Roles in the Music industry

There are many roles within the music industry who are all involved with marketing the artist.
- Manager – Responsible for planning tours, leasing with record company, promotional activities, photo sessions. Confidence is needed and important to think about the bigger picture and think creative. Everything you think of has to be relevant in the future, not something that will only last a year or 2.
- A&R (Artists and Repertoire) - Finding bands and seeing a lot of gigs. Pair them with producers to make big records and singles and campaigns. Ideas about videos and how the artist wants to be perceived is important
- Producer – Works with an act to get their songs onto record. They will help an act choose the right tracks and capture the right sounds for a record.
- Engineer – Sound engineer – Helps build sound picture, make your ideas come to reality. Often have a good idea of how to get the best sound for you but if an artist knows what sound they want to produce they need to describe it very carefully so the engineer can produce that for them properly.
- Promoter – Pays for everything – venue, security, band, catering, posters, leaflets. Projecting/advertising the event, pays for venue, security, advertising, paying bands, catering, researching new artists. Marketing team who market everything that happens and deliver shows.
- Booking Agent - Finds, sources and books shows. Looks after and progresses with an artist, negotiates deals with acts and venues. UK artists should start in the UK, but it is important to try working yourself up into different countries to gain more publicity. Booking agents deal with the length of shows, positioning, when to perform, issue contracts, work permits are sorted for over-seas artists who want to start making music in another country e.g: UK to Japan
- Tour Manager - Makes sure the artist gets to the right venue at the right time to perform a gig, a tour manager will handle all the personnel issues during a tour. These can include everything from handling the press during the tour, checking if they band are healthy enough to perform and making sure budgets are in check.
- Plugger – Increases your chances of getting played, the producers and DJs personally know these people and take their opinions on. Keeps producers and DJ’s in the know of the plot for what a bands activities are outside the record. – what they’re touring, capabilities they have, festivals, what press they may have in order to create a buzz on an act.
- Publisher – Allows work to be created, selected and delivered at high quality for the public. -
Creatives: find talent and exploit that talent, work with other artists to pitch songs. ALSO:
Sync team: pitch to tv, media and try to get music placed there.
Administration – protects artists rights and that they get paid for performances, record sales, synchronizations. Very important inter-related functions of a publisher
- Agent – Everything is sorted for the artist - Fee, travel, and hotel. Gigs are very time consuming so you need an agent to be sorting out everything for you when you get onto a certain level. If you get an agent too early, you can risk scaring promoters off because they feel like the artist has someone there to help them already. You need people to be talking about you already and building up word of mouth in order to be successful in finding an agent. Sending out MySpace link and being pro-active and being enthusiastic will encourage an agent to want to work with you.

Looking at all these roles has helped to realise how much work is put into marketing an artist and making sure they are successful. The only way an artist to be successful and make it far is by having all these people playing these roles and on-hand for you to make you the most appealing artist to the audience as you can be.