24 minute read
Ashley Page Page 1
PAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE
British-born Ashley Page quit the major record companies 14 years ago to launch his own management company, Page 1 Management. With clients like Joel Little and Jawsh 685, things have gone rather well since…
Ashley Page, whose Page 1 Management works with Grammy-winners and chart-topping artists, never set out for a career in management. In fact, he actively avoided it. His dad repped acts including The Kinks and The Troggs in the sixties, and Page says he witnessed the job playing a role in the breakup of his family unit: “I saw how it was 24/7, seven days a week and he was never around. When you’re a kid and you don’t have a level of understanding… there was a difficult period. It was the one thing I said I wasn’t going to do.”
Instead, Page – who grew up in Surrey and Devon – studied English literature and media studies at university and from there, landed a job in the warehouse of Castle Communications. The company decided it wanted to move into frontline catalogue with acquisitions and Page was offered the opportunity to join the new operation as a promo kid. “The first job I had to do, incredibly, was look after Mick Fleetwood when he came to promote the Live at the BBC album.” He was sold.
After a few years, Korda Marshall poached Page to work at Mushroom and Infectious in the international promotions department. He joined at the tail-end of the first Garbage record and went on to work with acts including Ash before leaving to try his luck in New Zealand with his now wife. There, Page found a job at Festival Mushroom Records and Flying Nun, later joining Warner as an A&R when it acquired Festival Mushroom Records in 2005.
Over the following three years, Page grew increasingly frustrated with the way he saw artist projects moving along a conveyor belt, and that’s where his mind started to change about working in management.
“You see within the system how quickly the record is put out and moved on from, and the artist was just left wondering what was going to happen for the rest of their life. I was too close and too personally involved to continue to watch that happening,” he remembers.
“With one of the bands I was looking after, I constantly said: ‘All of these guys have really great and individual things going on… maybe we should offer them a label set-up.’ I was being pacified and told, ‘Yeah, sure, we’ll do it’ and then it was six months of asking three or four times. When nothing happened, I got to the end of the road and ended up leaving.”
Page 1 was launched in 2008 to look after that band, who were called Goodnight Nurse, the lead singer of which was songwriter and producer Joel Little, who Page has managed ever since. At the time, Page’s mother had been given 10 weeks to live, so he relocated to the UK and spent every day in a palliative care unit, while working through the night on contracts. Since then, Page 1 has helped take Little from playing covers in pubs to writing and producing for artists including Taylor Swift, Khalid, Imagine Dragons and Lorde (for whom he co-wrote Royals, which secured two Grammy wins in 2014).
Today, other Page 1 clients of note include Grammynominated producer and songwriter Drew Pearson (Zac Brown Band, Kesha, Phillip Phillips) and producer and songwriter SIBA, who co-wrote Griff’s UK Top 20 hit Black Hole plus Where Did You Go? by Jax Jones feat. MNEK, which has recently been climbing up the UK radio charts. Page 1 also reps Jawsh 685 – whose Savage Love hit No.1 in 16 countries in 2020 – and singer, songwriter and producer Navy, who has recently been in the studio with Zara Larsson.
Last year, Page 1 counted two US mainstream radio hits with Regard, Tate McRae and Troye Sivan’s You (co-written by SIBA) and Tate McRae and Khalid’s Working (produced and co-written by Little). Page 1 also secured a deal with Hipgnosis, which saw Merck Mercuriadis’ company buy 178 of Little’s song rights. Despite the limitations of the pandemic, Page tells us that 2021 was his company’s most successful year to date.
Alongside its base in New Zealand, Page 1 has presence in London, New York and Nashville. Page is planning on doubling its size over the next few years. That process has started with the hiring of Danielle Middleton, who joined from Sony Music Publishing as Senior Director last year, and Page will soon announce his first hire in Sydney, Australia. Here, we chat to him about his approach to management, his inability to fit in at Warner, his proudest moments and much more besides.
How did you reconcile your personal adversity to a career in management with the job you find yourself doing today?
I’ve always been aware of family being first. Even when I travel, I will never travel and miss my wife’s birthday and I’ve also never missed a Valentine’s Day. I take that very seriously — you constantly have to remember these things. The minute you start to forget is when you start becoming part of the system and forgetting why you started [the job] to begin with.
