New data sheds light on the realities of artist management

When it comes to nurturing artists’ careers from the ground up, artist management is arguably the most crucial and influential sector of the music business.

The manager is often the first person an artist adds to their team, before any record label A&R, booking agent or other partner takes interest. Managers are the most involved in artists’ day-to-day operations, working day and night to help manifest their creative visions while getting them the best recording, live and brand opportunities.

But surprisingly little is known about the state of the artist-management business as a whole, at least compared to the recording and touring businesses. What is the typical makeup of artist-management companies today in terms of roster size, audience size and genre representation? Has the ecosystem gone through the same level of consolidation as labels and agencies have over the past few decades?

I was excited to find many of these previously unknown answers in ROSTR’s second annual report on The World’s Leading Artist Management Companies, which analyzed data from over 3,000 management companies and parsed out which ones had the biggest rosters and largest streaming audiences on Spotify and YouTube, with additional insights on breakdown by genre, gender and label.

For those who don’t know, ROSTR is a Los Angeles-based startup founded in 2019 with the mission of “building technology to help create a more modern, connected & fair music industry.” The co-founders are two former Spotify executives, Mark Williamson (CEO of ROSTR and former Global Head of Artist Services at Spotify) and Adam Watson (CTO of ROSTR and former CTO of CrowdAlbum, a social live-events app that Spotify acquired in 2016).

ROSTR’s first product is a free, online, searchable directory that tracks over 100,000 global relationships between artists and their labels, agents and management teams, as well as the newest signings, news and playlist placements across the industry. The startup has also been using this data to compile some interesting reports that shed light on the music business’ inherent power dynamics. In fact, you may recognize ROSTR for their viral infographic that circulated earlier this year, illustrating how the four major talent agencies alone — Paradigm, WME, CAA and UTA — booked 75% of the Coachella 2020 lineup (RIP 😞).

I got to chat with Williamson yesterday about some of the trends in their latest artist-management report that stood out the most to me. While Williamson does not have an artist-management background, he was responsible for developing strategic partnerships with artists, managers and music executives during his time at Spotify, so has a good overview of how the industry works as a whole.

Data limitations

ROSTR lists a couple of disclaimers and limitations to its research directly in the report, but it’s worth restating them here. The report does not include any data on concert or merch sales, and also has a Western bias in terms of the companies represented. I don’t think these limitations impact the validity of the higher-level trends I discuss below; they just mean that the report paints an as-yet incomplete picture of the artist management business.

Trend #1: Artist management is more fragmented than ever — contradicting the consolidation narrative that dominates mainstream music.

The trend that stands out the most to me from this report is that the distribution of power among artist management companies is heavily fragmented. This contradicts the increased consolidation we’ve seen among record labels and talent agencies over the past few decades.

Just look at the graphics below, which ROSTR provided directly to Water & Music. Based on the top 1,000 artists on Spotify by monthly listeners, the top four agencies (CAA, WME, Paradigm and UTA) have around a 60% share, while the top three major labels (Universal, Sony and Warner) represent a 65% share. In contrast, the top 40 artist-management companies altogether don’t even have a 30% share of the list.

Examining roster size rather than audience size also tells a similar story. According to ROSTR, the largest management company by roster size is Red Light Management, which represents 376 acts. The second-largest company — Maverick, which represents 84 acts — is almost five times smaller than Red Light. All in all, the top 40 artist-management companies by streaming audience represent around 2,600 artists; that’s a smaller pool than whom Paradigm alone represents.

To me, this doesn’t only show that the artist-management sector is quantifiably more diverse than the label and agency sector in terms of business competition and participation. It also speaks to a reality of the business that I’ve heard anecdotally from many artist managers in recent years — namely, that artist management is much more difficult to scale.

For one, a manager is more involved hands-on across all of their artists’ day-to-day operations than a label or agency, which is focused primarily on recordings and shows, respectively. “Labels and agencies are more cycle-focused,” suggests Williamson. “Labels get busy with artists when they’re planning and releasing a record, and then the work passes on to the agent for putting on a tour, which might be every one or two years for an artist. A manager has to deal with that all the way through in a really bespoke way, in addition to handling brand deals and overall A&R. The work isn’t as repeatable on the individual artist level as it might be at a label or agency.”

This bespoke work makes it harder to share resources across multiple artists, which potentially explains why we don’t see more mergers and acquisitions among artist-management firms. “Aside from shared data and digital marketing, I suspect scaling doesn’t really provide you with the same efficiencies in shared costs and overhead at a management company as you might see at a label or agency,” says Williamson.

As we’ll see in the next section, though, there’s also the possibility that the new, emerging generation of artist managers are intentionally deciding not to scale their rosters. “Only a couple of companies today are really going for really large rosters,” says Williamson. “Instead, you have more companies that are doing really valuable business with smaller, hyper-focused rosters of three to ten artists.”

Trend #2: Hip-hop remains underrepresented among the top management companies — but not when you double down on the “small-but-mighty” firms.

Another surprising trend in ROSTR’s data is that hip-hop remains underrepresented among the top 10 management companies relative to its consumer-facing popularity.

