Jack Abraham

At 26, after being sacked from my band and dumped by my girlfriend, I had a road-to-Damascus moment and made a commitment to myself: I would find a way to only do music, and I wouldn't work in another bar again until it was one I owned. Four years later, in 2015, Giacomo Smith and I founded the music venue and band Kansas Smitty's. That venue, sadly now shuttered, and that incredible band gave me the platform to release music, put on shows, go on tour, work with indie and major record labels, and build some of the best teams in music at the time. I'm immensely proud of what we did together.

We launched KSTV, an award-winning live streaming platform, during Covid, and since then I have had the privilege of working with multiple artists and their projects at different stages of their careers, 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.

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

Today I am primarily an educator working to redesign how people define and grow their careers in the creative industries. I love teaching, however, the cognitive dissonance is now deafening as institutions, students, lecturers, and parents think about the value of higher education in the age of AI. I am thrilled by the challenges and opportunities that this current juncture is providing to make well overdue changes to the way we enable young people to start their working life.

I lecture in music business at Guildhall School of Music and Drama, am a senior lecturer at ICMP and BIMM, and a visiting lecturer in innovation and disruptive practice at Westminster University. I lecture on a range of modules in fundamentals of live production and the 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 been experimenting with a suite of simple no-code tools as teaching tools and for my own work. This one is my current favourite; they are all available to play with here.

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 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, 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 licence.