I read in another interview that you felt you never really fitted in at Warner. Why was that?
Maybe I was too headstrong. I was talking to an A&R in America recently, who shall remain nameless, who had moved from management back to work for a major. They said they weren’t sure how long they’d last, because they sat in the first couple of meetings and were so frustrated by how limited the scope was and how some of the approaches weren’t quite correct to really obvious things. [Staff in the meeting] were so institutionalised as to how jobs had already been done within record companies. So maybe that’s the thing — sometimes you can see things that are so much clearer that need to be changed or tweaked and I like the ability to be able to go out there and do that. We should be able to change things, we should be able to speak up and we should be able to do what we need to do. Hopefully I push that onto my team. If Danielle [Middleton] in America decides that there’s something she feels can be done better and wants to try it, I’m fully behind giving it a go. We all have slightly different views and ways of doing things and I believe in my team and that they should have free rein to do what they need to do. Maybe that’s a learning that stems from where I came from. “Don’t sit there trying What, in your eyes, makes a good to hype a deal to a level manager? The ability to be deeply empathetic that’s over-inflated.” but also to be self motivated enough to know what still needs to get done. You are dealing with, on a very personal level, very emotional people and rightly so — the greatest songs are written because people are emotional. But you have to be able to step back from that and complete the tasks, too.
What do you look for in the clients that you work with?
You have to be able to get along, first and foremost, and understand each other on a very personal level. This is a long journey — you can’t enter into a management agreement and then, six weeks later, find out that you don’t have the same understanding. When we sit down with a client, we say, ‘Take your time, let’s walk alongside each other for a while and work out exactly what you want to achieve’. There is no cookie cutter template to how this is going to play out — one person’s goal is going to be very different to another. Creating a three-year plan has to be done at the beginning and has to be stuck to reasonably tightly. Being driven is also important. There’s nothing to be benefited from working with people who don’t entirely feel like they want to be doing it. If I’m going to be travelling the world 365 days a year, I want somebody else to feel like they are up there, every day, working for us as well.
You’ve got some extensive company values published on your website that centre on wellbeing, mutual respect and honesty.
Drew Pearson
Photo: Yazz Alali Jawsh 685
What sparked the thinking behind devising those and the need to make them clear?
Because we are a small company, I think you have to set these things out at the very beginning. You have to have all cards on the table as to how people are expected to work within the company. In this day and age, it would be a shame if they weren’t spelled out.
While it is extensive, I think a lot of it should be common sense and about basic respect between all parties. It’s as much for myself and my staff as well as the clients — it works both ways. I hope those sorts of ethics are taken on board internationally as well. I was talking to similar companies recently where there are still some pretty sharp divides between parties and that’s quite difficult to hear.
What’s your proudest moment as a manager?
It would be hard to look past winning Song of the Year at the Grammys for Joel Little. I wish I’d had more time to stop, step back and enjoy that. In the moment – and I was looking after Joel’s family who were over – my brain was in logistics mode of moving one person to another place, to another place. I enjoyed it when Joel was able to buy his first house and when there’s financial stability, a deal goes through, and suddenly the writer understands that they now have an opportunity to push forward.
I’ve also enjoyed the growth of the company. I think the proudest moment is possibly yet to come because I’m enjoying our expansion and bringing new staff members on board, watching it grow and create its own ecosystem.
How about your most memorable failure?
A deal that fell through with a band called Kids of 88 in America around 2009. They were one of my first management clients, we put out a song called My House and all the labels in America started coming in for it. It was a time when Atlantic could take us around the world and Sony were interested too so we were having meetings with them, as well.
It was incredible sitting in New York with all these people coming into the room and telling you how the deal is going to be great. We made the choice, with a lawyer who’s gone on to do far better things than us, to clear the runway and just focus on one company, which at that point in time was RCA. The deal had got to that level where they were like, ‘Don’t worry, this is going to happen’. I remember everything going icy cold and quiet and then finally getting the call from RCA about three weeks later that they weren’t going to proceed.
