LOS ANGELES (Hypebot) – The evolving music industry is turning top managers into moguls — operating across media, tech and consumer brands The evolution of the music industry is putting greater power into the hands of top artist managers and transforming their firms — traditionally very small, behind-the-scenes operations — into miniature conglomerates operating across media, tech, and consumer brands.
The root of this transformation is the broader shift in power from labels to artists, and thus to artists’ management teams. The internet empowers artists with the ability to directly engage fans and distribute digital content on their own, a dynamic that has made record labels—whose deals usually give them the majority of an artist’s music revenue—increasingly less necessary for building a national, or even international, audience.
The whole EDM genre, which has been on fire over the last few years, has thrived largely without major labels or radio. In hip-hop, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis (with manager/agent Zach Quillen) built a passionate fan base locally and online, leveraged that to run their own (profitable) tour, reinvested earnings to self-finance the production of the The Heist, and then went to labels only later with the negotiating power to strike a la cartephysical distribution and marketing deals.
Even in the more common arrangement of taking a traditional record deal—which remains the norm and likely will for many years—top artists and their managers have been faced with an increasing hand-off of responsibilities as the labels downsize their investment in developing artists (mainly because they themselves are tight on money). Management firms, talent agencies, and publishers are in response expanding to handle many functions that were traditionally label services.
As a result of both trends, power is shifting into the hands of artist managers and their teams, who are at the helm of an artist’s whole operation as a business… which keeps expanding in scope.
Artists as Diversified Brands
An artist manager’s job description nowadays goes far beyond merely coordinating a musical career.
This is partly by force and partly to take advantage of new opportunities. Although there’s some optimism for earnings from streaming services to improve as their use becomes ubiquitous, revenue from songs themselves is no longer very significant in comparison to how popular the songs are and what album sales would have once brought in at that rate.
Music (and social media presence) is the heart and soul of who an artist is and where they devote their time, but its function from a business lens is just the starting point. It fuels a brand and loyal audience that are then leveraged for complementary ventures with more meaningful money-making potential.
Coordinated mostly by an artist’s agent, the live music (touring & festivals) boom has combatted losses in music sales and continues to see healthy growth—a unique in-person experience remains well worth paying for—but it’s only one piece of the puzzle.
New forms of collaboration with brands are a central revenue source and require a broader business and digital savvy from the artist manager to envision and evaluate opportunities effectively. Traditional sponsorship deals remain standard, but in increasingly creative (and often complex) forms like Pepsi’s “tweet to unlock” campaign around Katy Perry’s Prismalbum, the Jay-Z/Microsoft collaboration for launching his Decodedautobiography, or AmEx’s interactive “Blank Space” app with Taylor Swift.
But there’s also an evolving shift toward longer-term, equity-based partnerships. Rather than “selling out” by slapping their name on lots of random products, artists are finding corporate partners whose brands genuinely complement their own, then working to help build the product/company over time and share in the upside, like Pharrell’s work with sustainable materials brand Bionic Yarn. If the artist manager has the eyes of a smart investor, equity-based deals can be dramatically more lucrative for artists: 50 Cent’s (estimated) $50MM stake in Vitamin Water, and Diddy’s 50% profit-share in Diageo’s Ciroc vodka, sparked wider adoption of the model in particular; Justin Timberlake’s stake in the relaunch of Myspace, not so much.
Especially after its recent $3B acquisition by Apple, Beats by Dre stands as the pinnacle example of a how artists might parlay their personal brand into their own startup companiesMost notably, as a step beyond equity-based partnerships, popular artists are increasingly channeling their personal brand into the launch of their very own companies, matching creative control with far more potential upside. Madonna’s launch of Maverick in the early 1990s (with music, film, tv, book publishing and fashion divisions) was an early incarnation of what really took off among hip-hop icons in following years (although she’d go on to add more fashion lines and an international fitness club chain in 2010 as well).
