Theodor Adorno argued that the commercialisation of music aligned with a reduction of quality. The
term he used was that music was becoming standardized. Andrew Keen said much the same, really.
This is a moderate look into how being a music manager is a conflict between artistic integrity and earning everyone a living
or trying to find a balance between the two is the art of artist management
Adorno argued that through commercialisation music and its artistic nature was made into a
commodity, which in turn was homogenised to suit the masses in business leader’s pursuit of
expanding niches and improving profits. This homogenisation lead to the decrease in music quality
that we see in today’s music industry. Industry commentators such as Arik Hesseldahl of Bloomberg
Businessweek (Hesseldahl, 2006) comment that music has reached such a poor state of affairs due
to its only motivation being the price tag, and the introduction of the .mp3 has driven the physical
product to be worse audio quality as well as the song structure, lyrical content and delivery of
cultural influence.
The concept of being famous as a career option has only been around for the last 100 years. The
industrial revolution coupled with improved communication networks – and the world wars of the
early 20th century acting as a catalyst for new technologies in communication – meant that being
well known on its own could be enough to develop what was becoming prominent throughout the
70’s as the ‘Brand Me’ and corporate empowerment through social and associative public relations
on a large scale. Previous to this, an individual’s aspirations revolved around honour and pride of
family or specialism in a specific task, skill or knowledge. The move from heroes to pioneers to Stars
and now into celebrities has meant that integrity is a very questionable facet of many people in the
limelight today.
The questions this poses for Artist managers and individuals who are developing the careers of
musicians is the balance between monetising the artist’s endeavours so that it is a sustainable career
opportunity for all parties, but also retaining integrity and purpose in the art form itself. Thanks
to very strong and clever marketing tactics from large corporations in media principally in the late
1980’s but now in a more subtle way through larger news and media corporations which promoted
very particular things as cool – note MTV Cribs, Spring Break Parties, Jackass as well as the standard
media formats of Hello!, OK, and other gossip columns – a culture has arisen in the youth of today
that to be purely famous and well-known is a route to success and happiness and that shameless self
promotion or embarrassment can lead towards total fulfilment (Reynolds, 2011).
The artist manager needs to be able to identify and successfully explain to an artist that being
famous for fame’s sake is not musical success, nor is becoming a musician about being in all the
gossip magazines and that this mentality has stemmed from a very long line of tactics which
ultimately mean people buy gossip magazines and watch new media/reality TV programs. The
artist manager should understand how to monetise the artist’s talent but without losing the artist’s
integrity.
A technological influence that has changed the way artists are perceived and how they can create
successful routes to market has been through the explosion of the internet throughout the 90s.
Alternative routes to market have changed from traditional and expensive physical billboards, flyers,
posters, radio plugging and white label CDs to venture capitalists at record labels or distribution
companies towards an almost level free playing field with low start up costs, lower barriers of entry
and immediate feedback from fans and customers in the development through the noughties of new
social media.
Artist managers must understand both traditional mediums of marketing and traditional strategies
as well as new media technology, have a grasp of web development and scalable systems and keep
up to date with new programs, systems, websites and trends online to better position their artist
in the online community. The alternative media now demanded ranges from videos, games, web
apps, customisable and user generated content, exclusives in press and pr releases, mailing lists, RSS
feeds, higher quality music, high quality photography, distinctive branding, colour schemes, scalable
websites, excellent search engine optimisation, good contact networks, a personal feel to contacting
the band as well as alternative routes to market other than the collapsing recorded music industry.
The recorded music industry collapsed through the noughties after a peak in early 2001. While
the press saw this as an opportunity for sensationalist commentaries explaining how the ‘music
industry’ is completely lost, industry insiders and venture capitalists noted how the music industry
– noting the distinction between the recording industry, live industry, publishing industry, and the
music industry as a whole – was larger than it had ever been. The live music industry was booming
between 2006 – 2011: worldwide live music revenues were $16.6bn 2006, $18.1bn 2007, $19.4bn
2008, $20.8bn 2009, $22.2bn 2010, $23.5bn 2011 (grabstats, 2011). What this meant for the artist
manager was that alternative income streams to the more traditional recorded music licensing had
to be achieved.
