<p>All good advice … I would add that you should get feedback from a professional in the business, or feedback from at least local musicians on your talent and potential. There are a lot of people that love music, but you do need to have feedback on what your skills and potential are. You are smart to start moving on this to catch up as fast as you can. You should definitely plan out how you will use your summer between your Junior and Senior year, because it should reflect your passion and commitment for this new found career path. I would add a few more things to ask yourself, only because you are shooting for ‘famous’ and not ‘best musician in the world’: If you want to be famous in a big way, do you have an interesting look that would be great on stage? Do you have experience performing or feedback that you have natural (even if untrained) stage presence? For the music skills that you are learning now, are you rapidly acquiring knowledge such that you could catch up? If you don’t have a lot of training going into college, you aren’t likely to get scholarship money, so you should have a stash of cash to cover 4 years. Schools on this forum that have been mentioned that cover popular and contemporary music are NYU/Clive Davis (do you have the potenial and business savvy like Alicia Keyes?), USC’s new popular music program, Berklee, and several others. All of them require a live audition and each has different levels of competitiveness to get accepted.</p>