I don’t think you ever find a good band without good management, certainly never in my experience. I never worked with Peter Grant, who was Led Zeppelin’s manager but he was the one who set the perimeters. He was totally devoted to his band and a brilliant manager. Since then Paul McGuinness with U2, Tony Smith with Genesis and Michael Lippman with Matchbox twenty take some beating. I worked with all of them and they were all great to work with. Apart from great visionaries and having great ideas for their artists they are all good listeners, always wanting to know what was happening with their artists and always asking what they could do from their end to help. Those types of relationships, the plugger with the manager are crucial to the success of an act. They know how to get the very best out of their artists and if you don’t have that you’re wasting your time. Management is not a job to play at, it can be a thankless task. If the group fail then they think the manager is crap and if they succeed then it’s all down to them, they were always brilliant anyway! A good manager totally understands that though, they’re used to it.
Nowadays, where you need the artist to do so much for themselves ,it’s the role of manager that has changed. At the top end you need a powerful, influential manager who can act as the buffer between the artist and the record company. Where the record company might want to exert their influence because they have money invested, the manager can ensure protecting their act. Record companies will want to pressurize them to deliver records to suit their projected quarterly targets as a successful act is their lifeline there. No good manager would ever allow that and where they have good management, the record company would be less inclined to ask.
At the other end where the act is unknown it is difficult to secure good management. Some of the more reputable ones are ‘full up’ with no room to take on new acts. Sad but true, it’s the smaller acts that often require the greater work. An unknown manager without a reputation is going to find it hard to get to record companies. Apart from them signing fewer and fewer acts, they rarely listen to unsolicited material. What that effectively means is if they don’t know you they won’t listen to what you have. In defense of the record companies, they simply don’t have the resource any longer to wade through endless CD’s of mostly crap artists. With regard to the better managers, it is very hard to spend all the time you need to on an act that is earning you nothing, and at the expense of the one that is. They could get very pissed off and that could jeopardize their managerial position with them. Whichever way you turn you can’t win, but at least the good are wise to that.
