Richard James Burgess
A2IM
President & CEO
President and CEO of the American Association of Independent Music (A2IM) Richard James Burgess Ph.D. produced many gold, platinum, and multiplatinum albums. He authored The Art of Record Production (pub. Music Sales/Omnibus Press, 1997). In 2013, Oxford University Press published his fourth edition entitled The Art of Music Production: The Theory and Practice. and in 2014 his most recent book, The History of Music Production. Burgess was a major label recording artist and composer with hit records in his own right; an A list studio musician, and worked internationally for all of the major labels and many independents as a producer, engineer, re-mixer, musician, and manager of artists and producers. He is known for his pioneering work with synthesizers, computers, and sampling, as an inventor of the SDSV drum synthesizer, for coining the term New Romantic (to describe the early eighties British music movement), and for the first known use of the term EDM (Electronic Dance Music)in 1980. Educated at Berklee College of Music, Boston, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London and The University of South Wales, he played with the National Youth Jazz Orchestra (U.K.), won Music Week, British Arts Council, Park Lane Group, Greater London Arts Association, and British Council Education UK Alumni awards. He oversaw business strategies at the award-winning Smithsonian Folkways Recordings label in Washington DC, where he was also co-producer, co-executive producer and project director for Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology, chronicling more than a century of jazz. He was co-chair of Smithsonian Music, a member of the Smithsonian Network Review Committee, board chair of A2IM, and a member of the Steering Committee for the Producer and Engineer Wing of the Recording Academy. He was Vice President of the Board of Governors for the Recording Academy’s Washington DC Chapter and Joint Editor-in-Chief of the Journal on the Art of Record Production.