Building Your Team: Part 1

As featured in: Performing Songwriter Issue #70, June 2003.  Visit performingsongwriter.com to order back issues or subscribe.

Part 1 | 2

Panel moderated by Fett

FETT, the panel moderator, is the Marketing Manager and Technology Editor for Performing Songwriter magazine. He is also co-owner, with Nancy Moran, of Nashville’s Azalea Studios.

AMY KURLAND is the owner and manager of Nashville’s world-famous Bluebird Cafe that celebrated its 20th anniversary last year. Amy’s been involved in the music business as a manager, industry advisor and much more. Her main role on this panel is as a promoter and venue owner.

CATIE CURTIS is a singersongwriter from Boston. She’s had five albums out independently and on various labels including EMI. She’s had her songs featured on television’s Dawson’s Creek and Chicago Hope, and was a member of the Lilith Fair tour.

JOHN BEITER is a partner at Loeb & Loeb in Nashville. His law practice focuses on entertainment, copyright and trademark law, primarily in the music field. He represents recording artists, songwriters, record companies, music publishers and other parties involved in the music industry.

JANIS IAN is basically a music industry powerhouse in her own right and has done it all many times. Her first record came out in 1967, and she has a tremendous amount of insight into the music industry.

BEVERLY BARTSCH is a business manager who has worked in the music business for 16 years in financial matters. Some of her clients in the past have included Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith and Rachael Lampa, as well as a number of corporate clients in the industry. 

The team is really composed of two sets of people. The first is the core team--the artist, being the boss of the team, and possibly one or more of the following: the manager, the booking agent, the business manager, the publicist, the attorney, the label--of course there can be a number of people at a label (same thing applies to the publisher)--the record promoter, the distributor, and let’s not forget the performing rights organization. There’s also an extended team that is equally important--and in some cases more important than the core members. That team includes the venues, venue owners and promoters; radio DJs and TV personalities; the press; and the one that’s overlooked quite a lot--but is probably one of the most important members of the team--the fan base. Your fans can do a lot for building your career.

Fett: Starting with Amy--as a venue owner and promoter, what do you see your role on an artist’s team as being?

Amy: As a team member, from the venue perspective I do have a lot to do with the success of the artist, and it is that core team that better look out for me. Because when you talk about that team, I can tell you some things that go wrong right away. If any of those people in the core team are your mother or your lover or your son or your next-door neighbor who’s temporarily unemployed and said they would make phone calls on your behalf, you are really in trouble. When I get those kind of phone calls, I’d much rather hear from the artist. I know you think it’s more professional if somebody else calls on your behalf--not if they don’t know who you are, don’t know who I am or don’t know how to make a professional phone call.

So, as a venue owner, I am exposed to that core team all the time. I am exposed to the road manager who forgets to call, or calls and makes a lot of demands, or is just hard to work with when he gets here. Or sometimes the most wonderful people in the world can make my life easier. And so I think, in a lot of ways, as the team member “venue,” what I am is the place where the rest of your team can either make you or break you from a business perspective when you’re starting out. The team is not worth having if they’re not doing a good job for you.

Catie, you’re an artist, and I’ll kind of give you a leading question here. We spoke very briefly before we started the panel about the importance of being in control of the team and the fact that you truly are the boss.

Catie: Well, for me there was a period of time when I did everything myself, and then once I put a team together, there was a period of time when I got off completely and really enjoyed having someone else take charge. But I think what happened during that period was that the fan base felt that they no longer had access to me; there was a lost trust. At one point early in my career, when I signed to EMI, there was this whole shift in my team toward, “OK, we know that you’re a folk singer, but we need to move you into this kind of thing,” and at that point I was just so happy to have people doing things for me, I was like, “Well, I’m just going to go play my gigs, and I’m not even going to engage.” And when I ultimately left EMI and moved back into the more indie situation, through the Internet I ended up reconnecting to the fan base, and now I definitely see myself as the person who has to lead the pack, whereas before I was just following along.

John, I know attorneys play a lot of different roles--you might want to describe a few of those and some of your own personal roles.

John: Well, a very senior entertainment attorney whose feet I studied at when I was younger told me once that an entertainment attorney is simply a lawyer who happens to be working for an entertainer. But on the business side of things, an entertainment lawyer nowadays may be the person who actually pitches the artist initially to a label, or to other people on the team, to sort of get the team together or get the career going. Sometimes the lawyer comes in much later. But the lawyer generally will be negotiating contracts, record deals, publishing deals, deals with booking agencies. And then there are the sorts of other things that a lawyer does defending the rights of the client on a daily basis: defending allegations of infringement, telling somebody else that they may be infringing, going to court to deal with a traffic ticket or getting somebody out of the drunk tank late at night.

