Overview
Gain full financial support to find solutions to the most pressing managerial challenges impacting the music sector, with our four year MusicFutures PhD studentship.
About this opportunity
The Management School welcomes applications for a fully funded Graduate Teaching Fellowship (GTF) as part of MusicFutures, the University ’s AHRC-funded creative industries cluster which supports sustainable and inclusive innovation, research and business development in the music sector.
Available to full-time students, this is a great opportunity to undertake management research that addresses major challenges in the music sector during a period of rapid technological, organisational and commercial change.
If successful in your application, you’ll become part of the MusicFutures multidisciplinary research environment.
You’ll engage with the wider team and, with appropriate support, contribute to internal and public-facing outputs, including reports, materials and other forms of dissemination that communicate relevant research insights and programme learnings.
Additionally, you’ll become a member of the University of Liverpool Management School, so your PhD will be aligned with its research and teaching environment, and supported by its doctoral development structures.
This studentship starts in August 2026, but we recognise individual circumstances vary, and some flexibility may be possible with the start date if needed.
Research topics
We welcome original proposals that address important business and management aspects, particularly where these intersect with wider questions relevant to the UK creative economy.
This studentship sits within the wider context of MusicFutures’ mission to strengthen the Liverpool City Region (LCR) music economy through sustainable and inclusive innovation, research, skills development and business support.
For this reason, we’re especially interested in projects that can speak to the opportunities, needs and future development of the LCR music economy, while also generating insights of wider national and international relevance.
If your proposal engages explicitly with the structures, dynamics, growth opportunities and challenges within the LCR music economy, we strongly encourage you to apply for this opportunity.
The PhD topic is not fixed in advance. Possible research areas include, but are not limited to:
- Disruptive technologies and their implications for music businesses
- Changing business models in the music industries
- Digital transformation in music sector organisations
- Innovation, entrepreneurship and new venture development in music
- Platformisation, intermediation and value creation in music ecosystems
- Organisational responses to technological disruption in the music sector
- Sustainable growth, resilience and adaptation in music-related SMEsSkills, capabilities and new forms of work in music and adjacent creative sectors
- Data, automation and decision-making in music businesses
- Emerging models of collaboration, production, distribution or monetisation in music
- The structure, performance and development needs of the LCR music economy
- Place-based innovation, clustering and ecosystem development in music and the creative industries
- Barriers to growth, scale-up and investment for music businesses and freelancers in the LCR.
These examples are intended as a guide only. You can submit a proposal on other vital music business-related challenges if it aligns with the expertise and supervisory capacity at the School, and the broader aims of MusicFutures.
Your project should be theoretically informed, methodologically robust and capable of a meaningful contribution to both scholarship and practice.
It should also be clearly grounded in management and organisation scholarship, even if it relates to interdisciplinary or sector-specific questions.
Please, be aware that even if your research proposal is accepted, the final scope and focus of the PhD may be refined in discussion with the supervisory team.
University teacher training
The MusicFutures GTF also helps kickstart your academic career, as you’ll gain experience as a university lecturer to become a rounded scholar.
Alongside pursuing your PhD research, you’ll complete a short teacher training programme and be involved in a fixed number of teaching hours.
As well as gaining a formal higher education teaching qualification, you’ll learn key pedagogical skills for the academic job market, primarily through a shadowing mentored classroom involvement.
To be successful in your application you must demonstrate capability to develop an original and rigorous PhD project, and also show strong potential to contribute to the teaching and intellectual life of the Management School.