The Grown-ups in the Room
THE GROWN-UPS IN THE ROOM
Andrew Gummer (1975) and Will Gresford (1993) share their experiences of working ‘behind the scenes’ in the corporate and managerial world of a hugely-changed music industry. In 1987, Andrew started work at EMI Music Publishing in the Charing Cross Road having qualified as a barrister. "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley was the best-selling single of the year and the music business was in the heyday of vinyl and cassette sales. The popularity of CDs was on the rise, and radio and MTV ruled the roost. Record companies could simply decide to make a hit by spending a lot of money and saturating the airwaves. Cut to 2020, and Will is managing a new artist, Matt Maltese. A good artist, but one not well known outside the confines of the indie scene. Then out of nowhere, a song he had recorded five years prior, ‘As the World Caves In’, became a huge viral hit on TikTok and from doing about 500 streams a day, it was doing 1 million streams a day by its peak in May 2021. A song that had been expected to top out at about 1 million streams in total has to date had over 150 million streams. Andrew and Will got together to chat about what has changed over those thirty years, in the industry and for the role of the music manager, and how, in this world of infinite white noise where there is so much material out there, artists get heard.
From CDs to Streaming
Andrew – The biggest change I’ve seen without a doubt was when the internet came along. When it did the music industry, which is notoriously conservative, hated it as it hugely disrupted their business model. It felt uncontrollable for them. However, I remember thinking at the beginning that this was actually a fantastic opportunity, having been at Mushroom Records when we simply couldn’t afford to produce enough physical copies to get them into stores to get a record to number one in the charts. We weren’t the only ones, and a lot of small labels, who had similar issues with the high cost of manufacturing, liked the look of the growth of streaming platforms as it gave them seemingly equal access to the market. Spotify then came along and broke the mould. When they pushed a subscription model it showed that, despite conventional wisdom in the industry saying it couldn’t work, people would actually pay for music online. Interestingly this approach only came about because in a negotiation with Universal Records they couldn’t agree on minimum amounts payable per track downloaded. Universal insisted that they use subscriptions instead, and to get the licence to the music, Spotify agreed and this opened up the music industry to this unexpectedly successful model.
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the old radleian 2021
Andrew At Radley Andrew did sing in the choir but claims this was a sympathy vote as, despite his love of music, he was pretty terrible at singing. His saving grace was the Marionette theatre, where he recalls painting the backdrops and hiding from having to play rugby. Radley was a place with music everywhere, from the singing in Chapel to being back in his study listening to King Crimson and Pink Floyd. After qualifying as a barrister, he decided it was a bit too straight down the line and music seemed like a much better idea. He worked on the corporate side at Virgin Records, Warner/Chappell, Mushroom Records, and Boosey & Hawkes. He is currently one of the managers representing part of the Pink Floyd business, teaches a negotiation course and chairs the 16's record label, Coro. ‘Master of nothing in particular but I have been around a bit.’
Will It was because of music that Will ended up at Radley. As a music scholar and chorister, music was a huge part of his life at the College where he was in the Clerkes and Chapel choir. He remembers singing ‘Pie Jesu’ in his first term and his proudest moment was winning Partsong twice under his direction. He has now been managing for the last 12 years, mostly focused on the pop writing space and has also represented a number of successful artists such as Nick Mulvey, Matt Maltese and Jasmine Thompson.
