So You Want to Open a Conservatory?

Congratulations!  This investment is a bold step forward towards your personal financial stability!  Despite long-standing rumors of the death of classical music (one if its outstanding features), music conservatories are actually cash producing powerhouses, supported by countless young WASPS with money to burn.  (In other words, there’s a sucker born every minute!!)

In order to build name recognition and tap into a pre-existing market, make your conservatory part of an enormous university.  This will guarantee cash flow for you (all that undergraduate revenue!), and bestow a modicum of class on whatever school you find.  Charge the undergraduates upwards of $35,000 annually.  Trumpet the fact that grad students have it easy when they only pay $20,000 per year.  For decoration, populate the university with gaggles of young women.  Give them looks that only money can buy.  The girls should have nicely highlighted hair, perfectly tweezed brows, tiny waists and enormous breasts.  They should be so large, that if the girl is running late, at least the front half of her will arrive on time.  Contain the knockers in skimpy tank tops, preferably with the midriff exposed. The wearing of sparkly flip-flops is to be strictly enforced.

Music students will require a place to practice.  For every 10 students, there should be one practice room.  Walls should be as paper-thin as possible.  The rooms should be sweltering hot, ill-ventilated, filthy, and stink of multiple human bodies.  If this final condition is not met, a product known as Fart Spray is available from novelty stores.  The practice rooms themselves can be bought for pennies on the dollar from former dictatorships that used them as interrogation rooms: Cambodia, Argentina, and former Soviet satellites are all good places to start!

Music students themselves should be a mixed bunch.  To lend even further validation to your conservatory, operate a militant overseas recruitment initiative.  The international presence will add a certain quel que chose to the atmosphere, making the students feel even more self-important than they already do.  Foreign girls should be slender and beautiful, and chat in their mysterious languages in groups.  Other students should look as young as high school students, garnished with acne and clothed in rags.  Many should smoke.

Staff your conservatory with cute, young administrators.  Provide ample training to make sure they are well-equipped to disperse misinformation and bad advice.  Tell students to address their problems to them, providing a first line of defense.  A quick study of the Byzantine empire will provide a model for your bureaucratic set-up.  Each administrator will have two assistants, who will have a nursery of work-study students to assist them.  Make them all seem so busy that students who actually need their help will feel guilty even walking into their office.

If a student should express interest in studying with a particular faculty member, just remember your mantra: it’s not about the students.  It’s about money.  And paperwork, and marketing and brand imaging and profitability.  Think of your students as stock futures, such as copper, textiles, or sides of beef.  Does it matter if one of those sides of beef has an opinion??  Noooo.  Once they buy into your conservatory you’ve got them over a barrel!  If they’d like to graduate, they’ll do it by your rules and pay your price.  You call the shots!  

So go start a conservatory, start recruiting them cash cows, and count your moo, moo, moolah all the way to the bank!