It starts with Britney Spears. More specifically, “…Baby One More Time,” the pop star’s debut hit from 1998. That’s the song Jeremy Morris, a professor of media and cultural studies in the Department of Communication Arts, uses to launch his uber-popular course Music Industries and Popular Culture. Now in its second year, the class generates a sizable waiting list each time he teaches it.
The course grew out of Morris’ long-running podcasting and music class, in which he typically spent 10 weeks teaching the former topic and a mere two on the latter, specifically on the impact of digital music. His students unequivocally wanted more.
“They were like, we don’t really have a class on the music industry, how to get into the music industry or what the music industry looks like in the greater realm of communication and media jobs,” says Morris, who is also a director of graduate studies. “Everybody nodded approvingly whenever I said, ‘Oh, should I do a whole class on that?’”
Morris based the structure of his class on writer and podcaster Rob Harvilla’s popular podcast series “60 Songs That Explain the ’90s.” In each episode, Harvilla digs into how the song and the artist fit into and defined the era.
Morris begins each class session the same way, using songs as jumping-off points for the industry and cultural themes he’s discussing with his students. Spears serves as an entrée to the late 1990s — the era in which CDs, teen stars and boy bands were ascendant, right before the internet and music streaming upended everything. A live version of Taylor Swift’s “Cruel Summer” jump-starts a discussion on the business of concerts and how Ticketmaster and Live Nation’s dominance has caused ticket prices to skyrocket. Doja Cat’s “Vegas,” a song that heavily samples Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog,” covers copyrights and responsibilities.
“I’m trying to get them to think about, assess and map what the structure of the contemporary popular music industry looks like and get them to analyze and think critically about the role that music and music circulation play in their everyday lives,” says Morris. “I want to spark some questions for them about what it means to work in this space and what kinds of implications there are for culture and for people’s social identities.”
The class also includes a technical aspect. Morris asks students to pull a Harvilla by assigning them to pick a song and create their own 15-minute podcast in Adobe Audition to talk about how it connects to a trend or topic that’s been covered in class. He also asks them to map the various roles that are part of the industry, from performers to the music supervisor who places popular songs in television commercials.
Many of Morris’ students are transformed by the experience. Kylie Kurzban, a junior who ducked into the inaugural class as a sophomore in pursuit of her digital studies certificate, ended up launching the Wisconsin Music Business Club (WMB), which is the first student club of its kind. Last semester, WMB hosted several events featuring guests from the music industry. Kurzban also used the things she learned in Morris’ class to land a summer internship at SiriusXM.
“It was my favorite class I’ve taken at Wisconsin,” says Kurzban, a Californian who’s hoping to get a gig in music programming. “I went into it with such a blind perspective on music. I only knew it as a consumer, and I walked away from it knowing so much more as a whole.”
Morris knows there will be no shortage of topics to cover in future years as the class evolves. Artificial intelligence is continuing to transform the music industry, as regular music lovers gain the ability to use voice clones of popular artists (Drake, Sabrina Carpenter, etc.) to create their own ersatz digital hits.
“I think the music industry finds that extremely frightening,” says Morris. “What regulations and policies are going to come out around that? What kinds of things are we going to see in terms of artists being able to license their voice and allow people like you and me to create a song with the use of their voice?”
The trick, he knows, will be finding enough time to cover it all.
“This is the problem with the course — trying to cram everything into 50 minutes and letting my students have 10 or 12 of those minutes to talk about Taylor Swift, because so many of them want to,” jokes Morris. “I think students fundamentally enjoy talking about music, so it’s nice to have a space where we can do that.”
