Tales from the Manager Part 2 (Patreon)

For Part 1 see "A Message from Terry the Manager" on Oct 24th 2020. 

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So, Rainbow sent me the contracts and I noticed that the band had given up ownership in the masters to a European label.

See…. I have no idea how Taylor Swift did not own her own masters. After all, she was dealing with some heavy hitter lawyers and the first thing that they should have done for her was give her ownership of her recordings in any contract that she signed. If not immediate ownership, then the right to recapture them after a certain number of years. But she didn’t and just a couple of years ago she raised hell about it. TBM will never have to do that.

The band had a manager at that point and like a lot of bands just starting out, it was a friend of theirs. The one who didn’t play an instrument is either the singer or the manager. This woman was the manager. We won’t get into any of the specifics except to say that the band broke away from her and she broke away from them after the big debt tour I talked about previously. So the band was without a manager and they asked me if I wanted to Manage them, I said no, not at this time, but that I would help them with their business.

Many bands look upon a Manager as someone who takes care of the business and that’s about it. However, for me, if I was going to be Manager, then I was going to comment on everything from song choices to marketing to recording and mastering as well as take care of the business. And until we got to know each other better, we should wait on that. So, I straightened out their contracts and got ownership back and then they started playing me demos of their new album that would be coming out in a year or so. That album turned out to be Walking With Strangers. Needless to say, the songs were incredible, and I began to see the growth in their writing and production…. And it was impressive. So, somewhere around September of 2006 I heard an early version of Kill the Lights and I had an idea to build the audience.

In those days myspace was the big deal and some bands had tens of thousands of followers. The Birthday Massacre had a bit over a thousand and so I suggested that we start hyping the next album by releasing one of the songs on New Years Day 2007. That song was “Kill The Lights”.

This is where I have to stop and give this band all the credit in the world. They had just come through a terrible experience with a “manager” and with a tour and here I was kind of taking over some things that can make a band extremely nervous. But they trusted me and I trusted them. More about how important that is in a later story.

A good place to stop….. but next chapter is going to be about what an Artist Manager’s job is and specifically, what my initial goals were for TBM.