Jay-Z (Roc-a-Fella Records, Rocawear), Diddy (Bad Boy Entertainment, Sean John, Revolt TV), Pharrell (Billionaire Boys Club), Dr. Dre (Aftermath Entertainment, Beats by Dre) and others have capitalized on the opportunity to build successful companies rather than just being a marketing tool for others. Even in country music, Kenny Chesney co-founded a successful spirits company, Fishbowl Spirits (maker of Blue Chair Bay Rum), built from scratch entirely around his brand and audience demographic.
Artist Managers Take Center Stage
In this new landscape, top artist managers are full-scale entrepreneurs building conglomerates spanning media, tech and consumer brands.
One part venture capitalist, one part entrepreneur, a manager is on the hunt for “the next big thing” in music to invest their efforts in—informed by an increasing amount of data and knowing that inevitably most “investments” won’t be big wins (managers, by the way, get a roughly standardized ~15% of artists’ earnings). They’re in charge of launching those artists to become an internationally-known brand in the span of just a couple years and gradually crafting sustainable businesses underneath them.
The tools and strategy needed to break an artist into stardom in 2015 often look more similar to operations of Silicon Valley startups—social media buzz, extensive analytics and key partnerships. The more capable an artist manager is as a digital entrepreneur, the farther the artist can go without needing the support of a record label at undesirable terms. Thus it’s not just increasingly necessary but also preferable for the artist and manager to build out the management firm’s team and handle operations across music, partnerships, and new ventures themselves.
As the management firm’s capacity grows, it also makes sense for it to take on additional artists, given the economy of scale. The management firm becomes a whole funnel for launching new artists and coordinating their stakes across numerous ventures. They can plug their artists into a network of opportunities they’re pursuing and ventures they control, cross-pollinate fan bases strategically, and collaborate with their established artists to propel newly-signed acts into the spotlight (look at how Justin Bieber put Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” on the map).
The result of it all is a much more influential and—contrary to their historic place—high-profile role for leading artist managers within the entertainment industry and beyond. It also makes the choice of manager a much more important, longer-term decision for an artist than it used to be when labels did more of the work and managers were switched out like pairs of socks.
By Eric Peckham on Medium.com
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http://encore.celebrityaccess.com/index.php?encoreId=498&articleId=50455
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MEGHAN TRAINOR BROKE DESPITE ‘ALL ABOUT THAT BASS’ SUCCESS
Despite the success achieved by her single, “All About that Bass,” and the other songs that followed suit, Meghan Trainor claimed she remains broke because she’s still not yet paid. The singer said she has to wait until April to get her money.
“I haven’t made any money yet. They say I will get a big fat cheque after nine months which will be in April so I’m hoping that’s right,” Meghan Trainor said. She added that people are quick to assume that she became rich overnight when her “All About that Bass” made all those charts, but in reality, she cannot even make any big purchase yet. However, she quickly added that she’s already working on it.
Her first new album “Title” would certainly make her rich in no time as it quickly went up the ranks and even pushed Taylor Swift’s album out from the top spot in the Billboard Charts, which was perched on that premiere rank for three weeks now. According to Reuters, “Title,” which included her hit song “All About That Bass” and “Lips Are Moving,” already achieved significant sales of 195,000 albums as well as 377,000 song downloads. The album was already streamed around 8 million streams, as shown by the figures compiled by Nielsen SoundScan.
The debut of this album also came three weeks ahead of the Grammy Awards where Trainor received nominations for two Grammys! Trainor is nominated for both the categories of song and record of the year for “All About That Bass.”
She once talked about how she came up with the song to Radio.com and she said she does not even know how the song happened. All she knew was the she turned serious during that songwriting session instead of “pretending she’s Rihanna.” She also said that even though she knew the song was special, she never expected that it would become such a hit. Trainor added that the song’s lyrics “my momma she told me don’t worry about your size” is not that far-fetched from reality as her mom is her biggest supporter, always telling her she is gorgeous and asking her to stop destroying herself “in front of the mirrors” by comparing herself to other girls.
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By Annie D. on February 03, 2015 12:30 PM
http://au.ibtimes.com/meghan-trainor-broke-despite-all-about-bass-success-1416634
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