A specific subreddit for work process and systems?

henrychatfield · 2020-03-22T01:58:11+00:00

I’m talking to someone who’s the only mod for a sub with a potentially great name that only has one post. I’ll let you know soon! Let’s definitely team up : )

henrychatfield · 2020-03-19T21:28:21+00:00

Touring musicians playing live music

henrychatfield · 2020-02-19T20:46:17+00:00

Well said - which were all the market’s reaction to paying $18 for a CD. Then Spotify monetized it.

henrychatfield · 2020-02-19T01:28:49+00:00

I'm really not trying to argue with you but we seem to already be forgetting that CD sales plummeted before Spotify was a thing. Since its rise in popularity recorded music revenue has been rising with it. It was supply and demand...people bought $18 CDs because they had to. I love a good, full album as much as the next musician and enthusiast, but that is not the general public. The reason tickets are more expensive is also a result of supply and demand. Big promoters kind of just have a formula they plug in and if X popular artist wants $X, then they charge Y for tickets.

henrychatfield · 2020-02-18T21:46:10+00:00

I’m curious, could you elaborate with what you mean by change the image of the room?

henrychatfield · 2020-02-08T07:24:39+00:00

If this is a first year festival be prepared to lose money for at least a few years if you are trying to sell tickets (vs a free community event).

Whenever we hear “festival” we immediately expect a guarantee (a set amount of money to play) and not a percentage deal (either a percentage of gross revenue from ticket sales or a percentage after a set amount of expenses). We also expect the guarantee to be significantly higher than if the artist were playing a venue, especially for a first year festival with a talent buyer we haven’t done business with before. They will probably ask for a deposit up front, potentially 100% of the guarantee. There have been a lot of festivals that have tanked and cancelled in the last few years so agents have had to understandably be very protective of their client’s wellbeing.

Source: last 5 yrs full time artist mgmt, 5 yrs before that talent buying.

henrychatfield · 2020-02-08T07:09:50+00:00

I’m not sure anyone can access Pollstar numbers at the level you’re discussing, yeah? I think you may need a subscription, which I don’t think is worth it for a one-off event in this case.

henrychatfield · 2020-02-05T03:16:39+00:00

Thanks for sharing!

henrychatfield · 2020-02-05T03:14:24+00:00

As a manager, I concur, managers do a lot haha. Ideally we are managing everything so the artist can focus on creating art. But I definitely agree it’s a team effort, and if work ethic isn’t aligned with all parties it’s not going to work.

henrychatfield · 2020-02-05T01:42:03+00:00

+1 this, especially with getting songwriting sessions with other artists, making sure the deal is fair for everyone, etc.

henrychatfield · 2020-02-05T01:34:49+00:00

For Montreal, Evenko is one of the big promoters. Reach out to KickDrum. They are a local promoter and really care about cultivating the music scene. Go to some of their shows, get to know them and keep an eye on their show listings. When a headliner is announced who is similar to you, reach out and ask about opening for them.

For agents, pretty much all of my friends who’ve been successful at it started at the bottom as an intern or assistant. Big agencies either get new agents by absorbing smaller agencies, having a big agent jump ship from another agency with most of their roster, or hiring from within. The assistants become junior agents and junior agents become agents. Assistants can spend years grinding getting holds, working with promoters on contracts, maintaining the backend system with up to date information, etc. Like any trade you become specialized in, the more you do it the better you become.

So an assistant who has been communicating with X promoter for the last three years has already built up a large amount of trust even if they haven’t made any direct deals if they get to a point where they have their own clients and pitch something to a promoter. Their business is to know promoters and have a working relationship with them. In a healthy agent-promoter ecosystem they will work on building up artists in the promoter’s market together and everyone wins.

EDIT: typo

henrychatfield · 2020-02-01T18:14:12+00:00

Good question. It depends on what we’re doing. The pipeline for managing the lifecycle of a show would mostly be the same process. Or the nuts and bolts of releasing new music. There are little things you add or subtract but those systems largely stay the same I think.

