The Other Side

I would like to write a few words about something called the IAMA conference, which I found myself attending last month.

IAMA is the International Artists' Managers Association, and it is the body which holds together every manager or management company of any worth around the world.
I made my way there as a delegate to represent my record label, and it was an eye-opening experience to say the very least.
The first day I spent telling everyone this is something no artist should ever have to see. By the end of the 3rd day I was convinced every artist should be forced to see it.

As with any conference, the idea is to do business. As delegates we gathered in a large building, drank vats of coffee, and had 10 minute meetings during which one buys, sells and generally does a year's worth of business in a day.
The interesting part is that we didn't get taught this at music college. We never learnt of the way the whole thing comes together- two sides of the same coin, artists and business people working in completely separate worlds which somehow join in order to bring music to the public. As musicians it is too much accepted to pretend the other half doesn't exist, and when it does it is only a necessary evil.
The Curtis Institute, where I studied, had a class called "20th Century Musician', which attempted to teach us the basics of building a career in the music business. There was a tour of the IMG offices in New York, and a show of hands was requested in the first class to clear up who already had major representation. (Quite a few did.) We learnt how to write a good CV, (something I have never done in my life) and had some very interesting lectures from people on 'the other side', in other words managers and career builders, but they may as well have been from another planet to us musicians.

For me though, the fascinating part of the IAMA conference was that it was the music business laid completely bare. The endless coffee drinking, cigarette smoking cafe debates we had at college about the relative merits of seeing music as a business rather than an art were shattered in the face of a room filled with 300 men and women who were creating the music business. Just like any industry there is an engine room, and here it was. We as musicians spend our lives in darkened practice rooms, worshipping composers (quite rightly) but we too often choose to ignore what it is that goes on beside us to create the opportunities we need to play in front of people.

Of course, playing the violin is something like my reason for being. But how much fun it would be visiting the engine room of the world of music I never would have known.