Brands are the new bands
Maybe it’s a sudden wave of nostalgia, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my senior year of high school. At the time, I was taking piano lessons and thinking about film school. So I picked a college where…
Music Management
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How to get out of a bad music management contract
It happens all the time. You’re having a great night on stage, and somebody slick tells you that they’d love to represent you. In a whirlwind, you sign a contract because they assure you that “it’s boilerplate” and “everybody signs…
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What Rebecca Black can teach you about music contracts.
It doesn’t take long for partners to become enemies when a record “pops” and royalty checks start rolling in. Rebecca Black’s bizarre path to the Billboard charts has generated buzz about what she’s going to do with tens of thousands…
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Is it tough to make a living as a music manager? Ask Quincy Jones.
At 78, you couldn’t possibly begrudge Quincy Jones the right to slow down a little. “Slowing down” for Q means working on just one album project at a time. This powerful career retrospective and interview from The National reveals some…
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No more “Dadager” for Beyonce
The entertainment press buzzes this morning with news that Beyonce has dropped her dad as her manager. It’s not unusual for artists and managers to evolve in different directions, but it’s very rare for a successful family partnership to last…
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Why you want your manager, your business manager, and your booking agent to work for different agencies.
Young Buck’s not having a great year. In the wake of his recent arrest, we’re learning more of the details about his money troubles, and the feud with 50 Cent over an unpaid $300,000 loan. He owes the IRS even…
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Creating a positive culture for your music management agency.
It’s easy for music management agencies to fall into a stereotype when it comes to corporate culture. Managers often get called cutthroat, rude, angry, or worse. That doesn’t have to be the case. Angela Haines from the Huffington Post…
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Paramore Breakup: How Managers Influence Artists
A post by Thursday Bram got me thinking about something I wrote years ago about the relationship between artist and manager. “Musicians get to be the CEOs of their own small companies. And CEOs get to hire staffs.” I want…
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Music Management Skills: Get Others Involved
While revising the site’s “About” page, I realized that it’s been a while since I wrote about one of the most important skills for a music manager to develop: the ability to rally and display support. Bands often get stuck…
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Giving yourself the space to shine.
Pamela Slim writes that it’s easy for creative people to fool themselves into thinking that their strengths can overcompensate for environmental variables. Have you ever watched yourself spiral downward with something that’s usually a cinch? It happens to musicians and…
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Music Management Skills: Act as if you’ve already got the power to make your artist a star.
“Fake it until you make it.” That’s frequent advice in the music industry. Just look at Lady Gaga. Folks that know her well can tell you about the tipping point when she went from another New York singer/songwriter to a…
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Music Management Skills: Network in person, not just online.
For most of the past few weeks, I’ve been offline more than online. And those moments I’ve been online, I’ve been working exclusively on client projects instead of mixing in networking and promotion. I’m not intentionally becoming a social media…
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Music Management Skills: Help Clients Understand Your Career Development
I wrote Music Management for the Rest of Us to help novice artist managers avoid the kinds of mistakes I made when I first started managing acts. I also wrote the book to help musicians understand that it was becoming…
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Music Management Skills: Volunteering to Gain Insight
If you’re a friend, a family member, or a fan enlisted to take on management duties for a musician, reading books about the business might not be enough to get you up to speed on what you really need to…
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Music Management Skills: Attend Conferences with a Bias for Learning, Not Promotion
I get a little worried when a new music manager writes up a goal sheet that includes “attend/work a music conference.” Music conferences are fun, raucous affairs. But many bands treat them as little more than extensions of already overheated…
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Music Management Skills: Manage Your Media Diet
When I started in college radio, my friends and I would jockey for position by the mailbox on the day when R&R would arrive. Two decades ago, trade magazines were the only way you knew what was happening in markets…
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Music Management Skills: Connect with Your Passion
Andy Wibbels just floated a great quote from John Waters about finding something you love and making it your life’s work. And while you may need to dabble–against John Waters’ advice–to really discover whether a passion is worth pursuing, it’s…
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If You Dream of Doing the Work, Do the Work
Here’s a pretty rough profile of the Class of 2010 at Middle Tennessee State University’s Recording Industry Management department. The RIM leverages its Nashville connections well, and it’s got one of the best reputations in the world for developing music…
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Music Management Skills: Build Your Professional Development Library
Sure, I might be a little biased, having written my own music management book, and everything. But, some days I feel like a handful of books should be required reading for anyone wanting to get into this business. Furthermore, I’ve…
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Music Management Skills: Organize Your World
I recently found myself leading a productivity seminar once a month here in the Philadelphia area for professionals from a variety of different fields. Overachievers in the group share a common ability to stay focused, regardless of the systems they…
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Music Management Skills: Learn to Stop Over-Analyzing
It’s easy to be a music management novice with your head in the clouds. You’re dreaming about the great things you’re going to do with your first band. You’re looking at all the great letterhead and logo ideas you’ve scribbled…
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Music Management Skills: Commit to Your Client
In Music Management for the Rest of Us, I lay out some basic math. If you’re earning 10-15% in commissions from a client, and they’re just about at the point of replacing their “day job” with a full time music…
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Music Management Skills: Stop Searching for Perfection
“I have learned… that my present is perfect.” That’s the first quote from Thomas Leonard‘s book, Simply Brilliant. In it, he boiled down the collective wisdom of decades of self-empowerment research into 1,800 quick learnings. And that’s the one that…
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Music Management Skills: Prioritize Your Day
I’m not going to try to convince you that I’m the most organized person in the world. However, I can tell you that making an effort to prioritize the actions you take every day can make a huge difference in…
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Music Management Skills: Stop Procrastinating
It took me six weeks to get to work on this series, even though it had been percolating for months. When I first started working on a live mastermind group for the spring, I knew that I wanted to go…
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Music Management Skills: Getting Comfortable with Risk
Music Management Boot Camp has been doing wonders for my thought process about the future of the music business. Putting the wolf at the door forces you to overcome the blocks in your creative work. One of the biggest blocks…
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Announcing the Music Management Boot Camp
Over the past few months, I’ve seen a huge surge of interest in my third book, Music Management for the Rest of Us. It could be that a bunch of folks are thinking about pursuing music industry careers, in the…
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Mailbag: Music Management Degrees in New York City
Hello Mr.Taylor, I hope everything is going well with you. I found your website on google and I’m looking for someone to help me with some music management advice. Could you? I’ve been in NYC for almost 3 years, and…
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Do Stage Parents Make Good Music Managers?
A bit of a dust-up on Ken Levine’s blog last week, when he ranted about the problems he’s seen over the years with stage parents that put too much pressure on their kids. The post got picked up on the…