In this episode, Creative Arts Curriculum Advisor John Gill is joined by Professor Philip McIntyre to explore what it means to be a manager in the music industry. Philip has had an extensive career as a songwriter, musician, record producer, video maker, and audio engineer. He currently works as a communication and media scholar in the School of Humanities, Creative Industries, and Social Sciences at the University of Newcastle.

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The following podcast is brought to you by the Creative Arts team

from Secondary Curriculum, the Curriculum Directorate of the New

South Wales Department of Education.

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in New South Wales achieves their potential through education.

Welcome to Creative Cast, the official podcast of the New South Wales

Department of Education's Creative Arts Secondary Curriculum team.

My name is John Gill, and I'm a Creative Arts Curriculum advisor

and Music Subject Matter Expert.

Today I am speaking with Professor Philip McIntyre from the University of Newcastle.

Philip is a communication and media scholar in the School of Humanities,

Creative Industries, and Social Sciences.

In addition to his academic and research work, he's a songwriter, musician, record

producer, video maker, and audio engineer.

Philip brings extensive knowledge in creativity, Innovation and

project management as well as his understanding of industry collaboration.

He'll be sharing insights from his work as a manager within the music industry.

Thanks so much for joining me for the podcast today.

Philip, can I start by asking, can you tell me a little about yourself and how

you got started in the music industry?

I grew up in a musical family.

From you know day one, we were all singing around the piano.

My auntie, my grandmother, my uncles were involved in music in all sorts of ways.

So it was just a natural thing.

I'll put this in inverted commas, "built my first guitar when I was 12", and

I've just been passionate about it.

So, it's just a natural thing for me to be doing and as I started, I did

my first official gig at 17, and I kid myself that I haven't stopped yet.

But all the way through that process I've been learning, you know, basically

various aspects of it and that description you gave earlier is just

some of the things that I've done.

That's great.

Thank you.

It's great to see that that journey started early for you

as well and the influence of the people that you were surrounded by

sparking that interest in music.

Absolutely.

I think that's essential that, that you're passionate about

whatever you're involved in.

Can you briefly describe your role and what interested you in this career path?

Okay.

I'll specifically talk about management.

What interested me was the music first.

I think if you're gonna be a manager, then you need to actually really

appreciate and be passionate about the music and the musicians that you're

dealing with, that you are looking after because it is a service role.

It's also a leadership role.

So, getting started in management is really just finding the people

that you enjoy working with, but specifically enjoying their music.

I think that's a crucial part of it.

Before I actually went into managing a specific band that I

actually looked after, I was doing that for my own bands anyway.

I was booking gigs, I was writing songs, doing all that sort of stuff.

I guess getting the first gig's easy, getting the second one's hard.

So building that connection, knowing that you have a

professional approach to everything.

That's right.

And I think there's 3 parts to it that I think is important for people to realise.

One is the performance side of things, and the second is

the recording side of things.

And the third is, I think particularly bands only really exist in the

media, whatever that media might be.

Whether it's traditional legacy or social and I think you've got to convince

bands that that's actually the case.

This is probably a bit more specific to your role.

How do you ensure that artists and collaborators work together safely

and respectfully within your projects?

While encouraging effective collaboration and communication

to improve project outcomes.

That's a long-winded one.

That's true.

Well, I've written books and we could write a book about that question.

I think formally, the first thing is that they need to understand that

there are formal guidelines out there.

And if you have a look at the Media Entertainment Arts Alliance

Ethics guidelines, I think that's the first port of call.

But of course you're dealing with young musicians and the last thing they really

want to do is read the ethics guideline.

You have to ensure that there's an ethical environment that they work in,

and that's critical for collaboration.

There are a number of things that you need to keep in mind, and it's

difficult when you know you've got 4 or 5 headstrong individuals in one group.

There are little aphorisms that I think they're important.

Like you need to praise in public and criticise in private.

You know, that's just one thing.

But part of your role is to ensure that this group stays together.

And there are many ways for a group to fall apart.

And I think the first thing to do is really just to set the standard yourself

so that if you act in an ethical manner, that filters through to the rest of them.

And basically they weed each other out as they go.

And I think what I've found really interesting just lately is that

the younger generation that I'm dealing with has a really good

ethical attitude to the world.

