One-Time Nine Inch Nails/Ministry Drummer Opens Multi-Disciplinary Music School

BY Keith CarmanPublished Jun 24, 2009

Martin Atkins is bigger now than when he was in some of the world's most popular bands.

Honestly, he was pretty much an unknown when he played drums for the likes of Nine Inch Nails and Ministry a few years ago. He was a musician's musician; the guy dudes in bands knew and appreciated, but who could walk down the street unknown.


Well, he's still not being mobbed in public, but Atkins has made a rather substantial career for himself over the past few years by teaching the ins-and-outs of the music industry. He's now packaged all of that together to create Revolution Number Three, a music business school based in Chicago.

Atkins aspires to have the new institution offer a truer, more real-world perspective to the music education field, which he feels has far outlived its expiration date and assures students will obtain cooperative training and hands-on experience.

"Teaching at Columbia College Chicago since 2003, writing a textbook, developing the new marketing program and the indie label program, celebrating the 20th anniversary of my label, visiting around 80 arts and media management schools around the world... [it] just seemed obvious," Atkins says in a statement about creating the school.

"I'm inviting everyone to have a role in this. Each class itself will be continually re-evaluated as we proceed. It's staggering to me that anyone anywhere is still offering classes in journalism. Where are the jobs? What's the point? At least here, one of the things we will be looking at are the possibilities of multi-disciplinary cross pollination. For instance, my last label manager worked on the Obama campaign and is now involved in the mayoral race in Pittsburgh. We'll be further analysing and incubating those possibilities."

The first set of Revolution Number Three students will have the opportunity to build a studio, create sounds for a new drum library with Drum Core, book shows, edit video, coordinate the publishing of a book, explore the origins of dub and experience other non-traditional areas of music industry education.

Too bad there aren't any journalism jobs out there, though. Now we can't tell you about this school. Speaking of, why the hell does his school issue a press release if there's no "press" to speak of in his opinion?

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