Next to a record label deal, the artist management contract is the most exciting agreement an artist will sign. As with any legal document, a contract shouldn?t be signed without the advice of a music attorney. In addition to being your legal counselor, your attorney is also your advocate because his is especially needed to play the role of the ?bad guy.?
What I mean is that there are many aspects of the contract that will have to be negotiated. It can be somewhat awkward if you and the manager were to try negotiating these points on your own because you may end up putting a strain on the close working relationship you?re supposed to have with each other.
The attorneys for each side, however, are disinterested third parties who have the objectivity and professional training to vigorously fight for their client?s interest without (hopefully!) coming to blows or shouting matches. So let your lawyer take the blame for ?asking too much? or for being such a ?tough negotiator? ? that?s what he is being paid to do.

There are at least three big questions in artist management contracts that you and your lawyer have to ask: how long will the agreement be in effect; how much will the manager get paid during the agreement; and how much will the manager get paid after the agreement has ended.
How you ultimately answer these questions is the result of what can be some heavy negotiation. Why? Because these questions cover areas where your interests are not going to coincide with those of your manager. The goal of the negotiating process is to produce a deal that will be fair to both sides.

Consider the first big question. You and your manager are each likely to have a legitimate difference of opinion as to the amount of time for which the contract will be binding. From your point of view, you would generally want a short-term contract. If it turns out, for any number of reasons, that you?re not happy with your manager, you want the assurance of being freed from the contract within a short period of time.
After the initial excitement wears off, for example, you may come to feel that you and your manager don?t really get along well. Or perhaps it turns out that he or she isn?t as experienced or doesn?t have all the contacts and ?pull? that he said he did. Maybe he?s simply not doing his job effectively. Whatever the reason, you don?t want to get locked in with a loser for the next seven years.

But now put yourself in the manager?s shoes. Generally, he will want the contract to be as long as possible because his compensation is based on a percentage of whatever money you make. Not every artist out there is going to be an overnight success. Chances are that your manager?s early efforts will not result in financial success for you until much later. So that manager will want a contract that will last long enough for her to enjoy the rewards she toiled for in the beginning. Nothing can be more frustrating for a manager than to have her budding artists go to another manager, where they then make it to the big time.

So depending on the particular circumstances of the parties, the negotiation will center on a contract term ranging from as short as six months to as long as several years. What length of time is fair really depends on what you and your manager are each bringing to the relationship you wish to form.

For example, let?s say that neither of you has too much experience in the music business. In this situation, you?re both probably better off with a short-term contract, like six months or one year, so that you can check each other out without getting locked in to a big commitment. You can always enter into another agreement if it turns out, at the end of the contract, that you have a future together.

This ends part 1 of the article. The other two sections are available in the main articles section of the site.

This entry was posted by Will Dayble on Monday, August 28th, 2006 at 10:04 pm and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.