I felt like that was the end of the road, like my management career had started and finished within about a year. I think every new manager goes through that moment where they think they are the greatest thing because things start taking off. You’ve suddenly gone from New Zealand to America to New York, you meet all these people and you’re being told how great you are to then have that one moment where the rug is pulled from under you, the trapdoor opens and you’re hurtling through space towards nothing.
It felt very quiet and probably the worst moment. You wonder if you can come back from that but ultimately, those great failures are your biggest learning curve. We didn’t end up with another
Danielle Middleton, Senior Director, US; Ashley Page, Founder, CEO; Rob Turnham, Managing Director, UK
big deal for those guys, so you end up picking yourselves up and moving on.
Why did the deal fall through?
I still to this day couldn’t tell you an exact reason other than they just decided not to proceed. And because we’d already told other label A&Rs that we were going with another label, when you suddenly turn around and go, ‘We’re not going with [that] deal anymore’, nobody wanted us.
What did you learn from that experience?
To potentially get a deal done a lot faster to potentially be happy with the level of it. Don’t sit there trying to hype a deal to a level that’s over-inflated. If you’re lucky enough to be in a position where there’s multiple people bidding on a deal, keep people going until the deal is across the line.
Also, you have good days and bad days. I think it’s the same with writers or artists – you see some artists come out of the traps and have No.1s in America right from the get go and then struggle after that. For me, this was a glimmer of hope at the beginning, the rug was pulled and I had to work my way back. It’s a humbling experience that keeps you quite grounded.
What would you change about the music industry and why?
I would like to see songwriters get compensated to the level that they should be. The reduction in rates makes things a lot harder. It’s a difficult world that songwriters survive in, where they are expected to write a song, day in and day out, and not
Joel Little
Photo: Jordan Arts SIBA
be compensated in any way, until it’s possibly released, and then potentially your part is reduced by another producer’s percentage, and then you don’t get some sort of an income for 18 months. It would be nice if, at some point, the service providers and record labels can recognise that without the songwriter, they have no song.
How would you like to see compensation change for songwriters?
I would like to see a greater share of the [revenue] percentage go to the songwriter, as opposed to having to fight against the digital service provider who’s trying to bring that down. It’s quite staggering in this day and age that you’re having to argue to be paid a little bit more for your songwriter, rather than a little bit less. That’s quite a mind blowing experience.
What’s the most exciting development happening in the music business right now?
The most exciting development that everyone’s keeping an eye on is to what degree NFTs are going to have an impact and which parts are going to stay with us. Publishers and writers will have to grow and adapt to that and actually enjoy being a part of seeing how we can be involved earlier.
I saw recently that Warner has invested in the metaverse with The Sandbox so it’s about understanding where that leaves writers and producers. I think there are so many opportunities — everything that Timbaland has done is quite interesting to watch. There are a lot of people who are leading the charge and it’s exciting to see which parts will actually end up continuing to grow and becoming part of our everyday landscape.
What advice would you offer to someone starting a career in management today?
They’ve got to be prepared to be knocked down and continuously get up. Everything is about the ability to work as an individual and to hustle for your client as hard as you can. That doesn’t change and that doesn’t stop, but sometimes it can become eye-opening how much you have to be connected out there, meeting everyone in the world. It’s a long, slow road to meet people, be connected, continuously hustle and don’t stop working.
You will get some great wins and you will be knocked down but just keep getting up because the only way to continue in management and to continue growing is to find those opportunities for your client. Unfortunately, that doesn’t come by taking holidays so much and it doesn’t come by not being out and meeting people — you can’t do everything via Zoom, get out and see people as the world opens up.
Also, trust your gut instinct. None of us internally here work on algorithms or formulas, it’s just about knowing your music, understanding, trusting and believing. I still think it’s as exciting a time as it’s ever been. The opportunities continue to grow, especially for us, otherwise we wouldn’t be looking at expanding. The work is there and the artists are as creative as ever. It’s fun. And if it’s not fun, don’t do it. n
The revenue flow from licensees to labels to artists is dependent on accurate data and efficient management of that data. And the key to that, says the PPL’s CIO and MBUK columnist Mark Douglas, is collaboration…
This quarter, I want to take a closer look at some key developments that have been taking place around the systems that manage the flow of royalty income from a licensee to record labels and artists. As the CIO at PPL, I will focus on the recordings side of things, but there are many parallels in the musical works side of our industry.
