✘ Five things to do before you even think of getting an artist manager
- Music out of synch with gaming - Soundcloud changed music - Spotify rage misrepresents facts - Watching a concert in VR -
Hi all,
We have a new guest writer, Charlotte Caleb! We first met through the Water & Music community and have since been following along with each other. I’m stoked that Charlotte wrote this piece as it’s the number one question I hear from artists: but where to start? This is an answer, and it’s one I support wholeheartedly. What’s so cool about Charlotte is her versatility. She is a lawyer, but has over a decade of experience as artist manager. She knows about video and social, but also has first-hand experience of the importance of data when AWAL got acquired by Sony. Her new thing is Ellevate, a platform that gives early-stage artists access to mentoring and coaching from world renowned experts across the full spectrum of the modern music industry. Enjoy the read!
Love, Maarten
Getting music into the hands of a public is easy and accessible. Actually establishing and growing a career in crowded markets is overwhelming and often a complete mystery to early-stage artists. Let’s unravel that mystery.
Getting an artist manager, a live agent or a record label on board might seem like the answer to these problems. Bringing on these experienced and connected people to fast track you to success sounds enticing, but the truth is no one can give you a career and in the modern music industry. Rightly or wrongly, artists are expected to have done much more of the leg work than they ever have. There’s work that needs doing before bringing in, or even knowing who and what to bring, specific experts and professionals.
In my decade+ of experience working with artists I’ve learned that there are five crucial things an artist needs in place as the basis for their career before they even think of getting an artist manager, booker, or label on board.
##The secret sauce
Brand, artist story, artist world, secret sauce, USP, whatever you want to call it. This is so vital to your career. Taking the time to understand who you are as an artist, what you stand for, what you represent and what you want to mean to your fans is absolutely fundamental. What makes you different to anyone else in the world and why should people give a shit?
Social media and algorithms often tempt us to try and replicate artists that have successfully ‘gamed the system’ in the past but there are two things that are problematic with this. You absolutely cannot reverse engineer someone else’s success. You have no idea how they did it and even if you did, that moment in time where it all came together for them has passed and the industry has moved on. You also need to be able to back yourself and who you are 1000%. You need to be able to show the world who you are with absolute conviction and that is incredibly hard when you’re trying to be someone else.
Understanding your brand, visually as well as what you represent emotionally and symbolically will help you make decisions far more easily. Take for example the Irish artists pulling out of SXSW 2024 due to the festival’s association with the US army. Those artists had a tough decision that was made easy because they had clear principles.
##Understand your audience
Every artist absolutely must establish a mailing list. Please, go and set that up today if you haven’t already. Once you’ve done that, aim to send out an email to your subscribers once per month.
The next thing is to understand your fans. Grabbing metrics from Spotify and saying my audience is 40% male and 20% are from London is unhelpful when you are an early stage artist. That doesn’t tell you anything about who those people are, whether they followed you on social media from there and whether they would buy a live ticket from you.
There are two ways to get to know your audience. The first one feels really cringe, but you can literally hit them up in the DMs. If you feel like you’ve reached a wall with growing your following, reach out to some of the people you know are your fans and talk to them. Understanding why they connect with you will be crucial to how you connect with more people in the future. I helped organise TĀLĀ’s debut live show and we knew there was a guy in Sweden that played her track every day on Soundcloud. We offered to fly him out for the show. An £80 plane ticket was relatively cheap and meant this fan got such an incredible, personal experience with their favourite artist. Through our conversations with him we learned so much in return.
The second way is to test and iterate content types. If you put up a piece of content that is bad, guess what? The algorithm will make sure that no one sees it anyway. If it’s good you can learn from that. I tell artists you need 4 or 5 pillars of content. These are content themes that fit in with your brand that you can rotate. One is usually behind the scenes/creative stuff, one is official announcements which rarely get engagement but are useful nonetheless, and the last 2 or 3 are the things that make you unique. Do you like cooking, traveling, making stuff, are you political or really funny? Give your fans a three-dimensional person to immerse themselves into.
##Find your tribe
The music industry is about connections and relationships but that doesn’t always mean you need to be well connected with the heads of labels and publishing companies. When you are building from the beginning you need to find a tribe of other creatives that support you and you support them.
Building your own niche scene with likeminded people is incredibly powerful. No one is good at everything so if you are a great producer but not so good at video editing, having someone in your tribe who is good at that could be a great asset and you can reciprocate skills. When budgets are tight this kind of sharing allows you to have great quality work without breaking the bank.
Having a tribe of people that get your vibe also creates a community space that fans can also join. There is a sense of belonging to a group of people that others want to be a part of. I’ve seen the explosive impact that taking this idea of community building has had on artists. They go from sitting alone posting on the internet to having a group of people that support them, go to their shows, share opportunities and grow a collective fanbase.
