as a mobile- based application dedicated to the facilitation of live music events based on the user’s location. Although the team quickly recognized and identified the competition, we still saw a need for a better interface, a better service, and a much better experience overall. We want to become the go-to app by providing a high-quality service and accurate and trusted information regarding the latest concerts and live music events taking place in our users’ corresponding cities. Flits understands that elements such as proximity and immediacy are staples in these types of applications. But we want to take it even further. When we talk about creating a better experience we imply a full transformation of product to persona. We want the app to feel like you, the user, are interacting with a friend, connecting with another concert-lover. We want it to have a personality. By adding different real-time features, implementing contextual UX navigational elements, and making the most of micro-interactions, Flits wants to connect you to your local music scene. Only thing left is for you to enjoy the night.
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The Road to G Arts
Tre’von Griffith
2015Over the course of the graduate program at Berklee Valencia I built a business plan/ business strategy that I hope to use as a guide to change the lives of young people across regions. G Arts Foundation is an arts organization dedicated to educating and supporting the next generation of performing arts. The organization will provide experiences to enrich and invest youth through fine and performing arts education by creating opportunities to make the arts more accessible.
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Speak for Music
Giselle Hausman
2015As an operational project, Speak for Music (SFM) is an organization that began at Berklee Valencia in the fall of 2014; founded by Gianni Abbott and Giselle Hausman, master students at Berklee College of Music Valencia, and Catalina Millán, a local language professor. SFM is a spoken word poetry project that aims to develop English skills through a creative medium. When combined, the power of spoken word poetry, music, and education can have a very strong impact. SFM connects Berklee Valencia to the wider creative and academic communities of the city, encouraging local collaboration. Additionally, this opportunity exposes Berklee’s name to residents around Valencia and highlights the importance of music in educational settings. Three students from Berklee’s Music Technology Innovation program will serve as educators, lecturing the Escuela Malvarrosa students on the technology in Studios A-D during their visit. The final album is scored with original instrumental music by Berklee Valencia students from a variety of programs.
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Plural Music, LLC
Alán Hensley
2015Plural Music is a young start-up company that entered the live music event production industry two year ago through their dance music concert series “The GetDowns”. The company originated in Stockton, California, but recently has moved to an office in Oakland, California. Most of the company’s operations occurs in the Bay Area of Northern California and the city of Stockton. Upon agreeing to collaborate for this consultation project, Plural Music devised a multi-faceted mission aimed at accomplishing three major goals: an analysis of the company’s current financial health and social media strategy, a report on suggesting a new revenue stream that leverages the company’s current assets, and the organization of a quarterly live dance music concert series.
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LIVEXMUSIC
Stephanie Hernandez Martinez
2015This consulting project was a collaboration to promote the existing music scene in Valencia, Spain. With more than seventy music venues, this city provides never ending possibilities to organize and manage live events and music concerts. Each venue is known to embrace its own unique style meaning various genres are found throughout the city on a daily day basis. From the intimate jazz clubs such as the Jimmy Glass Bar to large music halls like the Palau de les Arts. From café-theaters like Matisse to more exclusive spaces like the Loco Club.
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Crowdfunding and the Music-Making Paradigm: A Case on PledgeMusic
Megan Himel
2015This case is designed for an undergraduate or master’s level class in music business exploring business models, especially in the realm of blue ocean strategies in value proposition and revenues streams. It is ideal for considering ethical and transparent business practices within a notoriously unethical and veiled industry. It introduces students to business development tools such as SWOT analysis, while empowering them to understand institutional logic and its role in ethical and transparent business practices. Crowdfunding is a new tool that is disrupting the process of funding in the music industry. PledgeMusic capitalizes on this, while breaking into the third frontier of the music industry in order to increase sales power and marketing reach. This case is designed to study how PledgeMusic is participating in the paradigm shift that is occuring in the music industry, and encourage students to think critically and creatively about how to stay ahead of the curve as a leader in this quickly-changing market.
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MBC Festival and Sónar+D
Julia Hoffman
2015For my Culminating Experience project in the Global Entertainment and Music Business Master’s program of 2015 I focused on the music festival and conference sector of the international music industry, therefore complying with my focus in Live Events at Berklee College of Music - Valencia. The project consisted of two parts: a position on the Artistic Production team at the MBC Festival in Valencia and a position as Translator, Hospitality and PR at Sónar+D, Sónar Barcelona’s new technology and business conference during Sónar by Day. The two projects aligned with my focus in Live Music Events through the Live Practicum course, which took place during the spring term, 2015. While unalike in nature due to their differing phases of development, my experience at MBC and Sónar+D complemented one another by showing me the reoccurring structures, endeavors, methodology and roles observed in the production of events of this kind and size and by exposing me to the industry of live music events in Spain.
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ScreenSound Music Supervision
Babette Hoogendoorn
2015This paper for the Culminating Experience introduces a music supervision company called ScreenSound Music Supervision. This company specializes in classical music and makes exclusive bespoke content for film and video. Its potential clients are advertising agencies and filmmakers. ScreenSound Music Supervision will be set up to keep classical music alive and engage this music with the public in a more contemporary format. This is done via different creative ways, for example, a classical piece could be transformed into a dance music tune to get the audience's attention.
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International Expansion and Activation of the Yun SeokCheol Trio
Ji Won Hwang
2015The goal of this Culminating Experience project was to actively expand the Yun SeokCheol Trio more internationally, by developing the social media content to have a more global focus and running a long-term social media campaign. Furthermore, with the stronger social media, I was able to create an electronic press kit for the trio, which led me to confidently search for possible performance opportunities in Europe. I researched and updated possible gigs in Europe until I built stronger social media content to accompany the press kit.
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Warner Chappel Spain
Danel Illarramendi
2015This project consisted on a consulting project for the publisher Warner Chappell Spain. To complete their question, “How to better market our music to brand”, I needed to conduct a research that consisted in both, secondary information research and primary information research. Whereas the secondary information research consisted on articles and books about music advertising, the impact in music in advertising and even how psychological theories like neuroscience impacted in music advertising, the primary information research was, in the end, what brought most value to the project. It consisted in firstly, analyzing the music of successful Spanish advertisements of all time, trying to find similarities between them and seeing whether the music was key for them or not. Later on, I conducted a series of interviews with different profiles of industry specialists, not only music industry experts but, in fact, I also reached marketing specialists of IT companies and consumer goods companies. This led to interesting answers where sometimes all the interviewees clearly agreed on, and where sometimes, the variety of answers led to an interesting approach depending on the specialization area and hence, industry.
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Art & Fashion Sound Design
Aimée Jagou
2015As a culminating project I chose to work on the Business Plan of AM Agency, a company I have cofounded with Marie Trifault, student at l’IFM, a fashion school in Paris. AM Agency is a sound design agency dedicated to the fashion and art sectors. Our activity consists in illustrating musically the vision of a fashion designer or an artist, illustrating the message he/she wants to convey or giving other ways of translation to his/her work.
