How to become an artist manager: Ryan's story

Ryan

An artist's manager looks after every area of an artist's career, good and bad. So, it can be logistics and touring and it can be booking shows, helping make the music, put out the music, the strategy of the label and finding people to come on board whether it's labels or publishers or brand partners and basically building the entire world around the artists and everything they do.If anyone wants to do this as a job, I would say you've got to be more hungry than the next person. There are so many people that want to do it. The gulf in pay, it goes from like you can either earn nothing at that end, there's not much of a middle ground, and then you could do quite well yourself and have a nice career out of it. So I'd say you've got to be hungry, you've got to want to work harder than anyone else, you've got to believe in the music you're working with and you've got to live and breathe it.

It's definitely a life choice because of the travel that comes with it, you know, you're away from home a lot in different places, see some amazing stuff but, as a consequence, you know, maybe not so much time at home with people you care about. So, yeah, definitely getting a balance of those two.

I had a technical background. So, I did Computer Science at university and I wanted to get into music. I didn't really like the technical stuff I was doing and, when I left, I got internship at NME at the time. I was there for a little bit and then I ended up at Sony Music and then, at some stage, I was like, you know what, I don't just wanna do one bit of it, I enjoy the live side and the brand side and all of it and I was like I should go and do this myself, I should look for something. I had a few manager friends at a time that were managing artists that were doing nicely and I was like, you know what, I quite fancy that. So it was definitely a journey. But then, as soon as I knew, I wrote like a list of things I wanted to achieve and, you know, being at Glastonbury and having Lewis playing on The Other Stage tomorrow is definitely one of them.

Surround yourself with people that are doing what you want to do and listen to everything they say, you know, just really soak up and don't be too proud to ask questions – there are always going to be gaps in your knowledge, there are always people who are gonna be able to do better things than you in certain areas. And when you get to the stage where you're able to build a team, let other people come in. It's about making sure at every stage, no matter where you are, you surround yourself with people that are probably better than you in areas you're not so good at.

There have been lots of highlights. There's been number one single for seven weeks in the UK. Definitely, we never thought that possible and, you know, I've got a number one single trophy and a number one album trophy sitting on my coffee table at home and, when I started, that was so far beyond the dream. So, to have that is incredible.