Artist Management

Agility in the Creative and Cultural Industries

Guy Morrow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315520872
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts & Business

Artists are creative workers who drive growth in the creative and cultural industries. Managing artistic talent is a unique challenge, and this concise book introduces and analyses its key characteristics.

Artist Management: Agility in the Creative and Cultural Industries makes a major contribution to our understanding of the creative and cultural industries, of artistic and managerial creativities, and of social and cultural change in this sector. The book undertakes an extensive exploration of the increasingly pivotal role of artist managers in the creative and cultural industries and argues that agile management strategies are useful in this context. This book provides a comprehensive and accessible account of the artist–artist manager relationship in the twenty-first century. Drawing from research interviews conducted with artist managers and self-managed artists in five cities (New York, London, Toronto, Sydney and Melbourne), this book makes an original contribution to knowledge. Nation-specific case studies are highlighted as a means of illuminating various thematic concerns.

This unique book is a major piece of research and a valuable study aid for both undergraduate and postgraduate students of subjects including arts management, creative and cultural industries studies, arts entrepreneurship, business and management studies and media and communications.

1

Introduction

Artist management in the creative and cultural industries

Why would you want to be an artist manager? Throughout the numerous research interviews I conducted for this book in New York, London, Toronto, Sydney and Melbourne, I experienced many poignant moments when my role as a researcher seemingly morphed into that of a therapist for the artist managers and self-managed artists I was interviewing. Artist management can be a thankless and difficult task. So why do it?

My own rationalisation for being involved in artist management is that I want to be helping to create content that I think is amazing. I am driven to manage artists because I am chasing the ‘five minutes of magic’ that is sometimes generated by this activity. This is a subjective type of magic that may take the form of a song that is recorded in a studio or a live performance or video. And it is subjective: it involves helping to create something that is amazing to me and that can be defined as such by me. Then – hopefully – many other people will also find the content to be amazing, and they will become fascinated enough to spend money attending performances, listening to recordings and contributing to crowdfunding campaigns, thus helping to build a client’s career. This is what motivates me and draws me towards working with people who amaze me. This perspective was shared by some of the participants in this research project. The artist managers interviewed were often fascinated by the talent of their clients, what their clients can do, how career building works and how they could help realise the potential of their client’s art, or their own art if they were self-managed.

I became involved in artist management through working as a musician, performing in bands that I was managing myself. I fell into the role by default, self-managing primarily because I was in bands that no one else gave a damn about. I then started to think about how I could progress ‘our band’, a band that we were, with hindsight perhaps inappropriately, obsessed with. This passion for musical creativities then led to an interest in management in and of itself and in how artists in other sectors of the creative and cultural industries, such as dance and film, are managed or self-manage. In particular, I am interested in thinking about how artists are, and can be, managed using agile methods. Within the field of organisational and business management literature (OBM), I am influenced by the lean startup movement (Ries, 2011) and the agile movement (Highsmith, 2010; Medinilla, 2012).

This book examines the extent to which the methods stemming from these movements can be used to address uncertainty relating to artistically creative products and career development in the creative and cultural industries. The aim of this book is to capture an aspect of the creative and cultural industries – artist management – as it is experienced, and interpreted, by the participants in this project. There has been, and will arguably continue to be, a rapid escalation of complexity within the creative and cultural industries due to the digitisation of aspects of these industries. Furthermore, these industries will increasingly interface with the data economy. In this book, I argue that this rapid escalation of complexity is the biggest challenge facing artists and artist managers and that agile methods are useful for facing an uncertain and increasingly complex future.

Artist management is organic, adaptable and diverse. It contrasts with other forms of management that emphasise linearity, conformity and standardisation. In this book, I argue that the uniqueness of artist management stems from its subordination to artistic creativities and the fact that such symbolic creativities are artistically/aesthetically autonomous and ‘cannot be reduced to set rules or procedures’ (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011: 84). I also argue that partly due to the autonomy of what they are managing, as well as the fact that there are no professional qualifications required to become an artist manager, artist managers are extremely professionally autonomous in their roles. This is why, I argue, agile methods are useful in this context. This book engages with literature relating to these methods rather than other works within the field of OBM. In turn, the arts have much to offer the agile movement.