For the top 10 artist management companies by largest Spotify reach, only 15% of their rosters and 16% of their streaming audiences come from hip-hop. The genre is beat out by alternative/rock/indie, which accounts for 32% of rosters and 21% of Spotify audience, and pop, which comprises 27% of rosters and 40% of Spotify audience.

Looking at a more detailed breakdown of the top ten management companies by largest Spotify reach, you’ll see that none of them have 50%+ hip-hop representation. Roc Nation comes in the highest at around 50%, followed by Maverick at around 30%. There are four companies on this list — Red Light, YMU Group, TaP Music and Crush Music — where hip-hop representation is in the single digits.

What makes this conversation even more interesting is that clearer genre distinctions start to emerge when you look simultaneously at roster sizes and audience sizes.

ROSTR’s report includes a chart that maps out the distribution of artist-management firms by both roster and audience size. As pictured below, the management companies in the middle of the chart — including Roc Nation, SB Projects, Maverick, TaP Music, Crush Music, Full Stop and Patriot Management — are generalist, superstar businesses, with large rosters and large artists. They’re also the ones we hear about the most in the media, with a natural bent towards pop and hip-hop; Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Pharrell Williams, Rihanna, Jay Z, Dua Lipa and Sia are just a handful of the artists represented by these firms.

The two extremes of the chart, the top left and the bottom right, are where the more specific genre patterns show up.

The management companies in the top-left corner — which have larger rosters of 40+ artists, but an average audience of <1 million monthly Spotify listeners per artist — lean heavily towards rock/alternative/indie acts. These include Hard 8 Working Group, Vector Management, ATC Management, eOne Management, C3 Management, Triple 8 Management and 7S Management. (The one exception to this trend is TMWRK, which focuses more on EDM.)

This rock-leaning bent suggests the possibility that disproportionately larger rosters are correlated with more traditional or legacy acts and business models. To be clear, this isn’t a bad thing. Many of these artists could have thriving, profitable businesses through non-digital revenue streams such as live shows, merchandise and physical music sales that are not reflected in ROSTR’s study.

At the other end of the spectrum, you see a cluster of what ROSTR calls “small-but-mighty” management companies — i.e. those with only one to ten artists on their roster, but with outsized average audience reach per artist (>10 million monthly Spotify listeners) compared to their peer companies with larger rosters.

The vast majority of these small-but-mighty management companies are newer — founded around 2005 or later — and concentrate on only one genre. For instance, OVO Sound, Cactus Jack, S10 Entertainment, Top Dawg Entertainment, Emagen Entertainment Group and Taylor Gang focus on hip-hop and R&B. Rich Music and Rimas Entertainment focus on Latin and reggaeton artists. The Shalizi Group and Disruptor Management manage a mix of hip-hop and EDM acts. Notice that rock and alternative artists are virtually nowhere to be found in the small-but-mighty segment.

This suggests that small-but-mighty management firms are “cultural rosters, in that they’re focused on a particular culture,” says Williamson. “This is where it gets interesting, where the new generation of management companies act a lot more like the record labels of old, and the management rather than the label increasingly becomes the brand around the artist. Nowadays, managers are also focused less about just getting a percent commission on their artists’ earnings, and more on building equity in larger brands and owning IP in partnership with artists. This is something hip-hop has been doing for years — not just managing artists but also building brands, building clothing lines.”

This comes full circle to the our discussion about how artist management is so fragmented. “If you are picking artists with whom to build proper brands and businesses, you have to be a lot more deliberate with what you do, and often end up making larger investments in fewer bets,” says Williamson. “That model seems much more resistant to scale, but also seems more valuable for everyone involved.”

Trend #3: Nearly three-quarters of the artists represented by the top 1,000 management companies are male.

Given the conversations about gender diversity that have been happening in the music industry for years, this finding is disappointing, but not surprising.

73% of the artists represented by the top 1,000 artist-management firms — or nearly three-quarters of the total — are male. Williamson tells me that there are “very few companies in ROSTR’s database that come anywhere near a 50/50 gender split” — even though there are several, like SB Projects, whose largest and most commercially successful acts are disproportionately female.

Notably, ROSTR’s calculation of this specific stat includes only individual acts, not bands or other groups. “Groups tend to be overwhelmingly male,” says Williamson. “If there are any women in the group, chances are there’s probably only one or two. So the 3/4 figure is actually generous — it’s probably closer to 80% male.”

This offers an under-discussed dimension to the ongoing discussions around gender imbalances across the music business, particularly in festival lineups and at awards shows like the GRAMMYs. The lack of representation is an issue not just at these surface-level events, but also at the very root of the industry where artists are first being developed from scratch.

“The fact that there’s a massive gender imbalance at this level leads to big downstream problems,” says Williamson. “It’s not just managers who are responsible for this, but if we’re trying to find a way to improve representation, management seems to be a really good place to focus, because it’ll have an outsize impact down the line. Some of these bigger management companies can look inward and try to understand why it is that their top two artists are female, but 80% of their roster is male. Data doesn’t fix everything, but it can be the start of a solution.”