If today’s ever-morphing music business had its own theme song, it would be “Changes,” David Bowie’s sputtering anthem about the nature of artistic reinvention.

The digitization of music—including the advent of iPods and music downloading—is proving to be a fan heaven, drawing millions of listeners as well as musicians who mostly want a chance to be heard, according to a recent New York Times story. But for established recording companies, the instantaneous and often unpaid distribution of music online is, as one reporter describes it, “business hell.” CD album sales are declining and sales of downloads aren’t making up for losses.

In another era, major labels helped create stars through promotion and publicity, but their role has been shrinking. “Multimillion-selling musicians who have fulfilled their major-label contracts—Radiohead, the Eagles, Nine Inch Nails—are deserting those companies, choosing to be free agents rather than assets for the system that made them famous,” the Times article continues.

Frost School of Music associate professor Rey Sanchez, B.M. ’80, M.M. ’82, points to the issue often bandied about among today’s musicians and music company executives: “Nowadays the question is, ‘How do you make money with ‘free’?’ But in many ways, things have always been the same. There’s someone out there who creates really beautiful music and someone out there who wants to enjoy it.”

He says the demand for music is as strong as ever, but staying afloat in today’s music business means finding creative ways to ride the digital wave. Frost School of Music Dean Shelton “Shelly” Berg says music education must stay in sync with a changing industry to help ensure students will immediately land jobs after graduation.

“Every student musician will be engaged in entrepreneurial factors,” proclaims Berg, an internationally recognized jazz pianist, composer, arranger, and educator. “The most important thing for me is that we can affect the landscape of music by what our students go out and do. Students who graduate have to find their niche. Music is much more niche-based than it ever was before.”

The Frost School’s Music Business and Entertainment Industries program (MBEI) is one of the few programs of its kind in the nation designed specifically to roll with the times. Established in 1964, the program focuses on intellectual property rights administration, which includes publishing, licensing, royalties, and artists and repertoire administration. Courses in both the Frost School of Music and UM’s School of Business Administration help prepare students for careers with record companies, music publishing houses, talent agencies, and the like.

Sanchez—who is the MBEI program director as well as a voting member of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences—says much of the MBEI program’s coursework consists of rights administration and online music and licensing. “The emphasis of our program is the whole idea of intellectual property and how to monetize it. We altered our curriculum five years ago in anticipation of changes, and it’s turned out exactly how we anticipated.”

Sanchez says today’s music can’t actually be free because people need to make money. Instead, it needs to feel free. “For years overpriced records were sold with eight out of ten songs no one wanted to listen to,” he adds.

Sanchez describes the process by which sites like www.spiralfrog.com—a supported legal download site owned by Universal Music—generate revenue while inviting visitors to download music gratis. “You fill out a questionnaire once a month that takes 30 seconds. How valuable is it for an advertiser to know what you like? It’s like money in the bank for them.”

It’s the job of Sanchez and other faculty in the Frost School to maintain progressive knowledge of the music business, and programs like MBEI have played a significant role in helping students quickly get jobs in the industry.

“How does a music student avoid waiting tables upon graduation? What we do is give them the real deal,” says Frost School assistant professor Serona Elton, M.M. ’95, who also works as a consultant for Sony BMG Music Entertainment. “We don’t skim the surface; we dive into the minutiae so they go out there with a deep and broad foundation of knowledge that many people just don’t have.”

Diving deep means real-world experience, and for a music student, there’s probably no better opportunity than working for ’Cane Records or Cat 5 Music Publishing. ’Cane Records is one of the first-ever college record companies (a self-sustaining business with no outside funding), and Cat 5 Music Publishing is the first-ever graduate-student-run, full-service music publisher. Cat 5 recently forged an administration deal with Peermusic, a major independent music publisher with a catalog of more than 300,000 song titles.

Jim Progris, chair of the Music Media and Industry Department (which houses the MBEI program), waxes nostalgic about several Frost School firsts: “We had the first music business program at a major university, the first graduate program, and the first international music licensing course. And now we’re the first school to have a program to do this kind of deal with Peermusic.”

As one of the founders of ’Cane Records, Elton can attest to the importance of acquiring solid professional experience as early as possible. Upon graduation she quickly found employment in New York City at EMI Recorded Music, North America, where she designed a royalty system for artists and held a number of positions, including vice president of mechanical licensing and repertoire data services. Now, as an advisor for students at ’Cane Records, her career has come full circle.

“When we started ’Cane Records [in 1993], we saw an opportunity to put actual experience on our resumés before finishing our degrees,” she recalls. “The University gave us the green light but didn’t fund it. We had to raise the money to put out our first album. We signed a band, listened to demo tapes—did everything a record label does. It was one of the best times of my life. It was just so exciting, the rush, the pressure. And ’Cane Records has consistently put out a record a year ever since.”

While record-label experience is an asset to any musician’s skill set, many are subscribing to the philosophy of Radiohead, the Eagles, and Nine Inch Nails and becoming free agents. Guitarist Daniel Lanois, who has produced U2 and Bob Dylan, told The New York Times he sells his music directly online in high fidelity.

“We can record something at night, put it on the site for breakfast, and have the money in the PayPal account by 5,” Lanois said. “With all due respect to my very great friends who have come up in the record-company environment, it’s nice to see that technology has opened the doors to everybody.”

Cava Menzies, a second-year graduate student in the Frost School’s Media Writing and Production program, says nowadays it’s up to musicians to market their own work.

