Music and Popular Music

Music and popular music is a combination that brings together the traditions of formal musical study, including theory, history, analysis and classical repertoire, with the more practice-oriented, culturally diverse world of contemporary popular forms. Popular music encompasses rock, pop, jazz, electronic music, world music and the recording industry, and studying it seriously requires understanding how it is made, how it circulates, how it relates to audiences and cultural contexts, and how it has evolved as a set of practices over the past century. Together with formal musical study, this produces graduates with a wide-ranging musical intelligence.

At the University of Liverpool you will study this three-year full-time programme, which includes a sandwich placement year, a year abroad and embedded work placement opportunities. From the popular music side, you will engage with areas including performance, technology, audio-visual music, world music and the music industry, focusing in greater depth in the later years on the areas that interest you most, whether that means history, psychology, audio-visual practice, live performance or popular composition and songwriting. The university's location in Liverpool, a city with an unrivalled place in the history of popular music, gives the whole programme a distinctive cultural resonance.

The typical entry tariff for this programme is around 168 UCAS points.

Graduates of music and popular music programmes enter a genuinely diverse range of careers. Music teaching and education, both in schools and in the private sector, is a common destination. Others work in music production, studio recording, live sound engineering, music management, publishing, journalism and broadcasting.

The music industry more broadly, including streaming, radio, artist management, events promotion and music supervision for film and television, offers further paths. Some graduates continue to academic study at postgraduate level, pursuing research in musicology, ethnomusicology or music technology. The combination of analytical depth and practical versatility that this programme develops gives graduates unusual range across the musical professions.