Before getting into some of the specifics, it is worth looking more generally at the sort of systems that are used for this. In some respects, they are quite unusual. Unlike many businesses, very few of our systems are about repetitive transaction processing, such as you would see in, say, a manufacturing or retail environment.
So much of what we do is about data management, trying to turn incomplete or lowquality data into something that is good enough – and complete enough – to act as the basis for allocating and paying out hundreds of millions of pounds.
This is true for the repertoire databases that we all manage, but also the matching engines that link the reported music usage data back to that repertoire database. Not many industries have to put so much focus onto this sort of data management, nor do it at such scale.
These type of systems have some very interesting characteristics. Firstly, the option available to more traditional businesses, of selecting and configuring a world leading ERP package, is not a path that is open to us. As a result, most, if not all, of the required functionality has to be custom built. Such custom build projects are typically costly, and generally come with a lot of risk around time and cost overrun.
Secondly, some of the core functionality is difficult to fully automate. Developing software that can systematically and reliably determine whether the performer line-up on a particular
recording is correct is difficult. Especially when you consider that the logic has to work not just for contracted, featured main artists, but also for the large number of non-featured session musicians. Determining whether the stated rights owner for a recording is correct is equally difficult.
Using modern technology and approaches, such as Artificial Intelligence, can assist in the job, but getting it to make accurate, definitive determinations, at scale, is not possible. I know this only too well – we use these kind of tools at PPL and they certainly help. We have tools to help us group different versions of recordings into clusters so that we can look across them for inconsistencies in performer line-ups or in rights ownership, but they only take us so far. Beyond some low hanging fruit that we can automate, we need to engage human beings to make the ultimate determination.
And that gets us to the heart of the matter. The systems and databases that we use have required large upfront investments. But more than that, their ongoing operation is costly. Some of this is pure technology cost, but the lion’s share is the payroll cost for the large amount of human effort that is expended on a daily basis, managing the repertoire databases and matching systems that underpin everything we do.
For a long time, every Collective Management Organisation (‘CMO’) having their own set of systems and databases was the norm. It was as if being totally self-sufficient was a badge of honour, rather than the result of a properly considered assessment of the economics and risks.
To any rational observer, we have lagged behind other industries in identifying opportunities to collaborate and share back-end infrastructure, but things have been changing in recent years. Much of that change has come about quietly, but it is starting to make a very real difference. By shedding a light on some of those success stories, I can hopefully encourage even more focus on them, and drive even greater adoption.
First up is VRDB, a project that I suspect many of you have never heard about. Initiated at the start of 2014, this SCAPR (the international trade body for Performer CMOs) initiative had nine of its largest CMO members work on getting to the heart of the collaboration challenge.
At its core, VRDB has established a central repertoire database to hold a single and shared view of the truth on performer line-ups. It achieves this by having each member CMO upload the recordings that are commissioned in their country, or where they have at least one performer member included in the line-up.
VRDB takes these multiple uploads and merges them into a single, shared repertoire database. Where one CMO’s upload suggests that additional performers should be included in a given recording’s line-up, this is notified to the CMO in the country of commissioning for approval.
This alone is a game changer – it centralises the effort to determine who is and is not on a line-up and makes the answer available to all. Indeed, a requirement of using VRDB is that the CMOs must synchronise these amendments to line-ups back down to their local database.
By doing this, VRDB removes the need for every CMO to independently assess what the line-up should be. It also removes the annual
PPL recently inked a deal to represent US star Anderson .Paak for his neighbouring rights
swarm of claim files that were traditionally sent between CMOs. Importantly, it removes cost. It also improves data quality and therefore it improves the speed and accuracy of payments to artists.
Unsurprisingly, it was not an easy project, and it has taken time to get to the point where it is now delivering real value. The obvious challenge of getting multiple CMOs to agree on a common set of requirements turned out to be not such an issue. Indeed, after initiating the project in 2014, a live system was launched in mid-2016.