“It’s what I think about constantly. I just self-produced my own album, and it’s selling on iTunes and CD Baby,” says Menzies, a self-described hip-hop fusion musician whose songs can be heard at www.myspace.com/cavamenzies. “I love the age we’re in. I feel incredibly enabled because we no longer have to turn to record labels to distribute our work. It’s better to have your own business platform.”

MBEI graduate student Eduardo “Dudu” Pereira, whose rock band The River Raid (www.myspace.com/riverraid) was a finalist in this year’s International Songwriting Competition, has a slightly different perspective. He says it’s still extremely difficult for a small band to turn a profit. “We’re still fighting to get our space in the online war. It’s great that we have the Internet and people can listen to our music everywhere, but to really make money you need to sign with a major label or create your own company.”

After graduating from the MBEI program, Anne Cecere, B.M. '98, took a different approach to creating a successful career in the music business-she carved a path through Hollywood. She landed a job working with Grammy- and Emmy-winning film composer Mark Isham. She is now the associate director of film/TV relations at BMI, a music performing rights company. She was previously on the 'Cane Records staff and now works with Sanchez on Cat 5 projects.

"It took me five months to get my first job in L.A.," Cecere says. "But when I did, it was a major job, and UM really prepared me for it. The classes I took were very important, like copyright law and international marketing for the record business."

She worked with Isham on six films, including Crash and The Cooler, and has since worked with music supervisors on various television shows, such as Grey’s Anatomy and CSI: Miami. She notes that The O.C. and Grey’s Anatomy were at the forefront of using popular music and putting out soundtracks, which included bands such as Snow Patrol, one of BMI’s affiliates.

“Back in the day, when you wanted to break a band, you wanted them to get on as many radio stations as possible. Film and TV are the new radio,” she says. “Now you get them on Grey’s Anatomy, and look how many eyes and ears are seeing and hearing them all at once.”

The Frost School’s Berg agrees: “The most important person in Hollywood now guides the selection of music for TV and movies.”

Persistence is another quality that can help the roughly 100 undergraduate and 25 graduate students enrolled in the MBEI program find jobs in today’s music marketplace. “If we set the bar high enough for them to get into the school, that’s what it’s about,” Sanchez says. “I’m really looking for self-starters, free thinkers, and entrepreneurial-minded students. You can’t survive here if you’re waiting to be told what to do.”

MBEI students are required to get interviews and internships on their own. “If your student can’t convince someone to [let him] work for free, how’s he going to get a job?” Sanchez says, noting that this exercise builds the confidence necessary for success in the music biz. “A large number of our students wind up where they want to wind up. There’s a certain swagger among them. We like to say our students are politely aggressive.”

Randall Foster, M.M. ’05, is a licensing manager at Naxos, a leading classical music label based in Nashville, Tennessee. He credits his Frost School training and his own tenacity with helping him land a job. “I was very hungry, and UM’s reputation certainly helped. Every single UM music school alum I know of who graduated last year has a job in the music industry.”

Some of the connections students make for internships and jobs after graduation come from the weekly Music Business Forum, a significant Frost School resource that invites top executives from different areas of the music and entertainment industries to be guest speakers at the school.

“At least two of my internships stemmed from the Friday Music Business Forums. They were great networking opportunities,” says Elizabeth Lowry, B.M. ’03. The MBEI graduate now works in Sony BMG’s Global Digital Business Group on its U.S. Digital Sales team, selling mobile assets to Verizon Wireless, AT&T, and Virgin Mobile. She returned to the University to speak at a Friday forum last fall. Originally a voice major, Lowry says she had to choose between a performing career and a music business career, a decision most music majors have to make at some point.

“I was told as a female my voice wouldn’t fully develop until I was 30. I didn’t want to struggle in a performing career until I was in my prime. I also wanted to have a business background. The Music Business major allowed me to have both, as voice remained my instrument,” says Lowry, who still sharpens her performance chops by singing with the Manhattan Choral Ensemble, a semi-professional group in New York City.

Cecere also entered the University as a classical voice major. “Halfway through I thought it was a smarter decision to also learn the business side. If you’re spending the money, you might as well get a business degree too. And look what happened—I ended up going into the music business,” says Cecere, who has worked closely with some of BMI’s most celebrated film and television composers, including John Williams, Danny Elfman, and Mike Post.

But the common denominator for all the MBEI program faculty members and alums we spoke to is that music remains their number one passion.

“With our program, it’s all about the music,” says Sanchez, a guitarist who is currently recording an album with his Latin-bluegrass fusion band Yerba Blue. “And in the business, we’re going back to the basics. We have a new dean who’s active with his band. Shelly is first and foremost a musician, a person who practices and who leads by example. We like to see the heads of record companies practicing music every day.”

About all those changes the business is experiencing, Berg notes that every revolution in music has caused anxiety. When radio, the phonograph, and then the CD arrived on the scene, people wondered what would happen. “If we’re going to hold true to form, every development in music has vastly increased the amount of commerce. And now music is much more accessible on a larger scale,” he says.

“Music is about beauty, about honesty and honest expression of sorrow and happiness, and we get to express that in a truthful way,” Berg continues. “I’m ever the optimist. There’s always talent coming to the fore. Music is the mortar of humanity. It binds us together. There’s an importance to it. And if we can bring those values to the world through our students, the world will be better off.”

JILL BAUER is a book author and freelance writer in Miami, Florida.