Rochester's Eastman School Just Made 50+ Music Leadership Case Studies Free for Everyone

Ten years ago, the Institute for Music Leadership at the Eastman School of Music started treating music industry education the way Harvard Business School treats business education — by placing students inside real decisions. This fall, the Eastman Case Studies library they built over that decade is free.

Ten Years of Harvard-Style Case Studies for Music Leadership

Ten Years of Harvard-Style Case Studies for Music Leadership

The Eastman Case Studies launched in 2016, built on the Harvard case method. The structure is deliberate: instead of explaining how the music industry works in the abstract, a reader is placed inside a real situation that a real organization faced — a budget crisis, a negotiation, a question of how an institution builds genuine relationships across cultural lines. The reader works through it with real stakes attached.

The series has grown to more than 50 published studies over a decade, covering the full landscape of what it takes to run a music organization: funding structures, labor relations, audience development, cultural identity, community partnership. The subjects come from real institutions — the kinds of situations that music administrators, program directors, and emerging leaders face without a roadmap.

Why Free? What Changes This Fall

Why Free? What Changes This Fall

The Eastman Case Studies have been a paid resource since they launched. Starting this fall, the full collection moves to free, open access through the Sibley Music Library — no institutional subscription, no login wall.

The Sibley Music Library already has a global footprint: its digitized public-domain scores have been downloaded more than 13 million times worldwide. The case studies are joining a distribution platform that already reaches music educators and institutions across the world.

"The Eastman Case Studies are a wonderful example of the kind of contribution a school of music can make to the profession."

— Kate Sheeran, Dean, Eastman School of Music

For music students, educators, and program directors who couldn't access the paid collection — or who didn't know it existed — the collection is simply there now.

Rochester in the Room: The ROCmusic Collaborative

Rochester in the Room: The ROCmusic Collaborative

One case study in the collection is about Rochester directly. "The ROCmusic Collaborative" examines the free music academy that operates here through partnerships between cultural organizations, educational institutions, and local government — built specifically to remove the economic and logistical barriers that keep people out of music education.

Rochester's model is now in a library accessible to anyone building a community music program, anywhere. A program director trying to understand how to sustain free music education without a single major institutional funder can find the ROCmusic case study and see how it's done here. The full collection is free, no login required.