Interested in the Music Industry? How about A&R?
K-POP has recently been very successful based on BTS' worldwide popularity, showing explosive growth in the Korean music market. You may have seen an article about the recent record exports surpassing 200 million dollars. As such, sales and value-added amount of the music industry are steadily increasing. Therefore, it shows endless possibilities, and many people are showing interest in the globalized Korean music market.
The music industry, which belongs to the media/entertainment industry, may sound unfamiliar because it is a field that requires expertise. Also, it will be difficult to prepare for employment because it is information that cannot be obtained as a major or liberal arts class in our university. Therefore, I would like to introduce the job A&R through this article and tell our readers how they can prepare to work in this industry. The music industry mainly includes music production and distribution, visual-related businesses such as planning, design, marketing and so on. Basically, A&R is an abbreviation for 'Artists & Repertoire', and it is a job that handles overall record production, planning, and distribution.
To put this simply, people in A&R find and foster talented artists to produce records, plan albums, and recruit writers who take charge of the concept. They receive potential songs and process the recording that takes place under the guidance of the A&R. After that, they manage the album until the released date. It may seem like the job of a songwriter, but this is a job where you can live by music without writing songs or lyrics.
After reading the above, it may seem like a job that requires quite a lot of expertise and has high entry barriers, but in fact, most workers take on a wide range of businesses. As such, "flexibility" is considered an absolute competency. Also, as K-POP's overseas expansion is active, there is a growing tendency to prefer people with outstanding "foreign language skills." This can be attributed to the increasing number of collaborations with foreign musicians and the increasing number of cases of coordinating opinions with foreign songwriters and choreographers.
If you are the type of person who continuously analyzes the reason why the music is good, the reason why certain artists are attracting attention, and the intentions behind different concepts, then this type of job could also be very suitable to you.
If you want to expand your professional music knowledge, one way is to join business education camps held by various entertainment industries during the vacation season. A representative example is the external activities of the FNC Entertainment practical training course.