1.1 The agile movement

This book therefore locates artist management practices in the creative and cultural industries within the agile movement. Agile project management (APM) originated for the purposes of developing software to better meet users’ needs. While originating in the software industries, the agile movement has now become mainstream, with the ideas stemming from this approach to innovation being deployed in many industries and even by governments.¹ APM is characterised by the close monitoring of customer feedback, and each iteration of the developing product is designed to obtain and test such feedback. In this way, product development is not informed by assumptions about what customers want, but what they actually need. This approach therefore reduces the risk involved in product development, and within the context of the creative and cultural industries, it potentially has an impact on the artistic/aesthetic autonomy of the artist.

APM enables participants to respond to change rather than follow a rigid plan, often in small teams that work autonomously, with managers managing for goals rather than micromanaging processes. This is because APM involves understanding that, as software engineer and author Highsmith (2010) put it, ‘ultimate customer value is delivered at the point-of-sale, not the point-of-plan’ (8). APM has largely been enabled by ‘the plunging cost of experimentation’ (5) in many industries, which has been made possible by the digitisation of aspects of these industries. This is true of the arts; for example, the music industries. In my earlier co-written work (Hughes, Evans, Morrow and Keith, 2016) examining career development in music, we discussed a similar approach to APM, the lean startup method (LSM) (see Ries, 2011). My co-authors and I noted that:

Due to the ambiguity surrounding the term ‘novel’ in definitions of hard artistic creativity, some artists are operating in circumstances of extreme uncertainty. … The uncertainty and ambiguity surrounding the novelty of hard artistic creativities, and the question of who decides what is creative in the digital ecology, means that startup methodologies for addressing uncertainty in relation to both hard artistic creativity, and the business/es around it, are applicable.

(Hughes et al., 2016: 37–8)

Due to the plunging cost of experimentation, we (Hughes et al.) also argued that musicians can very cheaply release recorded music as a minimum viable product (MVP) (Robinson, 2001, and Ries, 2011, cited in Hughes et al., 2016: 38) in order to manage the risk associated with what we identified as a new circular career development model (see p. 30). In music, for example, promoting an artist to gatekeepers in the industries involves releasing a ‘demo’, or a ‘demonstration’, of a song as a recording. Nowadays, through social media, a demo can be released early as an MVP. This involves bringing the audience into the process of record production early and fascinating them in the same way that an artist manager may be fascinated. This can lead to ‘demoitis’ whereby the fan, or the person in the creative and cultural industries listening to the demo, becomes attached to an early recording. This is often because the demo is ‘loose’ and has a rough beauty to it that is subsequently polished off when the song is re-recorded at great expense in a professional studio. While this is often done with the best of intentions, the end product that is then released to a (hopefully) mass audience lacks something the raw demo had. I am not sure whether this is because one becomes attached to the original sound of the demo or whether there was something captured in the performance that cannot be captured again. Nevertheless, in the digital age, the timing of when an audience can be engaged has been brought forward in the creative process. Indeed, there has been a shift from summative to formative feedback from audiences and critics.

This book focuses on APM more than LSM. A startup is only a temporary organisation, ultimately seeking to move on from the startup phase; and in the context of the arts, startup methods are primarily useful for managing hard artistic creativities. In contrast, as I will explain, APM is applicable to managing the whole spectrum of hard to weak creativities (Madden and Bloom, 2001) and is useful during any startup phase, as well as post such a phase, in addition to facilitating innovation in businesses that are not entirely new.

