“The music industry, as it is now, is in crisis,” says Trevor Barrett ’08 (Music Industry Studies), a music man since he took up the trumpet in the fourth grade.

Barrett penned a piece about Anton Dvořák that appeared in Music & Vision magazine on the centennial of the celebrated Czech composer’s “New World Symphony,” but he also is fond of the classic rock of Alice in Chains and The Eagles—his high school rock group, Chamber 45, played the Sunset Strip “with minimal success”—and counts jazz trumpeters Maynard Ferguson and Miles Davis as musical influences.

He has lovingly chosen music for movie trailers, “sifting through hours of music in the company library,” and even had a “very cool” assignment as music supervisor for presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s introductory video at the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

For a man so passionate about music, the crisis surrounding it is painful.  “But out of crisis come pioneering ideas,” he said, “so it’s also exciting.”

Actually, Barrett noted, music is “thriving” with the advent of new technologies and delivery methods, but “it is the recording industry that is failing…because it has failed to address the wants of its customers.” At CSUN, he recruited music professor Joel Leach as mentor for his 2007-08 Presidential Scholars project: a 76-page business plan backed up by prodigious research. “I wanted to put out an original idea of what could work for the future,” he said.

His “semi-radical ideas” included “a hybrid model of free music downloading coupled with payments to the record company on a subscription basis, and some mathematical formulas related to payment disbursement.”

With the music business in a state of flux, Barrett candidly observed that the ideas he worked out so carefully in 2007-08 already are “pretty much obsolete.” But his diligence paid off. His business model functioned as a thesis project, enabling him to demonstrate to Leach his “strictly individualized work and original ideas.”

Barrett entered the UCLA School of Law in August. He will become an entertainment attorney, specializing in intellectual property.

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Presidential Scholars