- The Academy's co-founders take a seat on our couch.
- What exactly is the Red Bull Music Academy? Have a chat with Torsten Schmidt and Many Ameri, RBMA co-founders, and you'll realize it's getting harder to summarize by the minute. It began as a way for an energy drink company that was ubiquitous in nightclubs to forge a lasting connection with the scene—a bit of well-intentioned branding, if you will. That's still the simplest way of explaining it. But with RBMA co-signing festival stages, organizing music workshops across the globe, building a popup radio station in Berlin and plenty else, it's clear one sentence won't do. The Academy itself, though—an invite-only lecture, workshop and studio series, with events spilling out into the host city—is still at the heart of what they do. So when RA's Jordan Rothlein sat down with Schmidt and Ameri on the occasion of RBMA's 15th anniversary, its collaborations, participants and (occasionally contentious) lectures were the conversation's focus.