No. Not to produce records, not to get hired by a studio, and not to make a living at it.
That's the short answer, and I'll stand behind it. But "no" on its own isn't much use to someone staring down a three-year enrolment, or to a parent who'd feel a lot better if the word "bachelor" was somewhere in the plan. So here's the longer answer, including the cases where a degree is exactly the right call.
I've taught Sound Production at university level. I've also spent twenty-five years in commercial studios, on records for Sony, Mushroom, Netflix and Eurovision. I've marked the assignments and I've hired the assistants, so I've seen this from both sides of the desk.
What a degree is actually optimising for
A bachelor degree is three years of assessed study, accredited by a university, and it's built to do a specific job: certify that you can learn at a certain level and produce academic work to a certain standard. That's what the letters after your name mean to the world. Not "this person can produce a record". "This person completed a course of study."
That matters, because the people who hire producers aren't asking the second question. They're asking a different one.
Picture the actual moment. An artist has a single, a release date, and a budget. They've got three producers in mind. They're not going to ask any of them where they studied. They're going to listen to what each of them made last, and pick the one whose records sound like the record they want. The producer with the degree and the producer without it are standing in exactly the same line, being judged by exactly the same thing.
Now the studio version. A studio needs an assistant. The owner doesn't read the CV first, or if they do, they read the bit that says what sessions you've been in. Then they put you in the room for a day and watch whether you can patch a headphone mix without being told twice. They're hiring hands and ears. The degree tells them nothing about either.
In this industry, the work is the credential. Everything else is a proxy, and the people doing the hiring don't need proxies, because they can listen.
The tech comparison, because it's the closest one
A bit over a decade ago, if you wanted to write software for a living, you did a four-year computer science degree. Then intensive coding bootcamps appeared, a few months long, taught by people who shipped code for a living, and a lot of employers stopped caring about the degree, because they could look at what you'd built.
The degree didn't become worthless. It became the right choice for a narrower set of people: those going into research, into academia, into fields where the theory is the job. For someone who wanted to ship products, the bootcamp got them shipping products three and a half years sooner.
Music production is in the same place, and it got there for the same reason. The tools got cheap, the work became visible, and the judgement moved from "what did you study" to "what did you make". Once a client can hear your last record on their phone in the car park, the certificate has nothing left to tell them.
My own path
I studied Audio Production at RMIT in 2000. I'm glad I did, and I'd say so to anyone. What it gave me was the fundamentals, in the right order, and something less obvious: the belief that I could actually do this for a living.
What it didn't give me was almost everything my career now runs on. The business side, which is arguably the most important part of having a sustainable career, I taught myself. The deep mixing and production skills, the ones clients actually pay for, I developed over years of sessions or learned from other producers in masterclass settings, including time under Michael Brauer and David Kahne. None of that was in the curriculum. Not because RMIT did a poor job, but because it isn't what a course of study is for.
When a degree is the right call
I said I'd be honest in both directions, so here's the other direction, and I mean it.
You want the academic route. If you're drawn to acoustics as a science, to research, to the theory for its own sake, a degree is where that lives. A studio can't give you that and won't try.
You want a pathway to postgraduate study. Masters, teaching, research. A bachelor degree is the entry ticket, and there isn't another one.
You want a career where a degree is on the job ad. Broadcast, government and education all hire that way. If you want to teach this in a university one day, you'll need the degree to get in the door, and I say that as someone who's been through that door.
You want a hedge. Some people, honestly, aren't sure this is the industry for them, and want three years that count for something outside it. A degree does that. A short intensive doesn't.
If that's you, go and get one. RMIT do it well, and I'd rather you went there with a clear reason than to a private college with none.
The three years, seen from the other side
Here's the exercise I'd do before enrolling. Take the same three years and lay them out the other way.
Year one. Learn the craft properly, in a room with working producers, fast. Then start on records. Not assignments. Records for real people, with a release date and an opinion on the other end of the phone. Assist wherever you can.
Year two. You've got a body of work now. Small, but real. Some of it is on streaming services with your name in the credits. You're starting to be the person someone calls.
Year three. You're working. Not rich, probably, but you're getting paid to produce, you have clients who come back, and you've made every early mistake on a real session where it cost you something and taught you everything.
At the end of the three years, the graduate has a certificate and a portfolio of assessments, and is about to start year one of the plan above. That isn't a criticism of graduates. It's just the arithmetic, and it's the arithmetic nobody lays out for you on open day.
For the parent reading this
I know the degree often isn't the student's idea. It's the safe option, and safe is what you want for your kid.
So let me put the question a different way. Not "will they have a degree at twenty-one", but "what will they have at twenty-one?" Three years of debt and a certificate an artist will never ask to see? Or three years of records, a client list, and a name people in the industry already know?
The safe option is the one that leaves them employable. In this industry, that's the second one.
And if they're not sure this is for them, don't spend anything yet. There are free short courses at academyofaudio.com that'll tell you both inside a weekend.
What I'd actually do
- Ask what the degree is for. Research, postgrad, broadcast, teaching, or a hedge. If that's a real answer, get the degree. RMIT.
- If the answer is "to become a producer", it's the wrong tool. Find the fastest route to a real record with a real client. That might be an intensive, it might be assisting in a studio, and it might be both.
- Get the theory anyway. Signal flow, acoustics, how a compressor actually works. You need it. You just don't need it to cost three years.
- Start making records now. Bad ones, to begin with. The first twenty are the frame everything else hangs on, and nobody gets to skip them.
The degree isn't the enemy. It's just an answer to a question you might not be asking.
