This site is a blog for musicians and music industry people. It is a free educational resource and it is also the way I advertise my music consulting services. I am an entertainment professional with deep roots in the music industry. Throughout my music career I have been a major label A&R representative, a music supervisor, an artist manager, a reality show producer, a bass player and the head of a digital record label.
In Part four, I discussed some best practices for turning friends into managers on a trial basis. This option may not work for everyone though. Perhaps as much as you love your friends they can’t seem to get out of their way long enough to manage their own lives, let alone your career. It may be time to find your way into the office of a professional music manager. This, however, is often easier said than done.
Approaching a music manager should be thought of like approaching an investor with a start up company that you are looking to get funded. When trying to get someone to invest in a start up it is always easier to get people to contribute when a business has momentum and is well beyond the blueprint phases meaning it is either on it’s way towards being profitable or already profitable. It is essential that you have this in your consciousness when you approach someone to invest his or her time in your project. It is also essential that you have in mind exactly what your business selling points are above and beyond what your music sounds like – it’s very rarely enough that your music sounds great.
A great deal of being successful in your approach has to do with understanding the perspective of people on the industry side of the fence. It is about appreciating how overwhelming it can be to sit behind a desk where dreams go to die and how inundated successful music managers are with people who want something from them. Keeping this in mind here are some best practices in making an approach
1) Don’t go in cold:
If at all possible find someone who knows a music manager with a decent roster or another type of music executive who would be willing to make an introduction for you. Not at all a revolutionary idea but surprisingly one that is often overlooked. Begin to ask friends and acquaintances directly if they know people who work with music. It really doesn’t matter if it is your friend’s cousin’s roommate – something about being vouched for – even if it is 2-3 degrees of separation can really help create initial contact.
2) Present well:
This is a snippet of a real email I got recently from someone looking for help:
“i luv 2 sing , it is my world &ill never giv up. im already doin dis thing myself&i hav a guy dats a friend dat sing 2. im thinkn abt goin 2 college n persue my career @ da same time.wat shood i do 2 b well-kNown??”
Needless to say if your point of first contact is through email – use spell check. You aren’t texting a friend of yours drunk at some bar – you are trying to make valuable connections that will serve you in your music career for a long time to come. Whether first contact is spoken or written however – take baby steps. Your goal is to meet someone first – not to sign a management contract in perpetuity within the first 30 seconds. There are just too many aspiring musicians to respond to all of them when you are a manager or an executive with successful clients – they have to pick and choose who they pay attention to. My experience is that most people respond, even to cold calls or emails, if you present yourself well.
3) Be Specific and mention business accomplishments:
Write thoughtful and individually tailored emails to potential targets (Generic form letters often fall flat and also tend to reek of desperation). Why are you targeting this executive specifically? What did they do with their career or their client’s careers or who suggested you reach out? Give them business reasons to reach out to you – it’s not about “I’m the best singer in the world” it’s about – “I’ve got a mailing list of 1500 people or “my shows are selling out” or “I just did demos with a guy who worked with other artists you have heard of…”
4) Take it Slow & Provide Value
You could say - “I want you to manage me…” but every manager has different ways of working – the person you are approaching could be the complete wrong fit in spite of their successes with other clients. Saying this to a stranger is about as reasonable as proposing on a blind date prior to shaking someone’s hand.
You may be better served by saying “I’d love to buy you a cup of coffee and get your advice” or “I love what you did with the marketing plan on your client X and was curious if I could ask you a few questions…” or if you are really crafty come up with another compelling business reason that this executive could benefit from knowing you. Perhaps – “I would gladly do demos at my studio for some of your artists in exchange for some advice” or “I am connected to a bunch of artists and producers that you should probably know about or “I can help you promote shows locally”. These are all business reasons that I have watched artists use to further their relationships with executives. It may not be necessary to do so- but it is a good option and can help build relationships.