Year0001 as a label is an amazing example of this and you can look into their history through their fan curated wiki.
##Do the boring bits
The boring but vital parts of the music industry are things like metadata input and rights registrations. This is all admin and feels painful to most artists that just want to create but it's so important to do. Without the admin you are sure to leave money on the table. Here’s what’s part of this:
When you create a new track make sure that publishing and master splits are agreed as soon as possible and written down somewhere. A contract is great but at the very least have an email chain with everyone agreeing to it.
Make sure your metadata is complete when you upload to your distributor. Also register all of the rightsholders with the relevant collecting societies (e.g. PRS and PPL in the UK).
Create a folder for each track with the full version, instrumental version, instrumental with BVs, clean version and any other relevant versions, a lyric sheet and stems. Having this at the ready on a link means that if a sync, brand or any other opportunity comes your way you’re primed and ready.
##Select your team
When you feel like things are starting to move and it really is time to bring in a manager or some sort of support structure, be selective. You need the person that represents you to be able to walk into any room and say with confidence that you are the best in the world at what you do. They have to have complete belief in you, and you in them.
The relationship between an artist and an artist manager can be a deeply personal one. They will be with you on the worst and best days of your life and so you need to click, together. One of the best things that happened to me with TĀLĀ was that we had a blazing argument in the first few months of working together. We quickly apologised and had a newfound respect for each other. We’re still working together 10 years later.
Your manager will wear many hats for you: creative, networking, emotional support, contract negotiation and tour management, the list goes on. Your manager will not be the best at every single one of those things and you might need to bring in extra support like social media managers, stylists, content designers or a tour manager to fill in the gaps further down the line. So make sure you have a manager who is honest about their weaknesses as well as their super powers. I am always suspicious of a manager who says they’re good at everything, and you should be too.
##Do the work
My final takeaway for an early-stage artist is to always think critically about why you want the things you want. Do you want a live agent because you think they’re going to be able to magically produce shows for you? If you don’t have a fanbase who are ready to buy tickets yet then this will be difficult. The fundamentals are crucial to get right so that when the experts join you their impact will make a real difference and accelerate your career. The above should help you answer the question if you’ve done the real work yet?
LINKS (by Maarten)
🎲 Is the music business out of synch with game developers? (Elias Leight)
“Between multiple rights holders impacting timelines and steep up-front fees, many game developers find it far easier and more fiscally prudent to commission music in-house.”
✘ I so often hear people talk about music and gaming and all the opportunities, but rarely much realism or true understanding of how both industries work. This piece does well to balance that.
🛏️ From bedrooms with love: How SoundCloud changed the landscape of music (Dale Maplethorpe)
“It was no longer the case that people with record deals attached to big labels would be successful, thanks to the mainstream use of streaming services and the industry’s inability to work out how to monetise music in a newly effective way. It was more alluring for some artists to go independent, and SoundCloud made doing that all the more feasible. People would write a track in their bedroom, buy cheap recording equipment and set to work. And many of the big names we know today initially found success that way.”
✘ A cute read about how Soundcloud came to be and why it mattered so much at the time to leave the cultural impact it did.
🔣 CNM statement shows that Spotify’s rage about new French streaming levy misrepresents key facts (Sam Taylor)
“If the introduction of the levy in France was really the huge blow Spotify claims, then this suggests a number of different things. If the 1.2% levy is such a “massive amount” that it makes their French operation unsustainable, then this should, perhaps, be a matter of concern for Spotify shareholders - more on that point shortly. Furthermore, with a sophisticated lobbying and public affairs operation it seems somewhat unlikely that Spotify would not be able to anticipate the implementation of a levy like this in France.”
✘ The rumble and tumble of DSPs goes on and on. The problem with being a big, and listed, company is that you want to try and squeeze as much profit as possible. Any angle that will help will not be shunted.
👓 Review: Watching a concert in VR (Maxwell Millington)
“The concert itself made me feel like I was watching it in a dream. Unlike a traditional concert, there are no bad seats. If I was watching a concert film or livestream I'd be forced to look wherever the camera is pointed.”
✘ I’ve always been a fan of the format of these Axios pieces. It really helps you understand what’s going on from the writer’s perspective. Perhaps most interesting is that Maxwell feels this could be a game-changer for music videos more than concerts.
##MUSIC
I am always so incredibly impressed by how Tinashe has navigated her career. She went from having a mainstream smash hit single, successful label to having a tumultuous time with her label and a real journey into finding a sound that was true to her. Her projects are always incredibly strong conceptually and she always feels effortlessly fresh. This is her latest offering but I implore you to check out her catalogue. Just another example of an artist carving out their own career without the major label.
The first few are great advice for anyone creative who has (even minor) business/commerce ambitions