Before the 750 million streams, Dutch Melrose, born Josh Harms, was a songwriting student at ICMP, the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance in London. In 2026 the school welcomed him back, this time at the front of the room, for a guest session with its current students.
The long relationship
ICMP’s attention was not new. The school spotlighted his single “Home” back in 2019, when he was still stacking self-released tracks, and its official success-story profile now carries his career in its own words. It is also where one of his most enduring creative partnerships began: songwriter Alex Nobile, a fellow ICMP alum, co-wrote “Honey” and “FORGET YOU.”
What he told the students
The session covered what the school called “navigating the realities of a fast-moving industry” and “shaping a vision that’s entirely your own.” His core lesson is the one his whole career demonstrates:
Everything I’ve done has been fully independent, from funding releases and marketing to running paid media campaigns at scale and managing my own catalogue ownership and publishing.Dutch Melrose, ICMP
The school taught him songwriting. The business he taught himself.
The LA kid who went to London
The route itself is a story: a kid from the greater Los Angeles area crossing the Atlantic to study songwriting, then coming home to build an independent operation, his own label in Studio City, his own marketing, his own publishing, that most label-signed artists never get to touch. The degree is a Bachelor’s in Music; the education that shows up in the numbers is the decade of self-releasing that followed.
Why it matters
Music schools love a success story, but this one is unusually instructive: a graduate who never signed away his masters, manages himself, runs his own label in MADKID Records, and still ended up with one of the biggest independent catalogs of his scene. For the students in that room, the takeaway was not “get discovered.” It was “build the whole machine yourself, and own it.”