Jim Lucchese Talks About Being an Artists Advocate and How Hell Approach Berklee Presidency Lucchese, whose career as an entrepreneur and lawyer has focused on helping musicians, becomes Berklee's fifth president in January.By
Kimberly Ashton
December 9, 2024
Incoming Berklee President Jim Lucchese in the Berklee Performance Center.
Image by Kelly Davidson
In a letter Jim Lucchese wrote to the chair of Berklee's Presidential Search Committee last spring, he starts with a disclaimer. His life's trajectory seems more certain in hindsight than it did at the time, he writes. But a theme comes through: He's been continually searching for ways to support artists who've had the courage to live creative lives.
Lucchese, who becomes Berklee's fifth president in January, doesn't really consider himself one of these artists despite his decades of gigging in local bands- I'm not calling myself a drummer when Omar Hakim is a block away, he says-but rather an advocate for them.
It's this mission that Lucchese brings with him to Berklee, along with decades of expertise in helping artists through his work as an entertainment lawyer and then as an entrepreneur at the Echo Nest, Spotify, and Sofar Sounds. In a Q&A, he shared how he plans to approach his presidency and what he sees as his immediate priorities, as well as those for Berklee, while also acknowledging that many of these initiatives are already underway.
Can you tell me about your early experiences with music? Was your family musical?
My father never had any formal training, but was a natural drummer. He had a hand drum and he always played it. So I started playing when I was young and my parents were always incredibly supportive.
How old were you when you started playing drums?I was around 11. I always gravitated to drums, and my parents were great and tolerated a drum set in the house the whole time I was growing up. My instructor had a relationship with Berklee. He's the one who suggested I apply for a scholarship to the Five-Week program. I got it and attended. That was a transformative experience for me that began a decades-long relationship with Berklee.
Do you still play drums?
I've been playing locally and regionally for 25-30 years. Berklee is a common thread among nearly everyone I've played music with, whether they be alumni or faculty. For example, the last gig I played included two Berklee faculty members and three Berklee alumni.
What have you learned about the music industry from your time gigging?
All of my work has been driven by a deep respect for independent working musicians. They give cities their soul. They make all of our lives better. I believe everyone relies on local musicians and creatives, but there's certainly a risk that we, as a society, could take for granted that they'll always be there. Im motivated by a desire to hopefully help make the path for independent musicians a little easier and more sustainable. Playing music and building many of my closest friendships with local and independent musicians definitely informs that work.
You started your career working in music as an attorney. Can you tell me about that?
I decided to go to law school because I wanted to directly work on behalf of artists. I knew what I wanted to do as a lawyer before I even applied to law school. Also, I wanted a deeper understanding of copyright and IP as technology was creating new opportunities for artists while also really changing the overall landscape. It became clear to me that if you wanted to create opportunities for independent musicians using technology, you needed to understand copyright and IP. And that's why I went to Georgetown [University's] law school. After that, I worked at Greenberg Traurig as an artist-side transactional attorney, where I primarily represented musicians, with an additional focus on emerging music technologies.
How did you go from that to the Echo Nest?Funny enough, playing music was integral to how I met the founders of the Echo Nest. I played in a quartet with a wonderful pianist who was getting his MS degree at MIT, and his father-also a great pianist-taught at MIT. The two of them said, You should meet these two musicians at the Media Lab who are trying to apply their research in machine learning to fix music discovery. I did. I found their vision incredibly exciting and we really hit it off.
Another music connection our first institutional investor at the Echo Nest was a former road manager of another band I'd played with. So, I guess some of those gigs paid off.
All of my work has been driven by a deep respect for independent working musicians. At that time, music discovery and recommendation was based on a retail mindset: If you bought this, you might buy that. But there was no understanding of the music itself, and recommendations had a heavy popularity bias because recommendations were mostly influenced by purchase frequency-which was the same way it worked for a blender or a pair of jeans. That's the problem that the Echo Nest sought to solve: to more deeply understand the music itself in order to make what would otherwise be considered niche music, or an artist who's putting out their first record, as visible and easy to discover as an artist on the Billboard Top 100. Tens of millions of songs were coming online, but if they weren't understood and visible to recommendation systems, it would be nearly impossible for those artists to find their audiences.
So, at the Echo Nest, we built a music discovery platform that tried to understand music the way that you and I do, but at a scale to understand over 50 million tracks. We built a business powering music recommendation and other music data applications for hundreds of music apps, focused on serving artists and audiences