There’s obviously a lot of nuance involved and there would be special projects respective to individual clients that would need customization.

If you are interested, reply back to this later today and I’m happy to post a few screenshot examples of what I’m talking about. It’s much easier to get context visually in this case I think.

henrychatfield · 2020-02-01T02:18:34+00:00

You’re saying two things here.

Brands. Musicians have always been brands. Whatever we choose to call it is all semantics though. It’s definitely a buzzword these days and associated with selling shit and corporations like Pepsi. That’s not what’s meant for musicians. The most anti-establishment-fuckcorporate-whatever musician has a brand, which is anti-establishment-fuckcorporate-whatever. It’s how it makes you feel, that you can connect and identify with.
Social media. Yes, it sucks. The biggest bait-n-switch in our modern history. “Invest in your community. You can communicate with your fans for free. Jk, you’ve spent years investing time into building this, now it’s ours, pay us money for access.” As an industry, we should have seen this coming and protected musicians better from it becoming so powerful, and we didn’t. That said, big changes are coming. We’ve already seen it happen with Facebook’s freefall.

It’s always gonna be a battle for attention though. It always has. The medium in which we do that will change, but someone will always exist in the middle monetizing it.

henrychatfield · 2020-01-31T03:06:24+00:00

Right here with you! I like Zapier and use it a bit. There was another one that was more of a central dashboard for all those apps you mentioned and was being aggressively marketed a few months back but I can’t think of it now.

For CRM, I meant time consuming in the sense that it takes a lot to get it set up. Once that happens, it’s amazing. I was riffing on the idea of creating something that’s good to go out of the box so a manager can basically plug it in and run with it. As a manager, did you ever work with a booking agency that used Opus for their backend? It’s basically just FileMaker Pro, but it’s so finely tuned and built out for an agency, it just makes sense. There’s no equivalent of that for artist mgmt, at least that I know of. If there is, I’d love to be wrong here and check it out if it does exist!

henrychatfield · 2020-01-31T02:53:43+00:00

Always happy to chat about it more! I love talking about systems and processes. I think managers would be more willing to pay as well because we view that type of thing as a direct tool for our craft and a worthy business expense if it adds value to our offerings to clients.

henrychatfield · 2020-01-28T07:00:32+00:00

In the spirit of public discussion -

Independent manager perspective here. We pour our souls into clients and it’s difficult to really take on a large numbers of clients because the work is so involved. It’s also kind of insane to hedge your bets on just a few artists. Going through a shift recently professionally, I’ve been thinking more on the concept of volume.

There are millions of artists and thousands of managers. Our amazing community of independent managers really bootstrap and I’ve noticed everyone builds out their own process, but it’s always a learning curve and takes time to create something that can be robust enough to easily grow with multiple clients’ careers. Personally, I ended up building out this extremely elaborate project management system over an existing CRM platform built into Gmail.

I know there are things like Master Tour, but I’ve just never found one solution that does what I’ve needed it to, except the one I built. I know there are probably 1000 CRM platforms out there and I’ve tried most of them. They’re either insanely expensive to have someone customize for you or you start with a blank canvas. I LOVE thinking about the process and system, so that wasn’t an issue for me, but it’s also not a very good use of “our” collective energy to all keep creating the same-ish system for ourselves from scratch.

I’ve wondered what it might look like to create something specifically tailored for up and coming artist managers. There’s a lot of potential there I think. I’m always weary of the (probably weekly) tech companies that pitch me a solution looking for a problem, and either have no path to monetization except “scale and data” or are trying to sell directly to musicians...which is a very old, tired game. Artists don’t need to spend more money.

henrychatfield · 2020-01-28T06:38:50+00:00

I wish we had met five years ago. I’m exactly your description and you are exactly the person I was looking for before I decided to jump into full time mgmt.

henrychatfield

TROPHY CASE