Publishing has been expanded as a more secure income and the advent of new media with
opportunities for both recording synchronisation licensing as well as publishing song writing
opportunities in areas as diverse as video games either as main focus (as was seen in the brief ‘Hero’
range, guitar hero, vocal hero, DJ hero) or as secondary focus (as seen in FIFA and Tony Hawks Pro
Skater ranges), supermarket radios, advertising jingles, official sound tracks for films, and many
more. These formats that are now taking over from the album sales are seeing the focus of the
music drawn away from music on its own and drawn towards music alongside another function. This
means that there are more restrictions on songwriters as to how they arrange their recordings ready
for these publishing opportunities and ties in with Adorno’s suggestion that the commercialisation of
music is affecting the quality through the homogenisation of available product.
The artist manager’s next test is to negotiate with the talent they are managing in how songs will
be presented so that they are of interest to these different income stream’s decision makers but
also retain some artistic license and the integrity we were discussing earlier. The pop song emerged
through the second half of the 20th century to give standard formats and chord progressions: intro,
verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle eight, chorus, chorus, outro or I – IV – I – V and this has become
another facet of the lower quality music – songs begin to sound the same, arrangements become
predictable and it is harder to try original styles without being branded avant-garde or just not
accepted on any financially justifiable level. The manager must be in a position that they are up
to date with current musical trends as well as be in a position of trust with their artist so that they
can comment on music being presented in a critical and honest way with the artist. The challenge
here comes when the artist and manager disagree as to compositions verses market placement and
timing for the artist’s releases and without proper diplomacy the manager risks being ousted.
Another element to consider when talking about Adorno’s standardisation of media and the
technological intervention of the internet is the blatant disregard by internet users of traditional
intellectual property and copyrights. The internet has reduced the opportunity cost of purchasing
music to nil as poor international legislation and the inability to control property boundaries has
meant music can be copied transferred and shared illegally and easily. This internet piracy has
shifted the exclusivity of music and therefore power to the majority of internet users, with little
or no repercussions for their actions and a very strong ignorance of the laws that are in place
domestically aside from some very public cases where record labels have taken individuals to court.
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s website talking about the Recording Industry Association
of America, ‘In what would later seem like a prelude to the lawsuit campaign against individual
file-sharers, the recording industry sued four college students in April 2003 for developing and
maintaining search engines that allowed students to search for and download files from other
students on their local campus networks.’ (EFF, 2008).
The suing of individuals and even the suing of larger corporations to try and contain what is
effectively a poorly legislated free-for-all is a wasted effort and internet piracy continued. This is
what lead to the collapse through the noughties which was described earlier and the collapse has
meant larger corporations have folded, merged and downsized.
The industry that is left today is one of monopolistic competition. Artist mangers need to realise that
the power has shifted from few massive gatekeepers to many more people with lower barriers to
entry, but that along with that dilution comes a dilution of income as there are many more mouths
to feed from a set industry turnover. What this means is we will not see the rock star lifestyles
previously accepted by The Stone Roses or The Clash, where hotels were trashed, lavish stage shows
were achieved with no intention of return on investment and individuals such as Madonna, Michael
Jackson or Elvis Presley will have as much sway, but instead we will see artists taking much more
responsibility for their careers and treating them much more like an SME. The artist will become
the managing director of Brand Me whilst their Artist Manager will be their secretary, guiding their
vision along and ticking the boxes, dotting the i’s.
The Chinese and Asian markets are an interesting counterpoint to the western music industries
as these markets have seen the technological shift on a much larger scale which has left recorded
music all but gone and alternative income streams a necessity. In China distribution methods have
always been a hazard to record labels as a 3rd Shift policy has taken hold in the manufacturing
plants. (BBC, 2008) This is where manufacturing plants run 2 daytime shifts legally sanctioned by
the government, plus a third illegal shift producing only pirate material. To have this much pirated
material has left China as a country of 1.3bn people, the 20th largest music market in the world.
