Artist Management in the UK Music Industries: A Sui Generis Form of Management



Wang, Yiyi
(2021) Artist Management in the UK Music Industries: A Sui Generis Form of Management. Doctor of Philosophy thesis, University of Liverpool.

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Abstract

What needs to be managed in the music industries is the musician. The need for management emerges as (1) the blurred line between Project and Product and (2) the constant tension between the nonlinear freedom of creation and expression and the linear necessity of market success and non-measurable productivity. This is fundamentally different from launching a product such as a car or a mobile phone, even if musicians have to be organised, marketed and promoted, to be scheduled and budgeted, and so on. The sui generis need introduces different and substantial orders of complexity to the role of managers and to the practice of management. Those who keep musicians on track – dealing with the complexity while making new music – are “artist managers”, and their management practice is what we call “artist management”. This UK-based research provides the first substantive, academic examination of Artist Management to understand the role of artist managers, their motivation, their value, and their impact in order to cover the almost complete absence of knowledge in academic literature. It applies an interdisciplinary approach to bridge the two fields – artist management and orthodox management – to address three questions: (1) What do artist managers do? (2) In what ways can we identify the differences and similarities between orthodox linear management styles and the need for a combinatory style of management represented by the term and practice “Artist Management”? (3) What analytical procedures and concepts are required to specify Artist Management as a sui generis discipline? This research derives from and combines different forms of qualitative research: ethnography (in the form of long-term participant observation with unstructured interviews) supplemented by orthodox interview technique (34 semi-structured interviews with British artist managers and musicians). Together these create a detailed yet transparent account of Artist Management. It then defines Artist Management as a sui generis discipline which takes the form of the creation and maintenance of a dynamic set of relations that I identify as “The Loop” which is made dynamic by the need of the artist manager always to consider how Risks incurred, Relationships within, by a project initiated by musicians are to be managed together with the Emotions and Expectations of the musicians involved.

Item Type: Thesis (Doctor of Philosophy)
Uncontrolled Keywords: Artist Management
Divisions: Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of the Arts
Depositing User: Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited: 16 Dec 2022 12:33
Last Modified: 16 Jan 2024 17:21
DOI: 10.17638/03164935
Supervisors:
URI: https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3164935