Big Music Project offers young people in the UK access to music industry internships

The music industry is a notoriously difficult one to enter, with horror stories of year-long unpaid internships to get that famous “foot in the door” sadly still all too common. 

However, The Big Music Project aims to shake things up by offering paid internships in music businesses across the UK, thanks to funding by The Big Lottery Fund and Global’s Make Some Noise. 

The scheme is in collaboration with charity UK Youth, the BPI and Global’s Capital radio brand, and has already funded 24 internships over the past year, paid at the Living Wage of £9.15 per hour in London and £7.85 elsewhere in the UK. 

The project is important especially as young people across the country receive the results from their school or university exams and will be looking for experience/a way into this appealing but still hard-to-access industry. It is essential to enable students from all backgrounds to take part in an industry that in the past has - due to the unpaid nature of internships - led people to lead double lives (working at night to support themselves) or implicitly limited access to positions to those who could afford not to be remunerated for long stretches of time.

(Andrea Leonelli)