(Peto E, 2007) China’s fast internet speed in urban areas has further added to the illegal filesharing
and musicians are not afraid to find corporate sponsors instead of record labels to fund their
careers, promoting toothpaste alongside their album, for example.
As these musicians’ music is no longer the main focus of their work, their celebrity becomes
their value and the product they endorse becomes their income. This is a further catalyst to the
arguments stated above as to how homogenising goods can lead to a lowering of quality alongside
commercialisation being a catalyst for poor music.
This is yet another example, albeit in a much more developed stage than what we have seen in
western markets, of how integrity becomes a barrier to entry into developing an artist’s career when
monetisation is so limited to 360 deals, celebrity status and therefore advertising space. The artist
manager should have a firm grasp of how markets are developing both domestically and overseas
to find out how artists are able to leverage integrity into their strategies and keep the artists happy
with their creativity verses career and employability. The industry is still vague and so it is up to the
individual to accept or reject tactics that reduce the artist to advertising space for other industries or
to seek alternative income streams.
Andrew Keen looks at the Recorded music industry in more detail in his text ‘The Cult of the
Amateur’ where he shows how consumers have changed expectations from niche specialist record
stores holding unique collections of physical product into the Amazon Generation – where we
expect recommendations not from knowledgeable staff but from an algorithm and the ability to
access any media anywhere.
The consumer’s attitude to marketplaces and now eCommerce means that the Artist Manager
must be aware of the power of User-Generated Content (UGC). Where we have stated that
monetisation in the music industry has been drawn from secondary sources, ie. Advertising space,
the UGC and new social media and social networks that the internet now works to are one outlet
for that advertising space. We also know that advertising space is only as valuable as the amount of
relevant eyes that are affected by it, and this draws us to conclude that online traffic is the source of
monetisation. This is different to earlier theories about subscriptions and charging for music online,
which had too high opportunity costs for consumers who could just pirate material instead. Now
monetisation comes from giving content seemingly away for free as with traditional print media
such as free newspapers, but re-couping the money through advertising and traffic. Keen states
that value is derived from the ’number of pages of user-generated content potentially available
for advertising’ and so websites such as WordPress, YouTube, Myspace, and CraigsList becoming
exponentially larger and more profitable as more users are effectively the employees for the
company. They create the content for the websites and they earn money for the owners when they
click on the relevant advertising for their tastes, currently with the market leader Google adSense.
The logical next question here is how does an Artist Manager make content they can contribute
to one of these websites that will ensure that there are large amounts of traffic both to increase
the awareness of the band and to increase potential incomes from advertising space at these
areas? The answer at the moment is in multiple media and specifically in creating some media that
becomes ‘viral’. The most obvious example of this type of viral marketing through social media
for an artist comes from the band OK GO (OK GO, 2011). Their music videos are intricate and
complicated, always ensuring the ‘my mates need to see this!’ factor which creates a viral video,
and also including the element of cool that means consumers are tempted to re-post, re-blog or re-
tweet the links under the illusion of being the trend setter or ahead of the curve for the new content
as outlined in Roger’s Bell Curve on the adoption of innovation (Rogers, 1962). The Artist Manager
needs to bear in mind how consumers will share the content once they have received it through
their preferred medium and adapt any videos, media, press, and even recordings so that virality can
be achieved.
These points all drive together to give some interesting conclusions: traditional marketing needs
to be known but is a foundation for new media marketing and is not the most cost effective form
of marketing for small artists, one-to-one relationships with quick feedback and good contact with
consumers is the next step on from the more traditionalist customer relationship management when
customers have many different options and a high opportunity cost, user generated content drives
online promotion and advertising space as which in turn drive eCommerce and physical sales, new
social media has become a megaphone for a few early adopters and trend setters & sites such as
facebook are not appropriate for larger scale marketing tactics but are good for keeping an eye on
negative and positive reviews of the brand/service/product. Finally the Artist Manager should be
able to communicate the difference between selling out and monetising as well as the difference
between integrity, artistic license and developing new niches. The Artist manager may push a
band against its artistic will to lengthen their career but this may in turn shorten it by driving band
members apart.
