A new initiative has been launched that hopes to increase diversity amongst producers working within the music industry, which even in 2025 is overwhelming male and more often than not, white and middle class.
The Future Producer Academy is the brainchild of Fraser T Smith who has worked with Adele, Stormzy and Celine Dion, and yes, he is very much white and male. To be fair to Smith, he has worked with a hugely diverse range of artists and in 2020 released an album 12 Questions (under the name Future Utopia) that raised this very issue of disparity of opportunity, amongst many others.
The idea is each year 16 aspiring young producers will be selected from across the UK to participate in this programme. Smith is keen to point that addressing the imbalance is central to the initiative and the Academy will actively draw from under-representative groups. “I’m delighted to launch the Future Producer Academy, and to be supporting the next generation of young music producers,” Smith said in a statement, “with our focus on restoring the imbalance of gender, culture and privilege within the UK’s creative space.”
The Academy is partnering with Music Guardians, The Music Producers Guild (MPG), Phonographic Performance Limited (PPL) as well as the online learning platform, Virtuoso. The scheme will offer mentorship from some of the most acclaimed professionals out there, as well as paid work placements for all students upon completion of the programme.
And that aim of ‘restoring the imbalance’ also extends to geography too. “We want to disrupt the notion that to succeed in music you must be based in London and as such our taught sessions will take place at various leading studios in different cities across the UK,” says Smith. “We’re on the lookout for existing music hubs and communities all around the UK and where they don’t yet exist, we will aim to build and support them.”
The Future Producer Academy is open to applications from now until April 10. So if you’re a producer aged between 16 and 24 and the sound of this tickles your fancy, get yourself over to futureproduceracademy.com pronto.
