For Wharton undergraduate Grace Gramins, music and the music business is in her blood. Her mother moved to New York City to audition for Broadway, and while doing so, she worked on Wall Street. Growing up in New York, Gramins started her educational career at the Special Music School, where she first learned violin and then began to compose music.
(Image: Penn Records)
As she continued songwriting, she developed an interest in business in tandem. Throughout high school, her volunteer work was focused on helping with organizations’ marketing, which had natural intersections with her interest in producing music.
While she identified this intersection between business and production as an interest when applying to Wharton, she was able to see it through with her undergraduate experience in marketing courses.
“Writing music and editing it to cater to my consumers was something I was inherently doing,” Grace says. “But then I was able to attach it to a real concept and principle in my marketing class.”
Gramins is now a third-year finance and management student with a minor in popular music and jazz, and is a member of Penn Counterparts, Wharton Ambassadors, Penn International Impact Consulting, Mask and Wig Band, and Music Business at Penn.
Business gave her the vocabulary behind some of the more pragmatic decisions she was making in her creation of music. It also gave her the ability to understand recent movements and trends in the music business.
In her Management 1010 course, she says, “I learned about horizontal and vertical diversification, and I moved from writing to producing music which was vertical diversification in a way, but I had no words for it until I took that class and was able to understand exactly what I was doing.”
This winter, Gramins produced and released a single, “Falling.” While her business education taught her to tie in some of the more pragmatic, less emotional aspects of the art form, she also gets the most out of the music department at Penn.
This story is by Alex Zhou. Read more at Wharton Stories.