The lawyer’s role is a little bit different than everyone else’s on the team, at least in one regard, and that is that a lawyer cannot really throw a contract in front of the client--the artist--and say I’m going to be your lawyer for five years under this contract. An artist can always get rid of a lawyer on a whim, subject to paying whatever outstanding bills there are, but you’re not tied at the hip. A lawyer also is subject to a set of ethical rules in dealing with all clients and just can’t be one of the slick people on the team. I have to deal in an ethical way, or I’m not a lawyer anymore. So that should be some comfort to the artist.

The one thing that I usually think of myself as is the designated driver in a group. The same lawyer I’m thinking of told me when I was in law school, if you want to be an entertainment lawyer because you want to hang out with the cool people and be cool with the clients, don’t even bother to get into entertainment law. My job is to be the uncool guy in the room. My job is to be the guy who stays sober--in a figurative sense. I’m looking at contracts. I’m the one in the suit. And if you’ve got a lawyer who’s too much into sort of hanging, well, think about it.

Janis, your role as an artist has taken on lots of different forms over the years. You’re kind of running your own industry now--Janis Ian Inc. You might want to talk a little bit about the role of the artist in terms of controlling the entire career and keeping the team in check.

Janis: I make a pretty good living doing what I do, and it affords me some choices that a lot of people in our industry who are artists don’t have. I consider myself the CEO of Janis Ian Inc. I’m very cognizant that my face on that record is the only face that people are going to remember. They’re not going to remember my lawyer, they’re not going to remember my manager, they’re not going to remember the producer. They will remember my face. Ditto when I go to a show. They will remember my face as the one who had the crappo road manager who made everybody crazy or the stupid assistant who had all those dumb questions. So I would say that one of the important things to remember in building a team is that you’re the boss; everyone’s behavior reflects on you, and everything comes down from the top. You set the mood-- morally, ethically, professionally. If you’re always late, your crew will be sloppy. If you walk around sulking, your crew will be morose. So that’s issue one.

Issue two is that we are not trained to be bosses. In our profession, most of us are self-employed, and as such we don’t go to meetings about management. What I’ve learned over the last 38 years is that I’m remarkably unqualified to be a boss. And that means the people who are working under me are not well-trained, which also reflects badly on me.

The third issue, I think, is that teams cost money. Building a team costs money. As folk singers we go around thinking, “Oh, my instincts tell me that person will be good on my team.” Great. If your entire team is composed of people not making money on you, something is radically wrong. If you can’t afford to put together a team and you’ve been doing this eight or 10 years, something is radically wrong. But you have to temper that with the fact that anyone making their living off you is going to give you skewed information. Your agent will give you skewed information about how important it is for you to tour because they’re making money off of that. Your manager likewise will want you to take the high-dollar publishing deal, the high-dollar tour. Instead of getting your hotels paid for when you go to Europe, they want commission on that money.

My team’s job as I see it, first and foremost, is to gather information. To that end, I have a business manager--he’s my big dog. He has enough other clients and travels enough that he has information I can’t get at. I have a lawyer--same issues. Both of them cost me money. But the money that they bring in, in terms of the information I get from them, furthers the money that I earn. I don’t have a manager; I have been through three managers in the last 10 years, and to me, at this point--after 38 years--either I know what I’m doing or I don’t. I count on my business manager, my lawyer, my road manager of nine years, my assistant and my spouse--who has watched me for 14 years--to give me the input that a manager would normally give me, tempered by my agency. The problem that I find in all of this is that I’m being a songwriter; I’m being a performer; I’m being a recording artist; I’m being a publisher; I’m being the CEO of several corporations-- where do I find time to write and be Janis Ian? Without Janis Ian’s songs, there’s no need for a team.

The way I look at it, ultimately, is I’m in a service industry--just as a waitress is, just as a hairdresser is. If I don’t give that audience what they’re looking for, they’re not going to come back. If I don’t treat my team well and make sure that every year they’re a little improved personally over what they were the year before, they’re not going to be happy employees or happy partners and co-workers. So I try very hard to keep a handle on everything while separating Janis-Ian-the-artist from Janis-Ian-businessperson, because if that businessperson starts overlapping into the artist too much, all the teams in the world won’t prop you up.

Part 1 | 2