Three London universities are officially the best places in the world to study music in 2025

If you wanted to study music in the UK, London would be the place to do it. Not only has our city nurtured some hugely influential musical genres – grime, dubstep and britpop, to name a few – but it’s also home to some of the world’s best music schools. 

In fact, three London universities are officially the best places in the world to study music in 2025, according to the new QS World University Ranking By Subject.

British unis excelled across the board in this year’s edition of the rankings, with UK institutions coming out on top for arts and humanities and medicine. QS ranks scores on employability, research & discovery, and global engagement to give them an overall score out of 100. 

For music, the Royal College of Music (RCM) was named the world’s best music university by QS. Founded in 1882, the conservatoire has trained some seriously important composers and musicians including Gustav Holst, Leopold Stokowski, Dame Joan Sutherland and Alfie Boe. QS called the RCM ‘one of the world’s great conservatoires, training gifted musicians from all over the world for international careers as performers, conductors and composers’. RCM scored 98.2 overall, and received 100 points for employer reputation. 

In second place was the equally prestigious Royal Academy of Music (RAM), which was founded in 1822 and is Britain's oldest degree-granting music school. Scoring 97 overall, RAM received 97.1 for academic reputation and 96.4 for employability. Some of the RAM’s famous alumni include Elton John, Annie Lennox and Jacob Collier. 

Guildhall School of Music and Drama came third in the world for music with an overall score of 93.8. According to QS, Guildhall is a ‘global leader of creative and professional practice which promotes innovation, experiment and research’.

You can check out QS’s 2025 subject lists in full here.

Two London universities are the most ‘overcrowded’ in the world, supposedly. 

And these London universities are officially the best in the world for 2025, according to Times Higher Education.