Two of our  Level 1 Music Production students recently attended a high-profile music industry networking and Q&A event called The Student Sessions, courtesy of an invitation for Dv8 Sussex from BIMM and The Great Escape Festival – on May 9th.

Aidan Mant and Alfie East  were able to see guest speakers such as Andrea de Leon (RockCorps/The Young Guns Network), Glenn Cooper (Director of Digital, Island Records), Mike Ajayi (A&R Manager, Infectious Music), Simon Drake (Naim Label/BPI Young Executive Board) and Goc O’Callaghan (Director of ArcTanGent festival). The audience was made up of young musicians, producers and future music business leaders

Alfie and Aidan had never been to any sort of event like this before, but demonstrated great networking skills and spoke to Simon Drake about careers in the industry, opportunities for young people with learning difficulties to make a living from music, what equipment bedroom producers should be using and how best to approach labels with new music. They swapped details and Simon said he’d listen to some of the boys’ mixes.

The Q&A was followed with a conversation between Tony Wadsworth (former CEO of EMI Records – responsible for careers of Radiohead/Coldplay/Robbie Williams) and Seymour Stein (American music legend, President of Sire Records and the man who discovered Madonna/The Ramones/Talking Heads).

Alfie – “I got to meet Simon (Drake), who was in charge of Naim Label. I asked him if learning difficulties affect me becoming a music producer. He said ‘It doesn’t affect you if you are focused on what you want to achieve’. I found this inspiring!”

Aiden – “Great Escape was a great experience. It was good to hear from the industry specialists and how they see music moving forward, I was shocked to find out in one country they are going to stop distributing CDs. It was good to hear what it was like to sign big artists like Maddona. ;) It was sick.”

You can find the full BIMM press release here.

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