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Where does that leave you? Well – hopefully it leaves you-
I’ll be back soon for the next installment of the music manager series where I go over the investor / manager and momager and dadager phenomenon. If you missed it check out my interview with Music / Tour Manager Dave Lory from the New Music Seminar
This is the second article in a series of increasingly poorly named articles about how to get a music manager. In the first part of the article I discussed several of the suggested steps one take before looking for a music manager and how many people out there are looking for shortcuts that don’t seem to exist for most of us. If you aren’t looking for a shortcut then please, read on…
If you are beyond the blueprint phase of your career and you have a product that is ready or at least close to being ready to bring to market then it is time to begin asking yourself in very specific terms what you need a music manager to handle for you.
Now I am not looking to offend you dear reader but I’ve seen this movie before and I know how it ends. It is at this point in a conversation when I begin asking about specific management needs that the vast majority of the musicians I speak to respond with something to the effect of: “Well, I just want to make my music and the manager will handle all the business stuff”.
Upon hearing this I do my best to remain calm. Sometimes I roll my head from side to side in an effort to release the tension in my back and neck that has probably been there for a while but the pain is strangely and suddenly much more acute. I usually pause briefly and open my mouth without even thinking because what I am about to say has been said by me almost as often as my own name.
What comes out is a lengthy and well-worn sermon on the way things were in music, the way things have changed and what certain realities are. It usually takes 5-10 minutes and involves a story I heard about how Van Halen didn’t keep their eye on their business dealings and business partners during some of their most successful tours and paid a heavy price. Sometimes I go off on tangents about the pure volume of musical competition out there. All in all it boils down to a flowery and kind way of saying: “Tough shit- that’s not the way this works.”
To find and partner with the right manager is always easier once you have tried managing your career on your own for several months if not years. How the hell else would you know what qualities to look for in the person you want to trust with your career if you don’t have a first hand understanding of the job yourself? This process is the same for any number of entrepreneurial tasks that will present themselves to you when building your own business as a musician. You will be in this situation a great deal:
I am tempted to write, “Welcome to the music business” but frankly the above situation is just life on life’s terms as an entrepreneur. Solving these issues is what being in business for yourself is all about.
So what to do? Make it up as you go along like everyone else does! Be willing to fail. Be the best manager you can be and be willing to admit what you don’t know and ask for help. If you do this long enough the subsequent conversations you have with a potential manager will be much more intelligent. You won’t just say – “I want help booking better gigs and selling music” You will say something much more focused an intelligent and be able to look at an experienced manager’s technique with a knowing eye and be able to make intelligent commentary about what they have done for other artists. OR – you may go the other way. You make take a friend who is really organized, responsible and trustworthy to have them handle many of these tasks for you. There are dozens of successful managers I know who came up this way- because they were friends with the band and at all the shows and could be trusted.
Never forget that great bands make great managers. I will continue this article later in the week but for now I want to leave you with paraphrased examples of two cold emails based on the dozens I have gotten from people seeking me to manage them (a side note – I don’t manage people so bear in mind that research is an important component to all of this).
Cold Email A:
“Hey this is X and I’m a singer &nd I need a manager to take my shit to the next level. If there is money out there let’s u and i get som. I need people to here me.”
Cold Email B:
“Hey Rick,
This is X from the Group Y. I’m not sure exactly how I came by your site but I have read quite a few posts and really appreciate the information you have shared. My Group X is one of the biggest bands in (X’s hometown) and we have been playing to several shows a month usually to crowds of fifty or more people and we have started getting some of the better opening slots to be had here. I am sure you must be busy but could we speak on the phone in the upcoming weeks? I could really use some advice on breaking into a few new markets and getting more placements for our music in film and TV. The band and I feel we have done as much as we know how to do for ourselves at this point. I don’t know if you manage acts or could possibly make some recommendations on potential managers but if you have a few extra minutes I would greatly appreciate your time.
