Artist Growth

Managing an unsigned artist can be a challenging yet immensely rewarding experience. As a manager, you have the opportunity to shape and guide the career of a talented musician, helping them achieve their dreams.

But managing an unsigned artist also comes with its own challenges. Without the backing of a record label, you (and your artist) will have to take on multiple roles and responsibilities to ensure their success.

However, don’t let that discourage you! As artists like Macklemore and Chance the Rapper have shown, there’s no limit to what an unsigned artist can achieve.

In this article, we'll discuss eight tips for how to manage an unsigned artist and help them navigate the music industry.

1. Establish clear goals and expectations

Before you begin managing an unsigned artist, it's crucial to establish clear goals and expectations for both yourself and the artist. This includes discussing their musical style, target audience, and long-term career goals.

It's also essential to have open and honest communication about the responsibilities and expectations of each party to help establish any necessary boundaries. As a manager, you may be responsible for booking gigs, promoting the artist, and handling finances, among other tasks. Conversely, make sure the artist understands their role in the partnership and is willing to put in the necessary work to achieve their goals.

2. Develop a strong online presence

A strong online presence is crucial for any artist, especially for those who are unsigned. As a manager, it's your responsibility to help the artist establish their personal brand and maintain a strong online presence.

This includes creating and managing social media accounts, consistently publishing new content, building a professional website, and promoting the artist's music on streaming platforms. It's also essential to regularly engage with fans and potential fans online to grow a loyal following.

To this aim, an artist management app like Artist Growth Workspace can help you keep track of and manage everything you and your artist are doing (more on that in a bit).

3. Network and build relationships

Networking is a crucial aspect of artist management. It's your responsibility to build relationships with industry professionals, such as publishers, record label executives, music producers, other artists and managers, and so on.

Attending industry events, conferences, and showcases is an excellent way to network and make connections. You can also use social media and online platforms to connect with industry professionals and promote your artist's music.

Networking isn’t just your responsibility, however, and while not every artist is the most outgoing, it’s important that you push them to also network as much as possible.

4. Create a strategic marketing plan

Without the backing of a record label, it's essential to have a strategic marketing plan in place to promote your artist's music and grow their fan base. As a manager, you should work closely with the artist to develop a plan that aligns with their goals and budget, and is authentic to them.

This includes creating a press kit, reaching out to music bloggers and influencers, getting your artist’s songs on popular streaming playlists, planning releases, and utilizing social media and online advertising to promote their music. It's also crucial to regularly track and analyze the success of your marketing efforts to make necessary adjustments and improvements. Speaking of…

5. Collect and harness data

Beyond marketing data, you should be collecting all of the data you can for your artist. From weekly and monthly streams to album and merch sales to show attendance and social media engagement, if you can measure it, you should.

Not only will this data help you to make better decisions, like where to book shows or what merch to keep on-hand; in the event you do decide to pursue a record deal, labels are also going to want to see the data when evaluating your artist.

6. Keep a close eye on finances

Managing an unsigned artist also means managing their finances. As a manager, it's your responsibility to keep track of income and expenses, negotiate contracts, and ensure the artist is being paid fairly for their work.

It's essential to stay organized and keep detailed records of all financial transactions. This will not only help you manage the artist's finances effectively but also protect them from potential legal issues. And as mentioned previously, if getting signed is the goal, labels will most likely want to see aspects of your artist’s finances.

7. Lean on tools to stay organized and do more

Clearly, strong organizational skills are one of the most important traits of a successful artist manager. Fortunately, there are tools to make keeping track of it all easier — from basic spreadsheets and web-based calendars to dedicated artist management software.

Optimally, you want to choose a tool that enables you to track and manage everything from shows, promotional appearances, and social media posting to finances and historical data, while allowing you to share access with your artist and anyone else who is working with you to make their dreams a reality — like Workspace.

You should also make sure that whatever tool you go with scales with your needs, should you wish to bring in additional team members or add artists to your roster.

Not sure what to look for in an artist management tool? Read our post, 10 Questions You Should Ask When Choosing Artist Management Software.