It's interesting to hear that you're saying that you are that level of

keeping things in control, because I guess once success starts to happen

for a group, it's very much, they just want a gig, they want to get the money.

They see that sort of aspect, but your guidance and know that those

things will eventually come, but we just need to stay on path.

Exactly.

Well there's a psychological aspect to it that you need to embed in any

group of individuals that are working together is to keep them grounded and

to keep the egos at a stable level.

Certainly in music, you need a great deal of ego to be on stage anyway or recording,

but you also need to be very grounded.

Music can be interpreted differently by composers, performers and audiences.

How do you balance these perspectives when managing an artist's career?

I had a look at this question earlier.

I think it's impossible to govern interpretation.

I think the best thing for a manager to do is to ensure

that the musicians themselves.

Are very comfortable with what it is that they're doing and I think the first thing

that they need to do is satisfy themselves in terms of the music that they're

producing and what it means to them.

And I think that imbues a level of authenticity, certainly

in recordings and on stage.

An audience will tell very, very quickly whether you have an authentic

approach or whatever, but it's not up to the musicians to govern what

the interpretation of their music is.

They can certainly frame it in certain ways, but in terms of the

way that audiences interpret their music, well that's up to them and

hopefully many of them will interpret in the way that the band intended.

If you can't connect with an audience, then your career won't be very long.

That's right.

They've got to want to come back and listen to your again.

How do you support artists when they adapt or arrange their music for

different audiences or contexts?

That's an interesting one.

The area that I come from, which is primarily rock and roll and

pop music, usually the arrangement is fixed as the recording.

You know, it's a moment in time, and even when they're playing live, it's an

attempt to reproduce that recorded work.

It's not very often that they will rearrange it for particular audiences

unless they'll go into a radio studio, and that's not a recording studio.

It's not built to be a recording studio, but there's a live performance

occurs along with the interview.

Then they've got to start thinking about, well, what are the

essentials of this particular song?

And that really, in many ways is not a manager's responsibility,

it's the musician's responsibility.

But having been there myself, I can actually guide them as to what is the

essential part of a song and you need to bring out in those circumstances,

the melody and the vocal and the very basics of the arrangement.

That's the classic saying, 'If you can do a song with you and the acoustic

guitar and the song still goes over.

It's a good song.

The rest is embellishment.'

That's a really great way of viewing the success of a piece.

The lyrical aspects and all those elements within the song, the melodic shape and

contour, they're really the things that people connect with and hook them in.

Yeah, and the classic thing is, that it was Paul McCartney from The

Beatles was always thrilled when he heard the postman whistling one

of his tunes and he understood that the melody had got across to people.

And it's the same thing when, you know, people start

singing along with your songs.

The chorus especially is the thing where that happens and it's in

the name, you know, it's a choir.

We want everybody to be singing.

So yes, there are essentials there that needs us to stay.

And then you've got to figure out, well, how can I situate this

in a set of circumstances that really emphasise those things.

Can you share how you handle the rights and intellectual property

issues to protect both the artist and their work in these situations?

Okay.

I think this is a crucial thing that most musicians need to know about.

So, the first thing that I will usually do, is I'll put

a writer's agreement in place.

A formal writer's agreement.

This is about songwriting.

Well, I'll go back.

I'll go backwards.

There are a number of rights that you're dealing with.

One is the copyright, which is in the song.

The other right is the mechanical rights which is in the recording.

Which is the vessel that the song is carried in and it

could be recorded differently, arranged differently, and so on.

And then there are things like sync rights if you're lucky enough

to have a portion of your song on TikTok or in a film or wherever.

So, they need to understand the difference between those things.

In terms of the copyright, the songwriting which songwriting

royalties are derived from.

I try to make sure that everyone in the band has some percentage

of those songwriting royalties.

I think the best deal there is to take at least maybe 50 to 75% to the people who

actually write the lyric and the melody, and then allocate the rest, say 25%,

split that four ways so that there are contributions and changes in the studio

that are subtle from when it's arranged.

And there may be slight changes to lyric or to a melody as a result of that, what

that does is make sure that everybody gets a very similar set of incomes.

One of the worst things that can happen is the songwriter, if there's a sole

songwriter and a group of 4, their income starts to raise incredibly, exponentially

in relation to the performance income.