Thanks in advance,
X”
I used to answer every email… Emails of the former kind now get deleted.
I have interviewed several great music managers on this site over the past year. Please check out a list of those interviews here:
To be continued… in part 3
Rich Schaefer is a manager at The Artist’s Organization (TAO). He has worked with artists such as John Mellencamp, CKY and Ricky Martin and currently works with Matisyahu, John Legend, Lenny Kravitz and Counting Crows. Rich oversees all aspect of touring for all of the acts at TAO and including routing, booking, budgeting and marketing tour dates.
Rich thanks for your time. Tell me a bit about your gig. With established artists, what do you spend the majority of your time doing?
RS:
I primarily oversee touring for all our acts. It involves dealing with the crew and the tour managers and the production managers – everything from building the tour routing to the production of shows.
Since you’re tour focused, what would you say your theory or your way of operating is in helping break a touring act?
RS:
There are a couple schools of thought, and obviously every band is different, but for a lot of bands there’s the elusive, “How do I start selling tickets?” Because obviously once you start selling tickets everything is seemingly golden for you or at least you can keep building on that. The reality is there are fewer bands every day that are able to sell tickets just because of reduced number of outlets like radio and press which have kind of shrunk a bit and been consolidated to the point where they’re less likely to take a chance on new acts. So, it’s always great to have a new band that you’re able to get on a bigger tour if it makes sense.
There’s always a debate about whether, “Should we try to get on the U2 tour?” People that are going to see U2 and paying the $200 a ticket really are there to see U2 and really don’t care about the opening band. There are much smaller acts that play clubs or theaters where the audience is actually into seeing new music; and those are the more desirable tours for our new bands to be on.
That makes perfect sense. It’s also probably better to have an act play to a packed house for the psychological impact.
RS:
I went to an arena show and the opening band played to probably a thousand people. When the main act came on there were 16,000 people. There is something demoralizing about playing an empty venue anywhere and you can only imagine how bad it is when you’re playing an empty arena.
When you are evaluating potential clients, what are the factors that most likely influence you?
RS:
I think it’s a great question. There isn’t really any one thing in particular that does that. The first thing is the music, and as you know from what you’ve done in the past, you want to be drawn to the music. I forgot who said it, but somebody said to me at one point, “Would you risk your job and your career on signing that act?” That’s a big thing. And there are very few acts that would get that. But when you hear a band that is doing something special, or you hear music that you feel is unique and groundbreaking and at the same time you feel could have some sort of success, it’s definitely something that we would pursue and try to get involved with.
Taking away talent, which is clearly the X Factor of a band’s achievement, I would imagine what they’ve done on their own is a big influencing factor.
RS:
Oh, for sure. There are a lot of young bands that when they feel like when they get a manager, the work stops for them and all of a sudden stuff is going to happen. But the reality is once you have a manager, your manager should never be working harder than you as the band. It’s still the band’s job to make great music and promote themselves, because today- no one sells the band like the band. While a manager can help take their attention and focus off some of their business responsibilities, they need to spend that time tidying up their show and tidying up everything and just making sure the product that we’re selling and pushing out there is A+.
What are the key performance indicators?
RS:
It’s a combination of a bunch of things. You want to obviously see what the activity is. I talk to promoters and club bookers and agents all day long, and everyone hears about the new hot band in that market, and it’s one of those things where you have to keep your ear to the ground on everything obviously, but you can easily tell these days what people are talking about in real time. Twitter is an amazing thing, because you can go and search Twitter and it’s real time what people are thinking and talking about. You can tell if a band is playing on Tulsa on a Tuesday. You can Twitter and search the name and see who’s talking about it. That’s obviously a huge indicator of what the buzz is and what the kids are thinking about it.
How would you go about going from a local to a regional act?