8. Be a support system

Artist management is about more than just managing the business side of art. In your role, it's crucial to be a support system for your artist and help them navigate the ups and downs of the music industry.

This means being a good listener, providing emotional support, and offering guidance and advice when needed.

Laying the foundation for music success

Managing an unsigned artist requires a combination of hard work, dedication, and a strategic approach.

By establishing clear goals and expectations, developing a strong online presence, networking and building relationships, creating a strategic marketing plan, staying organized, and providing emotional support, you can help your artist achieve success.

Try Artist Growth Workspace free for 14 days to see how an artist management app can help you keep organized and do more with the resources you have.

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Whether you manage a single artist or a roster of talent, keeping track of it all is no easy feat. From juggling emails, texts, and phone calls to coordinating travel logistics, navigating disparate calendars, and managing big personalities, there’s a lot of chance for error.

Luckily, there are some great artist management tools out there to help you keep track of it all. You just have to know what to look for, as most project management tools aren’t geared for the music and entertainment space.

So to help you choose the best artist management software for your organization, we’re looking at 10 questions you should ask when evaluating your options.

1. Can I see all of my artists’ events for the year in a single calendar view?

There’s nothing wrong with popular options like Google Calendar or Apple’s iCloud Calendar. For most people and businesses, they’re all you need. But in an industry where album release cycles can span 18–24 months and tours routinely extend into the next year, you need more.

Featuring both 6- and 12-month extended views, Artist Growth Workspace puts all of your events on a single screen. You can even view your calendar by location, allowing you to quickly see where an artist will be at any given time, which can be especially helpful in determining where to focus promotional efforts.

However, extended views aren’t the only requirement of an artist management calendar. Just as important is the day view.

Workspace, for example, lets you add day notes, travel and event information, and any associated files right alongside your schedule for the day, so that everything you might need to know is easily accessible from both your desktop and mobile device.

This also means you can easily recall historical event data that might be useful to an artist and their team when they return — like what media outlets and digital service providers were invited the last time they performed in that city.

Extended calendar views make it easy to see an artist's entire schedule in one place.

2. Can I view my entire artist roster in one place?

If you manage more than one artist — or plan to — a roster-level calendar view is a must for many reasons.

Say you’re a label promotions team looking for opportunities to cross-promote artists or wondering where you should focus your marketing efforts. Or maybe you’re booking a joint tour with two artists.

In instances like these, you need to be able to see all of your artists’ events in a single calendar. At the same time, you need to be able to view each artist’s schedule individually.

Unfortunately, that’s not something you can do in many popular calendar and tour management apps, making this one of the most important questions to ask when vetting artist management software.

View your entire roster's activity by day, month, quarter, or year. — Artist Growth Workspace lets you toggle between roster-wide and artist-specific calendar views. You can also view by week, month, quarter, and year — as well as create user-specific views, or workspaces, enabling you to see only the artists relevant to your needs.

3. Can I control who can view and manage events, finances, and other sensitive information?

In music, as in other areas of the entertainment industry, a lot of planning goes on behind the scenes. The last thing you want is for someone to leak details of a yet-to-be-announced album release date or to find out how much an artist gets paid per show.

So how do you keep everyone involved appropriately informed without divulging more than necessary? By making certain that the artist management app you choose gives you complete control over user permissions.

For example, Workspace's granular permission controls let you specify who in an artist’s team, label, or management agency can view and/or edit:

Daysheets
Finances
Guest lists
Performance dates
Tentative events
Travel logistics
Ticket requests
And much more

4. Can I access my data while offline?

For an industry that’s always on the move, it’s absolutely essential that you’re able to access schedules, travel logistics, and other data even when you’re offline.

Most management software, however, doesn’t work that way.

With the Workspace mobile app, though, you can view your information, and even make changes, while offline. That way you can keep working, knowing that any changes you make while offline will sync later.

5. Can I export day sheets, itineraries, and tour books?

Knowing you can access your artist management software anytime, anywhere is a beautiful thing. Still, some team members will prefer or need to have something printed out.

