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. 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.

Right: Andrew (left) with Hugh Masakela, who he remembers as 'amongst many interesting artists and composers, Hugh was unquestionably the most fun.'

Will – It’s an interesting situation, because putting a record out in 2006 is totally different to putting out a record now. Back then there was no streaming, so it was all about a physical release and it relied on a proper ‘old school’, hard-graft PR campaign to succeed. Blogs still only had very little impact, and print was the main media focus so, along with everyone else, we were trying to get a mention in one of the three or four ‘new music’ features in places like The Guardian Guide. We were doing the rounds of in-store shows and little independent record stores, basically doing whatever it took to sell the CDs. I still remember the thrill of going back to my parents at Christmas and going into HMV in Oxford and finding three copies of the CD we had produced in there. I thought I was David Geffen!

But with streaming and the internet, it is a completely changed business these days. Anyone can now get online, set up as a label and put music out and as a result vast numbers of records get released. 60,000 songs are uploaded onto Spotify every day, so it’s a huge problem getting things heard. Also, the scale of sales needed to make streaming is really high. With each stream earning around 0.05p you need to get hundreds of millions of streams to get meaningful revenue, and with the platform, record label and everyone taking their share of this, only a tiny fraction will go to the artist.

Andrew – There are some artists who have found a way to succeed by still selling physical records. Amongst other things, I am chairman of the 16 choral group and their record sales make a modest amount but which is a meaningful sum in classical terms and which helps offset the choir’s activities. Another example is New Model Army who (admittedly some time ago) came to an agreement with their German distributors after their traditional record deal came to an end. If they could make the record much more cheaply than their old label and sell over 20,000 records with an annual release, taking £4 per CD, they made much more money out of much lower record sales. It is true that these are the exceptions rather than the rule but there are still many different models of how to survive and make a bit of money as well. For a lot of heritage acts, the change to streaming has benefitted them hugely though. My children know all about the same music that I have loved, but they’ve found out about it from social media platforms, not from me. The current younger generation no longer avoid listening to music simply because older people listen to it and that’s a huge change in the market. No one was forgetting the big acts, but now they are getting billions of streams and the associated revenue from a completely new audience that they wouldn’t have previously had access to.

Will – The rise of TikTok has been the most recent transformative step in this regard as it has massively boosted back catalogues. Old songs are used on the videos and get discovered by a new younger audience. For example, Fleetwood Mac had a Number One hit recently off the back of a viral TikTok video, and that was driven by 15-year-olds. Getting a record, either old or new, to take off in this way is a bit of a lottery. As a manager, you can fan the flames, like we did with the Matt Maltese track, but you can’t manufacture that initial spark. Younger users know when something is being pushed on them and so, as an industry, it’s very hard to game the system. But it is a fantastic platform for uncovering new music, which is great for the idea of bottom-up growth. And so, I’m actually a bit of an optimist when it comes to the future. I believe that really great music by an ambitious artist, and backed up by a shrewd team, will rise to the top.

Managing artists, careers and parents

Andrew – The change the internet has brought is a good news/ bad news situation. The good news is now anyone can do it, but the bad news is now anyone can do it… and for artists this means getting that shrewd team behind you is a big, yet crucial task. I tried my hand at management and can honestly say it is one of the most entrepreneurial jobs you can do (and I wasn’t very good at it). Some artists come to you fully formed (but I’ve never met one yet!) and others need much more work, but they all need guidance to some degree or another. As a manager you have a whole suite of different options to try – there will be times where

you need to persuade an artist not to do something, and you have to learn to trust your judgement. You might get offered a great song for them to record but it just might not be the right one for your artist, and you need to persuade them of this and go out and find a song that suits them better. You’ve got to think your way out of the box every time.

Will – One thing you need to be aware of as a manager, especially of new talent, is that the development of an artist can take many, many years. One of the artists I manage has just signed a new deal with a major label and it has taken us 6 years of development work to get there. I have to just not think about that and focus on what needs to be done in the here and now, because if you knew it was going to take that long, you probably wouldn’t take the job on in the first place.

During the pandemic with live music shut down, people turned to social media and soon record labels were scrabbling around trying to sign the new biggest star from Tiktok. From a management perspective this means you can end up managing quite young artists, which involves much more hand-holding and even ‘parenting’. For example, we took on a YouTube artist who came through about nine years ago when they were just 13-years-old. This meant we weren’t only managing the artist but also the parents, but we were able to form a close working relationship with the artist’s mother and successfully brought them through to mainstream success. This isn’t a role I’d have normally expected to have to take on when I first started as a manager though!

Working with an artist from the start of their career often involves a lot of ‘in the trenches’ hard development to get them established. As a manager will need to work with the artist to decide what’s their look, what’s their sound and what the ‘feel’ is. They will also need to consider what the fanbase is and even how do you get a fan. Trying to build that first 1,000-10,000 fans is incredibly timeconsuming and hard work but that’s where talented managers really make a difference. From 10-20,000 onwards a record company can come in and spend the money to take the artist the next step.

