The Course
This is your chance to be who you want to be musically, learn about the business, match your music with an audience and plan a working life playing music.
We will also develop your musical literacy and technical skills.
There are four themes:
- Music performance
- Creation
- Production
- The music business and the context in which music happens.
Average places available: Up to 57 each year
Career prospects
We have strong links with the music industry and hold frequent in-house auditions and showcases for record and publishing companies. Our students have won many songwriting competitions. Our graduates have achieved chart success across the world, as writers, producers and performers.
Many have signed recording and publishing contracts. Career outcomes include working as session musicians, as music producers and as music writers for computer games and advert campaigns. In addition, you are eminently qualified to pursue careers within music education or within the wider world of business.
Each year we conduct a survey of our alumni who graduated almost four years earlier to find out what they did after leaving us. You can see the results of the latest survey by clicking on the factsheet image.
We also take part in the annual Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education (DLHE) survey to find out what our graduates are doing six months after they left us. The results are published on Unistats and you can see summary statistics in the Key Information Sets box at the bottom of this page.
The Graduates
Many of our Music graduates have been instrumental in top ten hits across the world not just as performers but as writers and producers.
Indie-pop trio The Wombats met and formed here. Their second album This Modern Glitch reached number 3 in the UK charts in April 2011.
2003 Music graduate Sandi Thom’s debut album Smile, It Confuses People... sold over a million copies and reached number 1 in 7 countries. Norwegian graduate Mads Hauge co-wrote and produced Pixie Lott's number 1 singles Mama Do and Boys and Girls.
Fellow Norwegian Jonas Alaska, who is a singer-songwriter, won the best newcomer prize at the Spellemannprisen 2011 (Norway’s version of the Grammy Awards) in January 2011.
One of our Music graduates is composer in residence at the Donmar Warehouse.
Many Music and Sound Technology graduates are signed with leading labels including Universal, Domino, Hubris Records and top jazz label Candid Records.
Others are composing and arranging for film, TV and video games. One of our graduates has worked for a number of years for George Lucas at Lucas Arts in San Francisco as a Staff Composer for Star Wars video games.
Some of our graduates area working as musical directors in musical theatre or in bands for musical theatre tours.
Our graduates have also gone on to work alongside many world famous musicians: this may be as backing singers, instrumentalists (e.g., drummers, guitarists, keyboard players), songwriters, support groups or as their sound engineers (working on their albums in studios or on their live sound on tour).
The list of artists that Music or Sound Technology graduates they have worked with covers just about every style of music and includes Beyoncé, AC/DC, Alexandra Burke, Coldplay, Sheryl Crow, Death Cab for Cutie, Eliza Doolittle, Florence and the Machine, Guns N’ Roses, Lady Gaga, Jools Holland, KD Lang, Madonna, John Martyn, Paul McCartney, George Michael, Muse, Roll Deep, Britney Spears, Take That and KT Tunstall, to name but a few.
The Staves, fronted by Jessica Staveley Taylor who studied here and graduated in 2010, have been signed to Atlantic Records and are an iTunes tip for 2012. Photograph by Rebecca Miller.
Masterclasses
Practitioners, well known and perhaps not so well known, from all performing arts disciplines participate with us. Many of our Patrons and all our Companions have shared their professional lives and the lessons they have learnt, often the hard way. Here's just a few of those sessions.
Key Information Set
The Key Information Set (KIS) below provides prospective students with facts and figures about studying at LIPA, which are comparable with other institutions.
As part of the Higher Education Funding Council’s work to enhance the information that is available about higher education, the KIS includes information such as:
- Course professional accreditation
- Assessment methods
- Learning and teaching activities
- Tuition fees
- Accommodation availability and cost
- Student satisfaction (National Student Survey)
- Post study employment prospects (Destination of Leavers from Higher Education)
This information is summarised in the “widget” (below). The widget also contains links to the Unistats website that enables you to compare KIS data with other courses.
Please remember to read these facts and figures in conjunction with the other information on the LIPA website to give you the fullest possible insight to studying here.