Review

David Cutler
The Savvy Musician 2.0: Amplifying Impact, Income, & Inspiration.:

, United States
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Date of Publication: 2025
URL: http://www.savvymusician.com

301 pages

Primary Genre: Study Material - book

Full disclosure: In September 2013 I was asked by Oxford to review the manuscript for David
Cutler’s The Savvy Music Teacher: Blueprint for Maximizing Income, Financial Independence,
and Impact. I was impressed and suggested (as certainly did others) that he be offered a contract.
Additional books now available include The Savvy Musician and The GAME of Innovation. Now
we have The Savvy Musician 2.0, offering musicians insights relevant to today’s music world.
The book is available in hardback, paperback, and e-book; and I have read it with my lens of a
nearly 50-year diverse music career and some 30 years teaching music business.
Cutler serves as Distinguished Professor of Music Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the
University of South Carolina, where he also leads a living-learning community called IDEA
(Impact, Design, Entrepreneurship, Arts). Lest you conclude that means this book is a dense,
complex tome, all the material within it is conveyed in a very conversational manner: an easy
read rather than a technical journal. Cutler provides an array of tools with which we can assess
what we seek and how we might strategize to achieve those goals—both through business sense
and life management. Whether spanning wide dreams or drilling down into business models, his
guidance stays clear and concise. Many of these tools are downloadable from his web site as
ready templates for your ideas. Specific financial illustrations demonstrate outcomes from a
myriad of pathways.

Peppered throughout are more than 150 brief real-world stories about individuals and
organizations spanning musical genres, geographic regions, and experiences. They are
informative and inspirational, and I’m betting you’ll be as drawn as I was to reading every single
one.

The purpose of the book, in my own opinion, is to get you thinking: what do you really want;
and how might you get there, especially via a route you might not previously have considered?
No matter what your genre of music—and whether performing, composing, teaching
institutionally or privately, or perhaps leading the business from off-stage—you will find
prompts within this book to generate a wealth of possibilities towards expanding your creative
and entrepreneurial outreach, impact, and income. Visit https://www.savvymusician.com.

-Antonio J. García
https://www.garciamusic.com