The hard bit has been making the fundamental business process changes back in the local CMOs to embrace a fundamentally different way of working, followed by the large volume of data cleansing that then has to take place.
The member CMOs have been plugging away at this over the past few years and here, in 2022, a great number have now abandoned the old, claims-based way of working and use VRDB as their primary means of identifying the correct performer line-up on a recording.
The second project I want to highlight is RDx. Conceived by IFPI and WIN, the Repertoire Data Exchange is a data hub that sits between record companies and CMOs. At the heart of RDx were three main aims.
The first of these was to make it easy for CMOs to gain access to authoritative data about recordings and their ownership, while at the same time providing record companies with feedback about how their data has been ingested, thereby gaining confidence that royalty distributions are based on this authoritative data.
The second aim was to reduce costs and complexity for record companies by providing them with a single channel through which they can provide their data. This allows them to retire the plethora of legacy data feeds and formats that have evolved over the previous decades, and ensures that everyone gets exactly the same data.
The third aim was to promptly surface competing claims of rights ownership in a recording. RDx does this both at the point of upload to RDx and also when that data is then loaded into a CMO’s local database. RDx notifies all parties involved in the conflict. It requires the conflict to be resolved and for corrected data to be re-uploaded.
RDx is a big step forward in sharing and collaboration. And just like VRDB, it is also a big step forward in ensuring that authoritative data is being used consistently in the payment of royalties. But it is arguably only a stepping stone as it is not, in and of itself, a repertoire database. It is a data hub and pipeline to local CMO databases.
Whether it evolves beyond this remains to be seen. The potential benefits could be large, but would require agreement and focus to realise. As the VRDB experience shows, changing the very heart of how a CMO operates, with its complex set of tightly integrated systems, is difficult and takes time.
In many ways, this is a secondary concern. If RDx remains exactly as it is today, it drives out error, complexity and cost, and for that reason, its adoption by record companies and CMOs must remain the focus. The pipeline of both is looking very healthy and those that have onboarded are already enjoying the benefits.
The final area that I want to look at is how we are sharing existing capability or combining data and IT system investments. I touched earlier on how complex and challenging it can be to build the IT systems we need. One consequence of this is that unless you have the necessary scale or resources, it can be difficult to do it well. One solution to this, and it is one we have been pushing at PPL for several years, is not to attempt to build in-country systems, but to leverage existing ones.
As I touched on earlier, many industries see it as completely normal to outsource certain back-office activities to existing, established players. Be it motor manufacturers sharing core component suppliers, oil and gas companies sharing exploration and refining capability, or hotel and airline groups sharing booking platforms, the rest of the world has embraced sharing capabilities without fear of losing relevance or competitive edge.
Whilst we have been slow to embrace this in our own industry, I have really noticed things start to change in recent times. There are still some large in-country systems investments taking place, but I have seen a real uptick in CMOs looking to offload some of the heavy lifting to those that have the IT systems, databases and scale to do it well.
The ones that have done this – and PPL now provides back-office services to six countries, including Portugal, Ireland and Switzerland – have gained access to best-in-class capabilities at a tiny fraction of what it would cost to recreate locally.
In a similar vein, I have been encouraged by projects such as Soundsys. Led by IFPI, SoundSys has seen India, Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand pool their investment budgets to build a single system that they then share.
Two other countries are in the process of onboarding to Soundsys, with a third in the pipeline. Shared development and collaboration around existing systems is, like outsourcing, a good way to reduce cost and risk around the back-office IT systems. These approaches can free up time and focus to concentrate on vital CMO processes, rather than on managing IT projects.
I have talked much about sharing in this article, as I strongly believe it to be the way forward. Our focus must be on maximising the amount of money that flows back to performers and recording rights holders and not on building yet more IT systems or databases that already exist.
Whether this sharing takes the form of backoffice services, pooling of investment budgets or in larger industry initiatives such as VRDB and RDx, this must be our continued focus.
There has been some really encouraging progress in recent times, but we must not be distracted. We need to build on the green shoots of collaboration and sharing that we have worked hard to achieve.