And then you get a disparity of wealth inside the band, and it's usually at

that point that a band will split up.

So, it's a crucial structural thing to have in place.

As far as the mechanicals go, whoever pays for the recording owns the recording.

If it's a record company, they will own the recording and

you'll have to pay them off.

So, they give you a loan.

And this is important to understand as well.

It's not like getting a house loan, where you own the house

at the end of that payment.

With a record company deal, it's usually they give you a loan to record.

But they'll maintain the rights in the recording.

So, you don't get to own the thing that you paid for.

And so that's a crucial thing to understand as well.

But if you're an independent band and say your recordings are

paid for from your performance.

Then you own the mechanical rights.

So, those are two crucial things for them to understand right at the start.

As far as operating, making those operational.

They need to ensure that they are members of APRA, particularly, because there's

an international agreement between APRA and say, ASCAP in the United States.

I can't remember the acronym in the UK and Europe and so on, but they're all there.

China, Indonesia, et cetera.

Make sure that you're a member of APRA because the reciprocal exchange of

royalties between the international world.

And then you've got a file returns to APRA and so every time that

you perform or play a song, the songwriter can claim income from APRA.

So, you've just got to tally every time that you perform, every

time a song is on radio, whether it's on Instagram or wherever.

That needs to be tallied on a particular form that APRA will then process.

And then in comparison to every other APRA member, you'll get a

portion of the income that APRA has bought in from all sorts of sources.

They need to understand that as well.

So, there's a formal thing that they need to be doing.

Often that'll fall to the manager, but if musicians are savvy about

their business, and this is the thing, there are two parts to music industry.

One is music and the other is industry.

If you don't take care of both of them, your career won't last long either.

There's so much going on in the background there, and I can see the

importance of having someone who really knows the business, especially

with a new band starting out.

They could be really taken advantage of in some situations, especially if

they're investing so much of their own money to try and establish themselves.

There's a trending pattern at the moment for particularly labels, especially

big labels, to run what they call 360 degree deals, because it was the case

for a very long time that record labels would just derive their income from

the mechanicals of the recordings.

But the 360 degree deal says that they want a percentage of every piece

of income that a musician will make.

Whether it's merchandising, whether it's performance or anything else.

So you've got to understand and be able to negotiate those things for your artists.

We're up to our final question, which is what role do you play in helping

artists evaluate their work and use feedback to refine their creative output?

Well I would see that primarily as the role of a record producer, but if you are

passionate about the songs, which you need to be as a manager and you're passionate

about the performance as well then I think you have the right to have some input.

I think that's crucially important, that you are absolutely honest

with the musicians about what it is that they're producing.

You are trying to get a balance between creativity and commerce for them.

Some of them have a very romantic understanding of the way creativity works.

You know, "Don't interfere with my creativity, man.", in inverted commas.

You mentioned it in one of the prior questions that they've got to connect

to an audience in some way or another if they're gonna sustain a career.

So, they've got to have a balanced understanding of the relationship,

and it's a tight relationship between creativity and commerce, or

between music and their industry.

So, part of your job as a manager is to ensure that they've got the best

songs that they possibly could that are being recorded and promoted.

That's essential.

It's very hard to promote what's called a dog.

If it's a good song, oftentimes it will promote itself and if you then can get

particularly word of mouth happening, you know, to put all the other things in

place, social media, Instagram, et cetera.

So, as a manager, you also need a good set of ears as well as being respectful

of your clients because they need to perform this almost every night at

certain times when they're on tour.

So, they still have to believe in what they're doing.

But I think your job is to say, 'Well, you know, that's a little bit left the field',

or 'That's too conservative', or whatever.

You have some input into that and remember, of course, that a

manager will often take around 20% of the entire income of the band.

So if a manager wants to see their portion increase then it's down to the songs.

Well, thanks so much for today.

I really appreciate you coming in and talking about your

experience and certainly from the perspective of a manager.

Yep.

My pleasure.

This podcast was brought to you by the creative Arts team from

Secondary Curriculum, the Curriculum Directorate of the New South

Wales Department of Education.

Get involved in the conversation by joining our statewide staff

room through the link in the show notes  or email Jane McDavitt at

creativearts7-12@det.nsw.edu.au.

The music for this podcast was composed by Creative Arts Advisor, Alex Manton.