Do you need a manager?

Traditionally a band has only really needed a manager once it has started to deal with a record label and release material. But once again in the face of the changes sweeping the global music industry, this has changed. If you are serious about making a career out of playing music and intend to start doing so with the band you are currently in, or are forming, then you need a manager. A manager is a signal of intent to the world and demonstrates that you mean business.

 

Part of the body of modern musical myths that every musician has to deal with is the idea that signing up a manager is risky and that you might get ripped off. The history of popular music is rife with such examples and much focus is placed on those examples. The truth of the matter is that mostly, musicians band together in a group simply to play music. As a result, the attitude of these groups is far from businesslike and their approaches to business are often not coherent or logically arranged. It therefore often takes an outside agent to impose on the musical vision a business vision that supports and complements the musical activity. As a band member, it is hard to do this as you are so submerged in the music and the ideas of the band that it is difficult to step out of that space to look at other issues pertaining to business. Furthermore, if you as an artist know what it is that managers are supposed to do and you enter into a transparent and clear agreement, you can control them and their activity with ease. It is only when one blindly signs away rights and properties and when one enters into agreements that one doesn’t understand that one is liable to get into large amounts of difficulty. That is a situation this book is designed to help you avoid – when entering into financial agreements knowledge is literally power.

 

Once you understand what it is that a manager does, and where his or her responsibilities lie, you can begin to see whether yours is doing a good job and if you are being ripped off or not. Despite the fact that your manager becomes the business face of your group, sight should never be lost of the fact that the manager works for you. In other words, his task is to enable your vision and your dream, using his skills, and being rewarded for his work with a percentage of your earnings. If you do not enforce a vision or a direction on your manager, then the roles are reversed and, perversely, you start to work for him. As a creative individual hoping to live out your life’s dream, why would you surrender that? Yet so many bands do and inevitably end up complaining terribly about their management. Just as you would never surrender control of your songwriting to your band manager, you must also remain in control of the vision and direction of your band. Management is there to advise, guide and facilitate business, not create vision and direction for you. I suggest that if you are so rudderless as to need that input from an outside force, you might deserve the rewards you get and that therefore your manager is entitled to earning a lot more than the normal percentage. If you give away control, you also give away money.

 

Manager or no?

 

So do you really need a manager? If you are organised, have a vision, have business skills within the band and don’t really want to give away revenue, well, at the end of the day, it is perfectly okay to run your own affairs and many musicians have done it. But it’s not whether you can; it’s whether you want to. As soon as you get management in, you commit to sharing all revenue generated with that individual, you have an extra party with input into your affairs, and you take your affairs from being a creative project among friends and peers to being a business exercise that includes an outside professional. These are big changes and ones that you need to be sure that you are ready to undertake. However, there are some compelling reasons not to self-manage and rather to find an individual who does manage bands to help you get where you want to go.

 

What most often happens in selfmanaged bands is that a power imbalance starts to grow within the band that can end in conflict and the break up of the band. Because the role of a manager is so much more than booking gigs and knowing where and when you have to be places, it can create tension. For example, your internal manager also becomes the person who makes sure you are not late, that things are done well and on time. In effect, suddenly one of the band members is the boss of the others. This is guaranteed to create friction. It also seems to encourage the other band members to become lazy and to leave all the business direction to this one individual, which later causes them all to resent him or her.

 

The effect of this is to disrupt the unity of purpose the band has around creativity and its internal cohesion as a live unit. If one person has his or her head out the box all the time, thinking business, it will affect they way you think collectively as a creative unit. Then in a musical sense that person becomes a passenger on your train, just as in a business sense, the band then becomes a passenger on the business train.

 

If you are serious about making inroads into the industry and starting a full-time career in the music business, I believe that you have to have a manager. The skill set of managers is very different to that of musicians: their point of view is different and their objectives as well. And these are all good differences and skills that you need to advance in the complex web that is your industry. It is often not easy to find a good, suitable manager, but you must persevere and look hard. Remember that you need someone with a good business head who understands the creative arts and is not easily fooled or bullied. If you are serious about creating music, do you really want to spend an ever-increasing amount of time negotiating with nightclubs, record labels and newspapers to look after your live shows and your record deal, or do you want to spend that time creating music? Most musicians will answer that they want to create music. But we are all so scared of being taken advantage of that often we try to do both. Make sure you have a solid agreement in place with your manager, that you agree to goals that can be monitored, and make sure you have access to information like bank balances. These are the kinds of things you can do to make sure you are not being taken advantage of and that you maintain a say in your own business affairs.

 

However, if you are a brand new band, don’t just rush off and get yourselves a manager before you have earned a cent or played a single show. It will be an important learning curve for you to book some of your own shows and submerge yourselves in the business before taking on a manager. Firstly, it gives you direct experience of some of the tasks that a manager will undertake, so you will know what you are asking her to do for you, and will also be far better able to tell if she is doing a good job of it. Secondly, you need to develop an idea of how much you can earn as a band. If a manager is not going to increase your earnings by at least the percentage he will take

as his fee, why employ him? And if you have not been running your own affairs for a bit, how will you know? Basically what I am suggesting is doing your own management for a period so that you can establish a benchmark against which any new manager can be measured. If they perform, keep them, if they don’t, ditch them fast!

 

Originally published in David Chislett's One, Two, One, Two: A Step By Step Guide To The South African Music Industry. Download a free copy of the book at www.davidchislett.co.za.