Business Plans

James L. Walker Jr. is an attorney that serves as managing partner of Walker and Associates, LLP, which is a leading entertainment firm.  His practices consist of entertainment, litigation, business, intellectual property and corporate law.  Walker also has an extensive resume with big name clients ranging from Bobby Jones, Jamie Fox, Bill Duke and many others.

Importance Of a Good Team

The importance of a good team comes with many attributes.  Many of those attributes are the driving forces of success and/or failures of careers.  Trust, building a solid work ethic, great support system, positive energy, encouragement, patience and understanding are just a few attributes of having a good team.  Along with these attributes comes one of the most important, Relationships.  Building relationships in and outside a team causes more doors to open, which then turns into bigger situations for a team. 

Trends: Hip Hop and Marijuana

Adapting to a trend to stay relevant is what some hip-hop artist does now days.  To find something that works for you is key.   This can sometimes cause a lot of tension between fans and an artist.  Especially when a certain audience is use to a certain style and sound from an artist.  For instance, hip-hop artist Lil Wayne tells his reasoning on why he decided to switch trends while also being able to keep some of his dedicated fan base.

Piracy

Piracy is one thing that managers of artists are really concerned about.  Most of this happens over the internet; the medium that helps build a fan base, but also helps break the pockets of management teams and record labels. “Music piracy has become an important issue since the turn of the century.  As the Internet has grown, sales of counterfeit CDs through online auctions, web sites, spam, and other channels have increased significantly (Bocij, 2006, p. 5).”  The Mp3 format plays a big role in this being that the format can distribute files easily because it’s compressed.  This allows songs, and even whole albums to be downloaded all in a matter of a few minutes.  Being that the Internet has grown tremendously, software can be pirated in more and easier ways. 

            “Music must be set at a level that will recover the initial cost development, fund further development, and allow research into new products.  Once the company’s investment has been recovered, the price can be lowered a little (Bocij, 2006, p. 148).”  But because of piracy, the artist, the management, and the label the artist may be under loses money from sells of the music.  “This jeopardizes any further development of the program and obstructs the introduction of new products (Bocij, 2006, p. 148).”  With piracy going on, it produces a cycle that drives the prices of the music up, in some cases.  This doesn’t necessarily mean that since the price of the project has been driven that the artist and his/her employees get to see that money.  It’s an even bigger risk to take, banking on new generated sells from the project, and the decrease of piracy.

            Dealing with management – artist relationship and piracy, is a big deal.  If the artist makes no money then the manager makes no money.  Michael “Blue” Williams said it best in his interview with vibe.com “there’s people out there writing checks, and there’s people out there finding checks, and I’m the one who finds them (Williams, 2006).”  With the field of artist management, finding money is a huge task, especially if piracy affects album sales.   

Licensing

There are thousands of quotes lingering around created by great inventors, theorist and even ordinary people that mention the love of money. Taking the time out to intensively look for a quote that would best represent money and the music/entertainment industry was very easy, although not one suited the issue of royalties very well. Artists share many things in common amongst one another the greatest of these is money, some who have earned more than others.

Infringement

All three of the podcasts listened to, touched on some great topics some topics in where the subject could have a negative effect on a music management company while others showed there could be a positive effect.  I believe the key to a great and successful artist is creativity.  Being original and creative will definitely be worth all of the hard work and effort put into whatever product that an artist is producing.  Copyright infringement is the first topic that stood out to me. It is indeed one of the many negative aspects that are in the music industry.  There some cases in which the artist does not realize that they may be breaking the law of copyright infringement while other artists know and still blatantly disobey the law.  This issue continues to appear in the music industry, this affects the character of an artist, financial stability, support of fans and business opportunities.  As a music management company there is a big responsibility of protection and teaching that has to be given to the artist to avoid major happenings such as copyright infringement.

 In the podcast with Dave Archuletta, Executive Director of Joe Goode Performance Group, he talks about taking offers that are unexpected and not what is particularly wanted.  He explains the motive of hard work, maintaining past work relationships and getting your foot in the door.  “Opportunities that you are willing and open to go for can possibly take you to your success; it’s just up to you to realize that it’s an opportunity,” said Archuletta.  This theory or work ethic applies to every profession.  Music Management can be quite hard to succeed in, your artist and genre might have to do certain performances with different styles of music in different atmospheres, which could either hurt or help an artist but most importantly bring awareness to the individual and his or her craft.

http://legalgeekery.com/2011/07/22/podcast-episode-27-a-veritable-zoo-of-copyright-trolls-and-monkeys/

http://attackofthekillerkeyboard.blogspot.com/2011/12/episode-18-last-of-copyright.html

http://www.artofhustle.com/2011/10/podcast-episode-005-executive-director-dave-archuletta/

EMI

Artist and Managers

Through many class discussions while attending Full Sail University, what an artist manager should and needs to do would spark many conversations in a lot of my classes.  A lot of the opinions given by my classmates and I would be the same, but when they would differ, they would differ in a tremendous way.  Not until getting into Product and Artist Management is when I received a better understanding of what artist managers do