16 minute read
Sandy Dworniak This Much Talent
WHAT I WISH I’D KNOWN
Sandy Dworniak established the writer and producer management company This Much Talent in 1991. She has gone on to build an impressive roster which includes Jim Abbiss, Liam Howe and 6 Figure Music, amongst many others. Her clients have worked with the likes of Adele, Arctic Monkeys, Lana Del Rey, Stormzy, Massive Attack and Foo Fighters. She recalls some hard lessons learned across her career…
What I wish I’d known before I started my career in management is that people aren’t your friends.
You have to be mindful of your relationships with clients, especially because things can get very tough. It’s a really weird situation, because you can be like best friends, but if something goes wrong, that best friendship can end forever. That’s what I struggled with in the early part of my career — being so close with people and then being really disappointed and heartbroken by the end of the relationship.
I realised this the first time I was sacked by a big client. That happened about six years into my company, so I was still pretty young. The reason I was sacked was because I had an assistant who basically undermined me and he [the client] sacked me out of the blue. I was so invested in this relationship because we’d worked together since he was a young artist and had nothing, and then suddenly he was earning tonnes of money and we were working on really big projects.
My assistant left, started a company and took this client, so then I had to go into a legal battle to get paid, basically. That was really ugly and went on for five years. That’s another pitfall of being a manager — people will decide that once they sack you, they never have to pay you ever again, so you have to battle for your right for post-term commission.
I didn’t have any contracts in those days either, so that’s another one I wish I’d known. Not every person needs a contract, but in that situation I didn’t have one and they basically denied that I was this person’s manager. So I had to fight and it was absolutely heartbreaking, not just because I was so invested in his talent, but because I saw the trajectory and knew that he was going to be huge.
It also taught me that lawyers can be really difficult because it’s their job to resolve a situation in someone else’s favour, even if someone else is completely wrong. It’s immoral. I find the morality of the industry quite difficult to deal with sometimes.
Ultimately, that experience taught me a lot about how important it is to have clear boundaries, and if you have a deal with someone that isn’t in writing, make sure they fully understand what that deal is, have acknowledged what their deal is, or that there’s someone else in the room who heard you say those things. We resolved it in the end, but it was a horrible, nasty battle that broke my heart and taught me everything about how to be a manager.
You have to be mindful that it’s a business at the end of the day, and not get too emotionally attached. As managers, it’s hard not to be emotionally involved in the work we do, because we do a lot of it for free; that means we have to love what we do. But I’ve learned how to hold a piece of myself back, so I’m not invested on every level, like you would be in a friendship.
That said, for every client that fucks you over, there are 20 who won’t. I’ve got people who’ve been with me for as long as I’ve had my company and have been incredibly loyal. We grew up together, we learned how to do it together, and they’re still here. Like Jim Abbiss, and Liam [Howe] who I’ve been with for 17 or 18 years, and Barny [Barnicott] for 20 years.
Also, as a female in the music industry, there are a lot of sharks. Navigating the shark infested waters is something I wish I was more skilled at when I was younger. Things are changing so much in terms of the perception of women in the industry, and we feel we’re equal now, but when I started, it wasn’t like that. I was one of very few women that did the job that I do, so I had to
Photo: Chris Frazer Smith
Liam Howe
work hard to prove myself. I found that brains are more important than anything else. You have to have the confidence to use your experience and intellect to get through certain situations.
It was intimidating when I was a young woman walking into a room full of men in the music industry and I couldn’t use the flirty element, or try to be charming. I found that my best strategy was to be the smartest person in the room in order to get people to take me seriously as a manager. It’s really important to understand that you need to know what you’re talking about, or at least you’re able to bluff your way through it.
I also wish I’d known that working in music was going to be a difficult life, that I’d have to learn fast, think on my feet and rely on my own intellect and nothing else to get through. There was no way of learning, there was no teaching [management] — I wish I’d known how to do it when I started, because I had literally no idea. Because of that, I’m never afraid to go, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, I don’t understand, can you talk me through this?’ I
learned that by having to deal with these massive bigwigs in America. Rather than be scared, I just said, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing, talk me through it’ – and people were really open to that.