RS:
The most valuable thing you can get especially now is, if a band wants to take a band out because they are friends with them that wins out nine out of ten times over knowing the manager or the agent. It’s all about bands. Because ultimately most bands are very protective of their image and who they tour with is a big part of that and the packaging. A lot of bands who are out on tour will bring a band that no one has ever heard of just because they are friends- and you can’t buy that. That is based on just hanging out and being a band and hanging out with friends and being friendly and just shooting the shit, because as you know most bands when they are in a town are lonely. They just want to hang out and have a beer.
It’s all about keeping up with people over social networking. Now more than ever it’s easier to be in contact with bands and famous celebrities through Twitter and through Facebook. I’d say the number one thing you can do is become friends with bands – local bands, regional bands, national bands. And that’s from just playing out and building your own reputation so they’ve heard of you as much as you’ve heard of them. But even unknown bands still have friends take them out on tours.
I often advocate people co-writing or people doing gig trades or whatever it is they can to get conversation currency with a bigger artist. Are there local and regional acts that actually get through to the bigger acts?
RS:
It’s funny, the Counting Crows have had some big success. But Augustana is one of Adam Duristz’s favorite bands. They were out on tour with us last summer, they were out on tour with us this summer, and he loves having them around and he loves hanging out with them. It’s more than just, “Do you guys want to hang out with us?” He makes them a part of their show. Do they hang out with bands in Oklahoma? I’m sure they do. A lot of the guys in the band are producers and players and work with a lot of young bands. So I would say all of them are super aware of the music scene and all scattered across the country. One of our guitar players produced a record by a guy named Jane Ash.Jay Nash. Last year we did a summer tour and Jane AshJay Nash opened one of the shows. It was a great opportunity and he asked if we could do it, and we did it. There’s definitely – even on the level of Counting Crows – still bands they are friends with.They are always meeting new bands and listening to new music.
I guess the lesson there is, “Don’t be afraid to reach out.”
RS:
I think, go hang out. It’s always weird to say, “Do you want to check out my demo?” But it’s more like, “Hey, just hang out, and if you’re a good guy and you we enjoy spending time with you, you never know.”
Have you seen innovative strategies recently for people trying to establish themselves?
RS:
The most groundbreaking thing to me was the Radiohead model they did around “In Rainbows.” While everybody thought on the surface it was “Pay what you want for the record” and of course there were people that paid zero and there were people that paid $100. To me the real genius around that was that six months later, seven months later when they put their tour on sale, they had three or four million people that were Radiohead consumers, and they had their contact info and e-mail data and everything and were able to blast those to active Radiohead consumers, and needless to say their tickets blew out and it was an amazing tour. Everybody really focused on the CD part of it, but to me it was actually really quite amazing that they were able to reach their audience directly. And that’s where the business is shifting; it’s shifting to direct artist to fan interaction and cutting out all the middlemen.
So the mailing list become every important.
RS:
It’s probably the most important thing a band has at this point. Obviously you want to maintain your master and all your publishing, but the bigger the mailing list, the better shape you’re in.
What are some of the things that you see getting in the way for aspiring artists?
RS:
I think for bands I think ego and laziness gets in the way for a lot of young bands. Everybody thinks they’re the best band in the world… and a lot of them are very talented, but they still have to work. All these guys from Chris Martin to Bono to the Kings of Leon, every stadium, every arena act is still out there doing press and talking to people and at the end of it selling their band and promoting their band. You can’t ever stop that.
The second is that a lot of people still, when they hear no, kind of turn around with their tail between their legs and walk away. I think it’s really the people that are able to push and create and come up with groundbreaking marketing ideas and just really be left of center and break from the mold of traditional marketing and traditional record company releases and traditional touring and traditional merch and everything. There’s an old school and a new school record business and I think there are a lot of bands that have adopted the new school and embraced technology. And the labels were resistant to technology, and it helped put the record industry in a tailspin. I think you have to continue to be open to new ideas and always think out of the box. Otherwise you’re never going to get out of the box.
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Click for more information about Rich Schaefer and TAO.