Music Week Daily News
The Paradox of the Music Manager
Theodor Adorno argued that the commercialisation of music aligned with a reduction of quality. The
term he used was that music was becoming standardized. Andrew Keen said much the same, really.
This is a moderate look into how being a music manager is a conflict between artistic integrity and earning everyone a living
or trying to find a balance between the two is the art of artist management
Adorno argued that through commercialisation music and its artistic nature was made into a
commodity, which in turn was homogenised to suit the masses in business leader’s pursuit of
expanding niches and improving profits. This homogenisation lead to the decrease in music quality
that we see in today’s music industry. Industry commentators such as Arik Hesseldahl of Bloomberg
Businessweek (Hesseldahl, 2006) comment that music has reached such a poor state of affairs due
to its only motivation being the price tag, and the introduction of the .mp3 has driven the physical
product to be worse audio quality as well as the song structure, lyrical content and delivery of
cultural influence.
The concept of being famous as a career option has only been around for the last 100 years. The
industrial revolution coupled with improved communication networks – and the world wars of the
early 20th century acting as a catalyst for new technologies in communication – meant that being
well known on its own could be enough to develop what was becoming prominent throughout the
70’s as the ‘Brand Me’ and corporate empowerment through social and associative public relations
on a large scale. Previous to this, an individual’s aspirations revolved around honour and pride of
family or specialism in a specific task, skill or knowledge. The move from heroes to pioneers to Stars
and now into celebrities has meant that integrity is a very questionable facet of many people in the
limelight today.
The questions this poses for Artist managers and individuals who are developing the careers of
musicians is the balance between monetising the artist’s endeavours so that it is a sustainable career
opportunity for all parties, but also retaining integrity and purpose in the art form itself. Thanks
to very strong and clever marketing tactics from large corporations in media principally in the late
1980’s but now in a more subtle way through larger news and media corporations which promoted
very particular things as cool – note MTV Cribs, Spring Break Parties, Jackass as well as the standard
media formats of Hello!, OK, and other gossip columns – a culture has arisen in the youth of today
that to be purely famous and well-known is a route to success and happiness and that shameless self
promotion or embarrassment can lead towards total fulfilment (Reynolds, 2011).
The artist manager needs to be able to identify and successfully explain to an artist that being
famous for fame’s sake is not musical success, nor is becoming a musician about being in all the
gossip magazines and that this mentality has stemmed from a very long line of tactics which
ultimately mean people buy gossip magazines and watch new media/reality TV programs. The
artist manager should understand how to monetise the artist’s talent but without losing the artist’s
integrity.
A technological influence that has changed the way artists are perceived and how they can create
successful routes to market has been through the explosion of the internet throughout the 90s.
Alternative routes to market have changed from traditional and expensive physical billboards, flyers,
posters, radio plugging and white label CDs to venture capitalists at record labels or distribution
companies towards an almost level free playing field with low start up costs, lower barriers of entry
and immediate feedback from fans and customers in the development through the noughties of new
social media.
Artist managers must understand both traditional mediums of marketing and traditional strategies
as well as new media technology, have a grasp of web development and scalable systems and keep
up to date with new programs, systems, websites and trends online to better position their artist
in the online community. The alternative media now demanded ranges from videos, games, web
apps, customisable and user generated content, exclusives in press and pr releases, mailing lists, RSS
feeds, higher quality music, high quality photography, distinctive branding, colour schemes, scalable
websites, excellent search engine optimisation, good contact networks, a personal feel to contacting
the band as well as alternative routes to market other than the collapsing recorded music industry.
The recorded music industry collapsed through the noughties after a peak in early 2001. While
the press saw this as an opportunity for sensationalist commentaries explaining how the ‘music
industry’ is completely lost, industry insiders and venture capitalists noted how the music industry
– noting the distinction between the recording industry, live industry, publishing industry, and the
music industry as a whole – was larger than it had ever been. The live music industry was booming
between 2006 – 2011: worldwide live music revenues were $16.6bn 2006, $18.1bn 2007, $19.4bn
2008, $20.8bn 2009, $22.2bn 2010, $23.5bn 2011 (grabstats, 2011). What this meant for the artist
manager was that alternative income streams to the more traditional recorded music licensing had
to be achieved.