Trying to blag your way through it sometimes doesn’t work. To this day, if I’m dealing with some arsehole lawyer somewhere and I don’t know what they’re talking about, I’ll make them explain their own contracts with me, because then you learn. This job is a continual learning curve, which is why I’m still doing it; it keeps me interested.
Running my own company has been fabulous because I’ve had freedom. I was also always incredibly insubordinate, so I was useless as an employee. If you’re starting your own company, be aware that lots of people will want your job, lots of people will try to take your clients, but you have to be really confident in your own ability and talent to see through that and don’t be scared. Be brave enough to do it by yourself, just go for it and handle the pitfalls when they come.
There’s also always people around who will help you when things are really tough. I still
Barny Barnicott
have people I call when I’m having a crisis. I never stopped, even when it got really hard it’s been, ‘Right, I can do this, I’m good at this’, and I’ve carried on and trusted my instincts.
When you start your own business, you have to be prepared to be really poor for a while. I think that’s a big one for a lot of young managers — they are scared to be by themselves and want to attach themselves to other companies, build their roster through someone else. But I think the most important thing for me has been understanding that you can do it, you don’t need anyone else. You will be poor for a little while, but if you’re good at what you do, you will find amazing talent and it won’t be long until you start to make a living. I love my job, I really do, even though there’s been some dreadful times, I’ve never regretted taking the plunge to be my own boss for one minute; it’s very freeing.
There have also been times when we’ve worked on some incredible projects. One of my first was Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet soundtrack. That was the biggest learning curve because I’d
Sandy Dworniak with Jim Abbiss at the MMF Awards
never worked on a film and I had to do all the UK supervision. I had to run a 70-piece orchestra and all the budgets. I was working 18 hour days, because LA starts at six, and they wouldn’t let me get off the phone until I was going, ‘Please let me go to bed!’. I learned really fast how to manage a project of that size, and it went on to do incredibly well. That was a pivotal moment — when I suddenly realised what kind of living you can make out of this.
I was a bit naive to the success side at that point. Some of the projects we’ve done with Jim, like Arctic Monkeys and Adele, have done incredibly well, and each time you have that kind of success it reminds you what a brilliant job you have and how incredible it can be when things go well. It also changes your status completely, because as soon as you start to have some success, people take you very seriously. So, now, rather than me knocking on everyone’s door, people come to me when they have a project. As a manager, suddenly you are someone who has something to say, someone who has got a set of ears and someone who can run a business.
It’s a debate that continues to lack essential nuance, and essential italicised emphasis. Eamonn Forde takes a stab at injecting both back into proceedings…
The #BrokenRecord campaign in the UK and the Justice At Spotify movement in the US have done incredible jobs in getting their points across about creator remuneration in the streaming age – including the former’s loud and clear voice throughout the parliamentary inquiry into streaming economics.
The entire system, they argue, is stacked against both songwriters and recording artists and – unless something significant is done, and done quickly – we are going to be facing a creative crisis on an unprecedented scale, where talent either bleeds out of the business or simply bleeds to death.
These are not quixotic demands, they argue: the system can and should change to pay musicians better. How much better is the harder part to define, but the intent is clear.
Yet, peppered throughout the wider campaigning here is an analogy – if we are being pretentious, a leitmotif – that is used as if it were the final and incontrovertible argument. The ideological smackdown.
It runs that musician X generated Y streams and only made Z income in the past month which, when it is all totted up, falls criminally short of the minimum wage they would get from working in, say, Starbucks that month.
It’s horrific, right?
Of course artists and songwriters should be paid more. But...
The thesis that earnings from streaming do not add up to a minimum wage is a hugely (and deliberately) emotional one – the goal being to point out that streaming income for many artists is tiny or non-existent and they are consigned to a cruel world of penury.
It is designed to frame the argument in terms that the layperson can immediately grasp and innately understand: streaming is a rigged
game, only the hugest artists benefit and there is a growing underclass of musicians who cannot afford to eat or pay their bills.
And yet… as a leitmotif in this growing movement, its deployment is doing everyone a considerable disservice. It also does not make explicit its own inherent complexities.
Here are the facts. The UK government lists five bands to the minimum wage – going from apprentice level (£4.30 an hour), up through the under 18s (£4.62), 18-20 (£6.56), 21-22 (£8.36) and finally 23 and above (£8.91).
These bands and rates have been revised over the years, but this is where they are today.
