Jack Abraham

I come from the independent music sector. My work centred on artist management, live and brand partnerships. I founded and ran the music venue, private events agency and record label Kansas Smitty's. I have been commissioned by companies like Samsung, Courvoisier and Apple to produce original music and have created activations for Alan Yau, Jim Beam, Reyka Vodka and many other F&B clients at festivals and stages all over England.

I have produced records, festival stages and one-off experiential shows. I launched KSTV; an award winning live streaming platform during Covid and I have had the privilege of managing multiple artists and their projects at different stages of their career — providing strategic and tactical support whilst working very closely on the creative process to ensure that the right compromises were made in pursuit of their creative vision.

I am still active consulting creatives on their projects. Most recently working as tour and label manager for Mica Millar and programming public and private events for a range of clients including Estelle Manor and Ronnie Scott's. I have also recently launched The East Oxford Jazz Festival scheduled for spring 2027. For music consulting work or help booking excellent music for your event get in touch.

Reflecting on this work now, what I enjoyed the most was building the teams, coaching the artists I managed, supporting the people who worked for me and watching them all (mostly) flourish.

I am currently a lecturer in music business at Guildhall School of Music and Drama and am a senior lecturer at ICMP, BIMM and Westminster. I lecture on a range of modules in fundamentals of live production and music business but I am most interested in the modules that allow me to practise futuring with the students — helping them to develop their opportunity recognition abilities and put into practice what they have learned.

I have arrived in higher education, despite having no degrees myself, as a result of meeting many recent graduates from prestigious universities who I felt would not be able to get what they wanted back from the music industry they were now thrust into. I believed at the time that this was simply due to not having enough experience and knowledge about how it actually worked.

This led me to want to explore higher education itself and figure out what was going on in these universities — and so, for the last six years, I have been working in HE where I discovered the reasons for the disconnect I felt between what students were prepared for and what the industry expected are much more complex than I imagined.

Building a career in the music industry is challenging and there is no one single path. Which is why since 2020 through my work in universities, 1-2-1 coaching and as a mentor with Help Musicians I have been swimming upstream. As of right now I am working on the prototypes which, I hope, will develop into working tools which will radically improve the delivery of music business and events education in the UK.

I believe that there has never been more opportunity than now for agency and creativity to flourish. There is an urgent need to develop methods which can reveal this worldview to students and young people and support the development of happy, dynamic, engaged and curious artists and strategists.

If you work at an institution or are an educator of any kind and would like to share ideas on how we can solve some of the issues we see every week in our classrooms please get in touch. If you are a student, creative strategist or an artist and you would like to discuss your work or learn more about what I do please book your free 30 minute session with me on the link at the top right of the page.

In my spare time, in an effort to work towards a future I want my children to live in, I am the regional leader for Oxfordshire for the Smartphone Free Childhood movement. Simply put I believe that children need to be children for as long as possible. I am also a youth phase coach at Oxford City FC and have completed my UEFA C license.