Publishing has been expanded as a more secure income and the advent of new media with
opportunities for both recording synchronisation licensing as well as publishing song writing
opportunities in areas as diverse as video games either as main focus (as was seen in the brief ‘Hero’
range, guitar hero, vocal hero, DJ hero) or as secondary focus (as seen in FIFA and Tony Hawks Pro
Skater ranges), supermarket radios, advertising jingles, official sound tracks for films, and many
more. These formats that are now taking over from the album sales are seeing the focus of the
music drawn away from music on its own and drawn towards music alongside another function. This
means that there are more restrictions on songwriters as to how they arrange their recordings ready
for these publishing opportunities and ties in with Adorno’s suggestion that the commercialisation of
music is affecting the quality through the homogenisation of available product.
The artist manager’s next test is to negotiate with the talent they are managing in how songs will
be presented so that they are of interest to these different income stream’s decision makers but
also retain some artistic license and the integrity we were discussing earlier. The pop song emerged
through the second half of the 20th century to give standard formats and chord progressions: intro,
verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle eight, chorus, chorus, outro or I – IV – I – V and this has become
another facet of the lower quality music – songs begin to sound the same, arrangements become
predictable and it is harder to try original styles without being branded avant-garde or just not
accepted on any financially justifiable level. The manager must be in a position that they are up
to date with current musical trends as well as be in a position of trust with their artist so that they
can comment on music being presented in a critical and honest way with the artist. The challenge
here comes when the artist and manager disagree as to compositions verses market placement and
timing for the artist’s releases and without proper diplomacy the manager risks being ousted.
Another element to consider when talking about Adorno’s standardisation of media and the
technological intervention of the internet is the blatant disregard by internet users of traditional
intellectual property and copyrights. The internet has reduced the opportunity cost of purchasing
music to nil as poor international legislation and the inability to control property boundaries has
meant music can be copied transferred and shared illegally and easily. This internet piracy has
shifted the exclusivity of music and therefore power to the majority of internet users, with little
or no repercussions for their actions and a very strong ignorance of the laws that are in place
domestically aside from some very public cases where record labels have taken individuals to court.
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s website talking about the Recording Industry Association
of America, ‘In what would later seem like a prelude to the lawsuit campaign against individual
file-sharers, the recording industry sued four college students in April 2003 for developing and
maintaining search engines that allowed students to search for and download files from other
students on their local campus networks.’ (EFF, 2008).
The suing of individuals and even the suing of larger corporations to try and contain what is
effectively a poorly legislated free-for-all is a wasted effort and internet piracy continued. This is
what lead to the collapse through the noughties which was described earlier and the collapse has
meant larger corporations have folded, merged and downsized.
The industry that is left today is one of monopolistic competition. Artist mangers need to realise that
the power has shifted from few massive gatekeepers to many more people with lower barriers to
entry, but that along with that dilution comes a dilution of income as there are many more mouths
to feed from a set industry turnover. What this means is we will not see the rock star lifestyles
previously accepted by The Stone Roses or The Clash, where hotels were trashed, lavish stage shows
were achieved with no intention of return on investment and individuals such as Madonna, Michael
Jackson or Elvis Presley will have as much sway, but instead we will see artists taking much more
responsibility for their careers and treating them much more like an SME. The artist will become
the managing director of Brand Me whilst their Artist Manager will be their secretary, guiding their
vision along and ticking the boxes, dotting the i’s.
The Chinese and Asian markets are an interesting counterpoint to the western music industries
as these markets have seen the technological shift on a much larger scale which has left recorded
music all but gone and alternative income streams a necessity. In China distribution methods have
always been a hazard to record labels as a 3rd Shift policy has taken hold in the manufacturing
plants. (BBC, 2008) This is where manufacturing plants run 2 daytime shifts legally sanctioned by
the government, plus a third illegal shift producing only pirate material. To have this much pirated
material has left China as a country of 1.3bn people, the 20th largest music market in the world.