They exist to protect part-time, casual, disabled or foreigner workers who are often employed in manual or low-skilled jobs. This is often hard, dangerous, risky (both in terms of actually doing the job and in terms of job security) work. These minimum wage bands are far from great – especially as the gig economy becomes the norm
Keith Richards is said to have written Satisfaction after the components of the song came to him in a dream
for so many – but they are legal measures that go some way towards protecting certain classes of workers.
There are many professions or vocations that do not fall under these protections. Top of the list here are “self-employed people running their own business”.
That means me, as a freelance writer. It also means the vast majority of musicians. The minimum wage does not include us, and neither should it include us. Because what we do and how we work is different.
Of course artists and songwriters should be paid more. But...
So, if we pick up this concept of the “minimum wage” for musicians, how do we actually implement it?
Is there an interview and recruitment process to find the most suitable candidates? Do we introduce job tiers? Are there performancerelated reviews every quarter? Are there productivity goals to be hit? Can individuals be let go because their work and attendance records are sub-standard? How do disciplinary hearings work?
Returning to the point about wage bands, if artist X makes Y% more than their particular wage band for that month (let’s say a song has gone viral), do they have an earnings ceiling which, if they exceed it, they pay back into a central pot? Will anyone willingly pay back money that exceeds their pay scale? And is the 20-year-old guitarist in a band happy to take £6.56 an hour while the 23-year-old drummer gets £2.35 an hour more?
Because, if you are going to take the logic of the minimum wage and run with it, these are the issues and complexities you are going to have to untangle.
The other – and biggest point – to remember
is that minimum wage is based entirely on a one-off payment for work done. There are no recurring payments or royalties for that shift in the factory, on the farm, or on the building site (for the record, these are all jobs I have done myself). The labourer does not own or have the ability to license their eight-hour shift. They do the work. They are paid for it. They are not paid again until they do another shift.
There is no (even slim) possibility that the shift you did in that chicken hatchery (yes, I am drawing on my own experience again here) could land a sync in a TV show or video game. No one is going to pay £25 (plus booking fee) to come and watch me do my hatchery shift live (the factory is hot, it really smells and is no place for the squeamish). No one is in the market for a T-shirt of my shift. The chances of someone doing a cover version – or even sampling – my shift are so slim as to be non-existent. I cannot parlay that shift into monetisation elsewhere.
The underlying point that this line about a minimum wage is trying to make is correct: the language it is using to try and make it is not.
What you also have to be sensitive about when reaching for the highly charged and emotional argument around minimum wage is the people who are actually working minimumwage jobs and are unlikely to ever break out into something more secure, something that is better paid.
Let’s get even more emotional about it in our descriptive language. Someone getting two buses across London at 4am to break their back mixing cement, cleaning an office or stacking shelves in a supermarket before most of us get out of bed is perhaps not going to respond well to the reality they live being appropriated by others to suit their own ends.
If you want to reach for the emotional argument about minimum wage, you have to understand that it is not an abstract for many: it is their daily grind.
And if you want to use an emotional argument about minimum wage, it is only right and fair that it can be used back at you.
Of course artists and songwriters should be paid more. But...
The other point to remember through all of this is that musicians turn to music because they do not want (or feel they are utterly unsuited to) “a normal 9-to-5 job”. They are also dealing in the mystical realm of intellectual property – where at 9am on a Monday a song or a recording did not exist and by 5pm that same day/a week later/a month later it does exist.
Music creation is alchemy. There is no other term for it.
Songs can land fully formed inside the creator’s head (Keith Richards had the entire riff and title of (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction come to him as if in a dream), they can be summoned up (Paul McCartney has talked about sitting down with John Lennon and saying “let’s write a swimming pool” as they crafted life-changing hits to order), or they can take years of refinement and reworking to complete (Leonard Cohen reportedly took five years to write Hallelujah).
Yes, this is work, but it is work unlike any other. And it does not fit the template of work produced for minimum wage.
The language here is wrong or confused or confusing and it does no one any favours.
You can make the same points – make the same calls for better payment terms – in a different way. A better way. A more effective way.
These are creative people involved here – so it feels like a betrayal of that creativity to be relying on an ill-fitting argument slipped inside a wholly inappropriate turn of phrase.
Photo: Tania Alieksanenko / Unsplash
