Try to keep the team togheter.

I got an angry tip-off from a manager to not work with a certain band. He got to be the manager in May last year for this band and got laid off in Dec. I can understand him, he did some good stuff and started to get things moving. Then suddenly the band dump him for a manager he introduced.
The manager was that the new manager should help out in diffrent territorier, instead, she took over the whole project.

In this case, i also know the band so i asked why they dumped the old manager. They felt that the new manager was better and just felt the old one took up to much space. They needed something fresh.

I also know the new manager. She was counting on the movement that the band was on to continue. The momentum was created by The old manager.

A very stupid mistake. Now the old one is telling everyone not to work with the band. So his network is gone. And in many cases, you are more close to the manager then a band. The view in the industry is that band comes and goes and industry people stay. Many will follow his advice and stay away from the band.

Yes, the grass is greener on the other side but since the new manager count on the work that the old manager was doing nothing will happen. In the end, their closest things will be stopped and the momentum gone and in the end, they will start to fire the new manager as well.

What they should have done is keept the old manager. Keept all as one as a team. If you jump around the network wont grow you just hope that the new person has such a large network to get things going.

To kick someone should just be done in extreme cases. In most cases, people will leave in a friendly tone anyway. Then you keep all the networks and you build a team. A team has many diffrent skills and you need them all. If you just needed one star in the team Zlatan Ibrahimović is playing in would always win.

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It's a team job, not a one man show!

A problem I see too many are doing is jumping around. They believe more in one person then having the right team. Or more that one person can put a fantastic team together.
What is happening is thought that they leave one team to go to another team or going from one person to another person.

Most of the successes are actually quite big teams that are doing things all around the world. when you jump like that you are more or less go back to square one. The smart thing to do is to build people in the team to get a larger and larger team. It's not easy and you have to do quite many team bonding activities, but in the end, it's worth it.

And when a team is that good, then you won't be stepping on anyone's toes when you are moving up and need different team members.

In the old days, you could always see these artists having different record labels at every release. In the end, you just avoided those artists. you knew that they demanded that you should drop everything you where working with and just focus on there release. How much you ever did it was not enough. Even with a number one on Billboard and they still thought that you should have done more and changed record label.

So don't expect that one person can do your career. Don't forget who was doing the early stuff. And try to keep the team together.

How much team?

You can almost never get enough team. Usually the problem is to afford them. Still I meet artist that know how much team there is. Many of them think that all this should be done by the manger /record label. I can easy tell you, no it’s not going to happen.

The Magnettes just released their new single “So Bad” and I will just take that as an example how many people that is involved in a release. This is an indie release so it could be much more. But around this is how many they are.

First is their record label. At their desk it’s two people working with The Magnettes with this release. Then it’s us on the management team and we are also two working on this release. Over that they have a booker in USA, Europe and Scandinavia working around the gigs. On top of that we hired a PR team with one person in Sweden, Two in UK and a third in USA. On the side they also have some sponsors, distribution teams doing some stuff so we can add an extra person since not all of them is working full time with The Magnettes.

Here we have 11 people and of course the band of 3 people so in total 14.

And now we haven’t count in the Mixing guy, the video people, the mastering. They did their job before and, still equal important. Count them in 19 people.

When people say they can handle a release by themselves. They actually tell me that they can do 19 peoples job by themselves. Also people ask me if hire a pr team is enough?

Meetings

This week I'm on great Escape in Brighton in UK. I guess the blogs will come a bit strange times. Also doing it on the phone can change words and other things so bear with the language.

I had a really interesting meeting in London today about new income models and pr things on Youtube. It will change fast and this make the artists really confused and I will make the Diy die really fast. I guess the diy died already 2010 still people actually think it work with the long-tail and other smart ideas that now is proven wrong. Today is the team that matters, a team that cares about you not a service that makes everything looks the same for all artists.