Career Biography: Jonathan G. Shaw

Professional music practitioner:
Music producer – music business consultant – composer – sound engineer – marketer – lecturer

Concise Précis

Updated for: September 2025

200 words (general):

Jonathan G. Shaw is a #1 chart hit music producer, composer, arranger, and platinum-level audio engineer working on SAMA, Hype Magazine, Crown Gospel, MAMA and Los Angeles Cinefest award-nominated projects, including Prestige Award and MEA Markets award winner. Shaw has mastered music receiving over 150-million streams. His biggest number 1 track “Satellites” was produced for the band The Flat Shandys, and stayed on the charts for four months, retaining the number 1 spot for over three weeks in 2022. Running Shaw Music Studios from Randburg, Johannesburg, South Africa, he offers songwriting, music production, mixing, mastering, audio post-production, voiceovers, jingles, adverts and music marketing.

In addition to his music passion, Jonathan G. Shaw is music technology and business lecturer at EMENDY Multimedia Institute (now integrated into the Academic Institute of Excellence, AIE), as well as an author and creative industries consultant through his firm Ibilion. Shaw has developed national and international arts policy strategies, notably several South African governmental music strategies as well as the Botswanan Creative Industries Strategy as lead consultant. His book, “The South African Music Business”, was published for a third edition in 2017. He is an international public speaker and conducts music business workshops and courses. Defined as a ‘multiplicitous’, protean practitioner with extensive experience in recorded music production and music business sciences, his academic attention is in the field of professional artistic practice and marketing. Shaw holds Master of Arts and Bcom Honours degrees and is currently a PhD Music candidate at Wits University.

150 words (music focus):

Jonathan G Shaw is a music producer with a career spanning over 20 years and over 150 million streams. Starting in a band and taking private music lessons in 1993, Shaw later studied guitar, bass, piano, vocals and orchestral arrangement, attaining a distinction for the UNISA Theory of Music Grade 5 in 2021. In 2001, he began a recording studio where he not only worked with award-nominated independent and signed artists the world over but also became an accomplished corporate voiceover artist. Nominated as a finalist for Best Score for the movie “Thirst” at the Los Angeles CineFest in 2017, in 2021 he became a commissioned composer to produce a theatrical score for Jake Natane’s “Decent” for the Market Theatre Laboratory. His biggest number 1 hit was with the band The Flat Shandys in 2022 where “Satellites” stayed on the charts for four months. Ibilion is Shaw’s marketing and education firm for the creative industries, and he lectures at AIE (previously called EMENDY Multimedia Institute).

150 words (business focus):

Jonathan George Shaw is a music producer, lecturer, author, and creative industries consultant through his firm Ibilion. Shaw has developed and been involved in national and international arts policy strategies, notably the Gauteng Music Strategic Framework in 2009, Eastern Cape Sector Plan in 2013, research to inform a national music strategy in 2013 included in the revised White Paper on Arts and Culture in 2019, lead consultant for the Botswanan Creative Industries Strategy from 2018 to 2020, Music in Africa research project on Revenue Streams for African Musicians from 2021 to 2022 as well as researching the SADC Music Industries for South African Music Week in 2022. Having authored a book on music business, Shaw lectures music technology and business at AIE (previously EMENDY Multimedia Institute) and has presented more than 30 music business workshops including Standard Bank’s Joy of Jazz’s ‘Geleza Kleva and Learn’ and Artscene Foundation’s music business and music & lyric workshops. Shaw holds a Master of Arts qualification and is a PhD candidate at Wits.

Visit www.jonathangshaw.com and www.ibilion.com