Having the right song is vital though and increasingly artists want to be involved in their own song writing process, from a credibility view as much as anything. There seems to be a stigma around just taking someone else’s song and singing it these days, which is potentially a bit of a mistake. Artists who win realise it’s part of a much bigger picture and you just need to look at one of the breakthrough artists of recent times, Dua Lipa. Both her first and second big hits, Be the One and New Rules were both outside songs written by others, which her team did a great job of marketing through an impeccable campaign. She’s now one of the biggest stars on the planet.

It’s been a big change for song writers, as streaming is all about the individual songs with no call for good solid album tracks. Nowadays artists often put their names on songs that they may have had minimal involvement in writing.

Andrew – That’s been going on forever, so perhaps nothing really changes! But many artists, especially those that have already made it, will universally say, I’m prouder of being a songwriter than a performer. One of the things I am most envious of is someone who has written a song that people really take to their hearts… From a management perspective, what is the right song for an artist changes over time. There is a difficult dynamic in music about trying to guide artists through their career as they (and their core audience) get older.

A great example of an artist doing this successfully is Tina Turner. She had a hugely successful late career as both she and her manager were so good at getting the right songs, recording them

Will (right) signing his first ever band, Portico Quartet, c.2006. Nick Mulvey (second right) was a founding member who he went on to manage.

in such a dynamic and engaging way and pitching them into the right market. It’s a fascinating change but very difficult to get right, not many do.

Will – Managing an established heritage artist is a totally different scenario to bringing a new artist on. You don’t need to do any of that early development work and in a lot of respects you act as a tour manager and overseeing a label campaign. Ed Sheeran’s manager is a great example of the way a manager’s career can change over time. From having Ed sleeping on his sofa as a young folk artist trying to get him picked up by record labels, he now manages an absolute musical juggernaut. He effectively has to run a vast multinational corporation – in 2019 Ed Sheeran’s Divide tour was the highest grossing tour of all time. It took them many years to get to this stage, but he’s now doing a completely different job to when he first started out.

Andrew – At the top end, touring can be enormously profitable, but only if well managed. The music industry looks with huge jealousy at stand-up comics, because they can book out the O2 and perform for three nights and all they need is a microphone. But a band like Genesis will need several articulated lorries full of kit and dozens of people to make it all happen, which is a huge financial risk. So you can make a lot of money, but you don’t have to go too far down the scale for it to become unprofitable.

Career route in and through

Will – One thing to realise is that the music business is a relatively small industry that punches well above its weight. It’s experiencing a bit of a gold rush at the moment, with back catalogues selling for $200m, and the industry is in extremely rude health, but a lot of it comes from a very small network, where everyone is one person removed from everyone else.

People often ask me about the route I took into managing, especially those I’m mentoring as part of an Oxford University internship scheme, and it’s my belief that not many people start out trying to be a manager. In fact, I started out as a songwriter as my entry into the business, and after messing around in bands and running live nights and shows for a few years I ended up running The Vortex jazz club in Dalston, London <Andrew’s favourite jazz club of all time!>. One of bands that performed there was Portico Quartet and after getting to know them, we ended up putting out one of their records, which received a Mercury Music nomination in 2008. As a follow up to that release, I transitioned to become their manager and signed them to Real World, Peter Gabriel’s record label. It was a role I found myself falling into, rather than a planned career path. I found that through my various other work in the music business, I’d built up the large suite of specific skills that a manager needs.

And whilst there are plenty of good courses that will teach you how to be a manager, for every course out there, there is also a guy who hustles and helps out his friend who happens to be a talented musician. The reality of it is, you have to go out there, put the work in and love what you’re doing. Whilst I’m primarily focused on pop now, I’ve worked in jazz and classical too and the same skills apply whatever the genre. But it fundamentally boils down to a focus on excellence in the music, a belief in the artist and trust between the manager and the artist. Andrew – Absolutely. For all the changes that have happened across thirty years, it’s still a ‘love’ industry and the people who do best are the ones who love the music. If you’re too cynical it doesn’t work in the long run, although following your gut feeling sometimes means you miss out. When I was at Mushroom Records we passed up the chance to sign Coldplay because they just didn’t resonate with us, although there is obviously some slight regret about that now!

Big companies are much more professional now than in the past and managers now no longer need to have the reputation of punching record execs to get what they want. There used to be lots of men who felt they had to live up to that role and it attracted some pretty monstrous characters. Thankfully that’s changed (and is still changing now) and it has been hugely, hugely beneficial that there are now more women in the industry. There are still too few at the top, but there are a lot of fantastic up-and-coming young female managers who are continuing to bring welcome change.

I would say my role has been that of a business engineer, and for all the differences in the industry now, it is one that hasn’t changed a great deal. Whatever I’ve had my hands on it’s about taking what’s there, making sense of it and taking out the problems. Not being a musician, I suffer no jealousy when it comes to the creative side of the conversation, but by staying calm and acting as a facilitator, we can make things work. In this sort of role, you’ve got to allow the creativity to work but it has to have some common sense applied to it and sometimes you’re the one who has to be ‘the grown-up in the room’.

Will doing a classic manager job for his old client Jasmine Thompson –trying to work out how to turn something on!