Khash Zarrin

Music Industries MA

Khash was headhunted to be Avid’s Global Demand Generation Marketing Manager after studying a postgraduate degree in Music Industries. With an end goal of one day working as a Global Director or Head of Department for the biggest worldwide music industry companies, Khash knew he had to take his research one step further by studying for a Master's.

“After I completed my undergraduate degree in music technology, I wanted to pursue a career as a sound engineer. I did some work experience, including a bit of live sound for festivals and then transitioned to TV sound where I did a season of The Gadget Show. However, I realised I wanted to broaden my future career options and started to explore opportunities in the business side of the music industry.

So I chose to study a Master’s degree in Music Industries which focused on music as a business. Marketing was a big aspect of that and I think that is where I fell in love with marketing.

My Mom was a big influence when applying for a Master's. As a Middle Eastern child to Iranian parents, it's very common to have your children go beyond an undergrad degree and get a Master's degree or even a PhD. I want to say 40 percent of the reason I went to study a Master's was to make my mum proud and the other 60 percent was for me to transition into more of a business role because that was my end goal.

Studying a postgraduate degree was a completely different experience compared to undergraduate. You're no longer in the class with all of your friends, you're with very likeminded people who are very serious about developing their careers. I feel like I developed drastically in that one year of my Master's.

There was great support from the lecturers because our class was a lot smaller than the undergrad classes were. I also found that the students in my Master's were a lot more engaged and got more involved in the conversations. Everyone worked together relentlessly, there was a much tighter bond between everyone in the class.

If you’re looking to study a Master's, I’d recommend that you look at the jobs that you might want to end up doing in four years’ time, 10 years’ time and see whether a postgraduate degree would help you get there. A lot of the jobs that I was looking for liked candidates to have a Master's degree so I thought if I really want to take my career seriously and progress to a Director or Head of Department role, I should take that step.

After I graduated from my postgraduate degree, I landed a marketing job in an industrial company as a steppingstone job. Whilst I was working there, I was actively looking for music tech companies and marketing jobs. I had a few big setbacks when applying for jobs that I really wanted at big brands in the industry, but that only made me want to push for them harder.

I set up a side business during my time in the industrial place, selling digital music products and then taught myself how to digitally advertise through paid social and Google Display. This self-taught experience led me to land my previous role as Digital Marketing Executive at Focusrite.

A year and a half later, I was headhunted by Avid to become their Global Demand Generation Marketing Manager, which I am still doing now and it's incredible. I work on campaigns on a global scale for all of our audio products. These demand campaigns include email, social media, webpage, digital ads, and more recently, a brand new podcast where me and my co-host sit down and talk to some incredible musicians, producers and engineers in the music industry, some of which have even won Grammy’s!

‘I AM BCU’ means that I am connected. In my work life and as a part of BCU. I feel like I know everyone at the BCU campus, even though I don't, everyone is on a similar wavelength. All of the staff have always been super friendly to me, and I've always felt like there is a friendship there outside of the lecturer-student relationship.”