The purpose of this project is to analyse core characteristics of key players in the music industry: artists, musicians, music producers and others. The background of the project is the growing interest among students to study popular music and music production in Scandinavian higher education Their interest can partly be explained by the successful music exports from the Nordic countries. A clear problem for the universities is that many of the students who are interested in various kinds of music related education often much more would prefer an artist career than to become a trained musician or music teacher. At the same time, very little of the training offered, in higher education, is focused on developing talents into full-fledged artists. Therefore, there is a gap between what is offered and what many students desire. Another problem is that many of the teachers in higher music education often have very limited experience as artists, but often have a good and extensive experience as musicians. Therefore, students in higher music education perhaps develop musician skills to a far greater degree than artist skills. A similar problem can be found in music producer education, where many of those who teach may have extensive experience as sound engineers rather than as producers. In order to create knowledge about this problems and to develop the higher education in music, this project collects multifaceted data through interviews with key players in the music industry: artists, musicians, music producers and others as well as by and analyses of their activities. It is an on-going project and at the conference in December, our objective is to present selected results from the study.