(CelebrityAccess MediaWire) —
After last year's inaugural session and receiving high marks, Sirius Satellite’s Steve Leeds returns to his teaching post at Mike Curb College of Entertainment and Music Business at Nashville's Belmont University on September 1. The school has a group of students relocate to New York and attend the 14-week course. This semester, Belmont University has relocated all the classes from a downtown rehearsal facility to space located on the 63rd floor of the Empire State Building.
During the last series of sessions, Leeds had his students attend a NARAS screening of the Tom Dowd documentary The Business of Music, held a tele-conferencing session with several industry names from LA (including Universal’s VP Video Production Jeff Panzer) and drummer turned author Jake Slichter of Semisonic. The class has become a frequent stop for various music industry executives.
When Leeds last held his Belmont-sessions he headed up his own entertainment consultancy firm, Neo Entertainment; Sirius was his major account. Leeds joined the satellite radio station last month as VP-Talent and Industry Relations.
“Right now, I work at one of the major entertainment entities in the business and the students will directly benefit from that," Leeds notes. “For a while I was wary of these so-called ‘adjunct’ educational courses in the music business, but now having done it at Belmont and William Paterson (in New Jersey), I totally get it and embrace it. To have a class full of students who very definitely are there by their own choosing and get it … is very rewarding. In fact, it’s become a very prominent aspect of my career.”
During his career, Leeds helped start-up MTV and VH1, discovered Rosie O’Donnell, Daisy Fuentes and Adam Sandler while there, and has held prominent promotion positions at Atlantic Records, Universal Records, and Virgin Records. — Jane Cohen and Bob Grossweiner
