Breaking the star = Breaking the bank (II)

Of course, taking on the task of developing an artist involves enormous potential risks. This was hammered home for one music commentator not long ago when it nearly killed a friend of his, now a former artist manager. One evening, they sat down to drink and enjoy one of his bands at a New York City showcase dive called Arlene’s Grocery Store. After his friend’s band finished up, they thought about moving on to another, quieter venue to continue their imbiding and talking, when the next band came on. They were brilliant – a group, as it turned out, that included two former members of a gold-record band on a major label that had broken up about six years earlier.

The commentator kidded with his friend that he should see if they had a manager. The friend took him seriously, approached them, and discovered that although they had this pedigree and had won a radio station’s “best unsigned band” contest, they still had no management. It took him six months, but his friend convinced them to let him and his partner do the job.

Now, most managers limit the amount of money they will put into a band. While this investment, like most things in the record business, is recoupable by the manager from the band, most managers just don’t have pockets that deep. The commentator’s friend and his partner put nearly every penny they had into this group, paying for pictures, press kits, CD duplication, studio time, the works. And they actually got the band an offer, not from a major, but from the closest thing in the independent record world to a major – the record company arm of one of the world’s largest independent distributors. However, having already recorded for a major, the band regarded this as a step backward. They severed relations with the management company. As far as the commentator knows, the legalities are still pending.

In the meantime, the commentator’s friend lost his wife, his family, and his house. He called the commentator up one evening in the throes of what sounded very much like a heart attack (turned out to be acute angina). He bailed out of the music business and got back into software sales. Last they had talked, the friend seemed a lot happier.

One thing that many managers seem to have discovered in this process is that downloading files may not be the bogeyman that they feared for the past decade. It can actually eliminate the need for the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars that it traditionally has taken to break an artist. And as music consumers begin to veer away from “hard product,” there are ancillary consumables that they crave.

Ed Majewski of Majic Management said:

The group I am managing are on MySpace. In less than eight months, we have over 13,000 friends, almost 52,000 plays and close to 50,000 views… . What I have learned through this is the voice/opinion of the kids out there today. Many, many e-mail me on the page, “How come we can’t download your music?” We are on the cusp of saying, “Why not?” This may go against everything that has been believed in the industry thus far, but we all do realize that the game is changing.