Andrew Dubber
Senior Lecturer & Knowledge Transfer Fellow
Andrew Dubber is a senior lecturer in the music industries at the Birmingham School of Media. He is also an Arts and Humanities Research Council Knowledge Transfer Fellow in music industries innovation, and a founder member of the Interactive Cultures Research Centre. He joined the University in 2004. His specialism is in radio and music industries innovation. Andrew Dubber works at the heart of the creative industries sector.
He is one of the most read experts in online music business and wrote a free e-book in 2007 that has been downloaded more than 300,000 times. The book, entitled The 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online, has been translated into Dutch, French, Spanish, Chinese and German.
An online music consultant, a co-founder of Music Think Tank and the author of New Music Strategies, the New Zealander acts as a consultant to more than 30 music and radio businesses in the UK and Europe, as well as New Zealand and Brazil - from established record labels and retailers to entrepreneurial online music start-ups - and is on the advisory boards of Bandcamp (US), Meetsound (France) and Un-Convention (UK).
His New Music Strategies site draws about 30,000 music industry readers a month and he is followed by – and engages with – more than 3,000 people, mostly from the creative sector, on Twitter. His expertise in the music industry is such that he is frequently asked to speak at industry events and conferences. This year he has given a seminar about public service broadcasting and music in the online environment for Finnish Public Broadcasters YLE in Helsinki via Skype.
His article, entitled The Endgame of Creative Economy, has been published in After The Crunch, a book published by Creative & Cultural Skills, and Counterpoint, the British Council Thinktank. He is heavily involved with the research that is being carried out into the future of music.
“If history – or media ecology - has taught us anything, it’s that making a prediction about the impact of shifts in technology on human behaviour will pretty much guarantee that you’re going to get it wrong.”
“Predicting the future based on trends is a guaranteed sure-fire way to get things wrong, because the unexpected almost always happens. It’s like the computer scientists in the 1950s who predicted that by 2005, there would be five computers in the world, and they’d be the size of skyscrapers. Rather than try and guess what ‘we will all do in the future’, instead think about what you should be doing now.”