BA (Hons) Popular Music is designed for musicians and artists who want to refine their craft, define their artistic identity, and shape a sustainable career in the music industry. You will explore songwriting, live performance, and creative production in a dynamic and supportive environment, combining hands-on practice with critical reflection and cultural insight.
Collaboration and creativity are at the heart of this degree. You will take part in live projects, showcase your work in professional settings, and experiment with new approaches to composition, production, and performance. Alongside this, you will learn how to promote yourself as an artist through branding, digital presence, and audience engagement, ensuring your music reaches the people who matter most.
Taught by industry professionals and supported by a community of peers, mentors, and collaborators, this course gives you access to world-class facilities and the expertise to develop your authentic artistic voice. Whether your ambition is to perform, compose, produce, or innovate in new areas of music, this course will prepare you to thrive in a fast-changing creative world.
Key features
Develop Your Unique Artistic Identity: Explore songwriting, performance, and production to shape a distinctive musical voice and build a professional portfolio that showcases your originality.
Hands-On, Industry-Focused Learning: Work in world-class studios and take part in live projects, showcases, and collaborations with peers and industry professionals to gain real-world experience.
Career-Ready Skills and Professional Development: Learn self-promotion, digital presence, audience engagement, and industry insight to confidently navigate the music business and creative industries.
Supportive, Creative Community: Join a vibrant network of musicians, producers, composers, and mentors, collaborating across disciplines while receiving guidance and feedback to grow as an artist and professional.
Employability
A degree in Popular Music opens the door to a wide range of creative and professional opportunities. Graduates can go on to work as musicians, songwriters, composers, producers, live performers, recording artists, music directors, DJs, remixers, or sound designers.
Many also move into technical roles such as sound engineering, recording, mixing, mastering, live sound, music programming, or studio management. Others pursue the business and management side of the industry, taking on roles as music managers, promoters, booking agents, A&R representatives, publishers, tour managers, or marketing specialists.
The transferable skills you develop will also prepare you for work in education, media, and communication. Possible roles include music teaching, journalism, music therapy, podcasting, radio presenting, music criticism, social media management, and event production.
Whichever path you choose, you will graduate with a strong portfolio, a network of collaborators, and the confidence to carve your own space in the global music industry.
Facilities
Whether you’re a songwriter, performer, producer or someone who wants to get into the live events industry, you’ll study and learn in the heart of a world-class venue – Metronome on our City Campus.
With its unrivalled reputation for the quality of its sound and visuals, Metronome hosts a successful commercial programme of live events throughout the year – and it’s here where you’ll learn from the best and gain real work experience.
This world-class venue is home to some amazing facilities, jam-packed with recording studios, rehearsal rooms, performances spaces, and a 400-capacity venue.
Year 1
Year 2
Optional Placement Year
All students have the opportunity to undertake a placement year which you will be supported in sourcing, and you can decide whether this is right for you once you have completed years 1 and 2 of the course. This time spent working in industry provides our students with crucial work experience, which is highly prized and much sought after by employers upon graduation. If you are successful in securing a placement you will have the chance to gain an additional Certificate or Diploma in Professional Practice, dependent on duration.
Final Year
This course is available in Clearing. If you have submitted an application, you can add this course. If you haven’t sent us an application yet, you can do this until 24th September 2026.
This is the equal consideration deadline. You can still apply after this date, but your application may not receive guaranteed consideration.
Nottingham Trent University has participated in the Teaching Excellence Framework. These ratings were awarded in 2023, for four years.
See why these ratings were awarded
What does this TEF outcome mean?
The following entry points are available for this course:
A lower offer may be made based on a range of factors, including your background (such as where you live and the school or college you attended), your experiences and individual circumstances (you may have been in care, for example). This is called a contextual offer and we get data from UCAS to make these decisions. NTU offers a student experience like no other, and this approach helps us to find students who have the potential to succeed here, but may have faced barriers that can make it more difficult to access university.
We also consider equivalent qualifications and combinations. Please contact Nottingham Trent University Admissions team for further information.
NTU makes contextual offers for this course to give everyone a fair chance to access their chosen degree.
Contextual offers are lower than our standard entry criteria or may be an unconditional offer for courses that require a portfolio. We also take individual circumstances into account when we receive results and may accept grades lower than our published criteria.
We use a range of data from UCAS to make our offers and more information on our approach is available at the link below.
This section shows the range of grades that students who received offers were previously accepted on to this course with (learn more).
It is designed to support your research but does not guarantee whether you will or won't get a place.
Admissions teams consider various factors, including interviews, subject requirements, and entrance tests. Check all course entry requirements for eligibility.
We are unable to show previous accepted grades for this course. This could be because the course is new, it's a postgraduate course, there isn't enough historical data, or the provider has opted out of sharing their entry grades data for this course - learn more.
This report uses your grades to show how students with similar results have done when applying to this course in the past. Sometimes, there isn’t data for every possible set of grades. When that happens, universities and colleges occasionally fill in the gaps for sets of grades that are typically accepted.
| Location | Fee | Year |
|---|
Tuition fee status depends on a number of criteria and varies according to where in the UK you will study. For further guidance on the criteria for home or overseas tuition fees, please refer to the UKCISA website.
The tuition fees above are subject to parliamentary procedure. They haven't been confirmed yet, but we expect them to be finalised by May 2026. The level of tuition fees for the second and subsequent years of your undergraduate course may increase in line with inflation and as specified by the UK government.
Phone:0115 8486000
Our Clearing Hotline is opening hours are: Monday to Thursday 0930-1630; Friday 0930-1600
From 14 August we have extended opening hours:
Thursday 14 August 0800 - 2100
Friday 15 August 0800 - 1900
Saturday 16 August 0900 - 1700
Sunday 17 August 1000 - 1400
Monday 18 August - Friday 22 August 0900-1700
50 Shakespeare Street
Nottingham
NG1 4FQ
At Nottingham Trent University