With most calendars and conventional project management tools, you’re on your own to create things like printed agendas and itineraries. That’s a problem for two reasons: 1) It eats into your already-limited time, and 2) it introduces the potential for errors that could derail your tightly coordinated plans.

Before you make a decision on artist management software, make sure that it enables you to export day sheets, tour books, and other itineraries for easy printing and sharing.

Workspace makes it easy to export detailed itineraries. — Exporting PDF itineraries in Artist Growth Workspace is as easy as selecting a date or date range, and choosing the data and event types you'd like included.

6. Can I track and export expenses and revenues?

No artist project management tool would be complete without the ability to track and manage finances. But while many tools have templates for budgeting, there are often limitations that you should take into consideration.

For example, can you upload receipts? Link financial transactions to specific events? Or export to popular tax and accounting software?

Workspace lets you sort financial transactions, upload receipts and, critically, link transactions to specific events, giving you a holistic view of your operation’s finances.

Track and manage all of your financial transactions right alongside your activities.

Additionally, you can export your finances as CSV files for uploading to tax and accounting software — with third-party integrations on the way.

7. Can I manage and approve guest pass requests and ticket budgets?

For record labels, the process of requesting, managing, and approving guest passes and tickets for performances and promotional events can be a major source of inefficiency. Often, requests are submitted informally via email, text, or DM, and managed via spreadsheets.

Well-thought artist management software, however, can streamline your ticket request workflow and budgeting process.

Workspace users can easily request guest passes and tickets. Meanwhile, approvers can quickly approve or deny requests thanks to customizable notification settings.

Additionally, ticket managers can allocate tickets to people and groups within your organization, who can then share those tickets with promoters, members of the media, and so on. Depending on your Workspace tier, users can even aggregate and segment requests and ticket budgets by tour, group, or department.

8. Can I import events from Bandsintown, Songkick, WME, and others?

If your artists’ tour dates and other events are already listed on a website like Bandsintown or Songkick, why should you have to go through the painstaking process of entering each and every one into your artist management platform?

The answer: You shouldn’t. Thanks to our integrations with Bandsintown for Artists and Songkick, pulling in your artist’s events is as simple as entering a URL. Scale and Enterprise Workspace users can also pull in data via our integration with WME.

Before choosing a tool, make sure that integrations like these are on the roadmap, if not already available.

9. Can I manage and view events across time zones?

Another area where many calendar apps fail the music industry is when it comes to managing time zones.

To be fair, for most professionals, if you have a call at 3 pm, ET, but traveled to California for work, then you’ll need to jump on Zoom at noon local time (PT) — so your calendar adjusting to local time makes sense. But in our industry, there are a lot of instances in which you would not want this to happen.

Take show times. While the member of your team or record label charged with entering details about an artist’s performances may be in New York, chances are the show is going to be at 8 pm local time regardless.

Any artist management app worth its weight will give you the option to view and enter events by either your location or that of an event. And it should be easy to toggle between the two. If the tool you’re looking at doesn’t, that should be a red flag that it may not meet the needs of the music industry.

Workspace's savvy time zone management eliminates the confusion of cross-country and global scheduling. For record labels managing international artists, this means performance, promotion, and release schedules align perfectly with the artists’ event times, irrespective of location.

10. Can I store files, guarantees, and other important deal info?

Finally, no artist management tool would be complete without a way to save files and information like setlists, contracts, and guarantees directly to events. That way, nothing gets lost.

This also means you can easily find information from the last time an artist performed at a certain venue or location.

Store all of your event details, finances, files, and more in one place.

Workspace puts everything you need to know about an event right on your calendar — from event, marketing, and promotion notes to guest lists to contact information and much more. You can even pull up directions right from the event.

Try Artist Growth’s Workspace artist management software for free

Hopefully these 10 questions are helpful to you as you evaluate which artist management tool is right for you and your team.

Choosing the best artist management software for you is a major decision, which is why we offer a free trial of Artist Growth Workspace. Because ultimately, what’s important is that the tool you choose makes your job (and those of your team) easier — and the best way to find out is to try it yourself.

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Updated January 31, 2024

Artist Management

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