1.2 Collaboration has a lifespan

As an artist manager I have contributed to the creation of music and design works, and also to the founding of numerous creative and cultural industries startups. I have worked with many of Australia’s best-known musicians within various popular music scenes through direct artist management as well as through music and design work. During the time frame of the research for this book, I was the founding co-manager of the bands Boy & Bear and Movement and I managed graphic designer and videographer Jefferton James. In this capacity I worked with Australian and international artists such as Passenger, Josh Pyke, Missy Higgins, Dustin Tebbutt, Emma Louise, Sheppard, The Paper Kites, The Griswolds, Oh Mercy, Tim Rogers, Kasey Chambers, Patrick James, and Husky. This involved working with Universal Music Group/Republic in New York, Creative Artists Agency in Los Angeles, International Talent Booking in London, Universal Music Australia, Warner Music Australia, Sony Music Australia, ABC Music, EMI, Chugg Entertainment, Eleven Music, i.e. Music, Wonderlick Entertainment, Select Music, Central Station Records, MGM, Inertia, and Nettwerk Music Group.

Interestingly, however, this list of artists with whom I am associated, and that I ‘name-drop’ here in an attempt to claim credibility in writing about artist management, is also, with the exception of Jefferton James, a list of the artists whom I no longer manage or for whom we no longer produce visual content. In this book, I define artist management as a form of group creativity, and therefore the nuances of group creativity are relevant here. One particular nuance that shone through in the research interviews is that creativity naturally leads to disloyalty within groups because any collaboration has a lifespan (see Chapter 3).

In this book, agility therefore also pertains to the process of relationships forming and dissolving. This form of agility can be understood in relation to group flow. Through his studies of jazz music groups, improv theatre groups and business teams, Sawyer (2007, 2012), who is a psychologist, found that while familiarity with each other is a requirement for a team to achieve group flow:

After two or three years, members of groups can become too familiar with each other and their effectiveness starts to decrease. Close listening becomes less necessary because everything is shared; no surprises are left. When group flow fades away, the group usually breaks up because its members want to find new challenges elsewhere.

(Sawyer, 2007: 52)

Sawyer’s findings are relevant to the artist management group in a multitude of ways. While the collaboration between the artist and the artist manager may itself have a natural lifespan, the artist may also be involved in an artistically creative group that has a lifespan, a group with which they collaborate until the interaction is no longer challenging. This causes angst for the artist manager her/himself and also within the groups they are managing. This is because the rhythm of group creativity often naturally ends with a break-up which is taken personally and interpreted as an act of disloyalty when, in fact, it is often not personal. This issue is arguably more pronounced in some sectors of the creative and cultural industries than others.

Within the music industries for example, it is common for artists and bands to sign with a record label for one album, with a firm release commitment, and then options for subsequent albums – options that are exercisable by the record label. If the first album is commercially successful, there is an expectation that the band will stay together for the release of multiple albums. Each album is typically released within a two-year cycle. The nature of group creativity over such a long time frame means that bands and their managers necessarily attempt to resist the natural transitions in the lifespan of such creative groups. The dance, film and theatrical industries arguably operate on a more project-by-project basis, and therefore groups within these sectors naturally form and dissolve more rapidly. An extreme example of this is improv theatre: ‘Chicago improv ensembles rarely continue performing together for more than three months, and many shows last for much less than that before the members move on and form new combinations with actors likewise freed from other mature groups’ (Sawyer, 2007: 52).

Understanding that the rapid forming and dissolving of groups within the creative and cultural industries is natural, because such collaborations have lifespans, can help managers deal with perceptions of disloyalty amongst the groups they are managing. Such feelings of betrayal no doubt become more difficult to deal with however when an artist manager is dealing with the lifespan of their own collaboration with a client.

1.3 Managing artistic contributions

This research-based book therefore conceptualises the artist–artist manager partnership as a form of group creativity. Because artists contribute to society in a complex variety of ways, so too do artist managers. While artistic creativity can serve useful, benevolent purposes that enrich our world, there is also a dark side to artistic creativity; the divisive tendencies of the arts can lead to tension, violence and fanaticism,² and creative thinkers can be more dishonest.³ Furthermore, many of the activities that are required to sustain artistic careers, such as the flying involved with international touring, are very carbon intensive and therefore have an environmental impact. A full understanding of artistic contributions is therefore needed when examining the topic of artist management. What exactly are artists, and their managers, managing?

Artistic contributions are often understood in one...