(Peto E, 2007) China’s fast internet speed in urban areas has further added to the illegal filesharing
and musicians are not afraid to find corporate sponsors instead of record labels to fund their
careers, promoting toothpaste alongside their album, for example.
As these musicians’ music is no longer the main focus of their work, their celebrity becomes
their value and the product they endorse becomes their income. This is a further catalyst to the
arguments stated above as to how homogenising goods can lead to a lowering of quality alongside
commercialisation being a catalyst for poor music.
This is yet another example, albeit in a much more developed stage than what we have seen in
western markets, of how integrity becomes a barrier to entry into developing an artist’s career when
monetisation is so limited to 360 deals, celebrity status and therefore advertising space. The artist
manager should have a firm grasp of how markets are developing both domestically and overseas
to find out how artists are able to leverage integrity into their strategies and keep the artists happy
with their creativity verses career and employability. The industry is still vague and so it is up to the
individual to accept or reject tactics that reduce the artist to advertising space for other industries or
to seek alternative income streams.
Andrew Keen looks at the Recorded music industry in more detail in his text ‘The Cult of the
Amateur’ where he shows how consumers have changed expectations from niche specialist record
stores holding unique collections of physical product into the Amazon Generation – where we
expect recommendations not from knowledgeable staff but from an algorithm and the ability to
access any media anywhere.
The consumer’s attitude to marketplaces and now eCommerce means that the Artist Manager
must be aware of the power of User-Generated Content (UGC). Where we have stated that
monetisation in the music industry has been drawn from secondary sources, ie. Advertising space,
the UGC and new social media and social networks that the internet now works to are one outlet
for that advertising space. We also know that advertising space is only as valuable as the amount of
relevant eyes that are affected by it, and this draws us to conclude that online traffic is the source of
monetisation. This is different to earlier theories about subscriptions and charging for music online,
which had too high opportunity costs for consumers who could just pirate material instead. Now
monetisation comes from giving content seemingly away for free as with traditional print media
such as free newspapers, but re-couping the money through advertising and traffic. Keen states
that value is derived from the ’number of pages of user-generated content potentially available
for advertising’ and so websites such as WordPress, YouTube, Myspace, and CraigsList becoming
exponentially larger and more profitable as more users are effectively the employees for the
company. They create the content for the websites and they earn money for the owners when they
click on the relevant advertising for their tastes, currently with the market leader Google adSense.
The logical next question here is how does an Artist Manager make content they can contribute
to one of these websites that will ensure that there are large amounts of traffic both to increase
the awareness of the band and to increase potential incomes from advertising space at these
areas? The answer at the moment is in multiple media and specifically in creating some media that
becomes ‘viral’. The most obvious example of this type of viral marketing through social media
for an artist comes from the band OK GO (OK GO, 2011). Their music videos are intricate and
complicated, always ensuring the ‘my mates need to see this!’ factor which creates a viral video,
and also including the element of cool that means consumers are tempted to re-post, re-blog or re-
tweet the links under the illusion of being the trend setter or ahead of the curve for the new content
as outlined in Roger’s Bell Curve on the adoption of innovation (Rogers, 1962). The Artist Manager
needs to bear in mind how consumers will share the content once they have received it through
their preferred medium and adapt any videos, media, press, and even recordings so that virality can
be achieved.
These points all drive together to give some interesting conclusions: traditional marketing needs
to be known but is a foundation for new media marketing and is not the most cost effective form
of marketing for small artists, one-to-one relationships with quick feedback and good contact with
consumers is the next step on from the more traditionalist customer relationship management when
customers have many different options and a high opportunity cost, user generated content drives
online promotion and advertising space as which in turn drive eCommerce and physical sales, new
social media has become a megaphone for a few early adopters and trend setters & sites such as
facebook are not appropriate for larger scale marketing tactics but are good for keeping an eye on
negative and positive reviews of the brand/service/product. Finally the Artist Manager should be
able to communicate the difference between selling out and monetising as well as the difference
between integrity, artistic license and developing new niches. The Artist manager may push a
band against its artistic will to lengthen their career but this may in turn shorten it by driving band
members apart.