Four ways of managing a rock and roll band

Ian Leslie, A rocker’s guide to management, The Economist, December/January 2019. An interesting article. In part because:

If rock groups are businesses, businesses are getting more like rock bands. Workplaces are far more informal than they used to be, with less emphasis on protocol, rank and authority. Many firms try to cultivate the creativity that can come from close collaboration. Employers attempt to engineer personal chemistry, hiring coaches to fine-tune team dynamics and sending staff on team-building exercises. Employees are encouraged to share lunch, play table tennis and generally hang out. As the founder of Hubble, a London office-space company, put it, “We hope that our team will become friends first, and colleagues second.” [...]

Successful startups have to make a difficult transition from being a gang of friends working on a cool idea to being managers of a complex enterprise with multiple stakeholders. It’s a problem familiar to rock groups, which can go quickly from being local heroes to global brands, and from being responsible only for themselves to having hundreds of people rely on them for income. In both cases, people who made choices by instinct and on their own terms acquire new, often onerous responsibilities with barely any preparation. Staff who were hired because they were friends or family have their limitations exposed under pressure, and the original gang can have its solidarity tested to destruction. A study from Harvard Business School found that 65% of startups fail because of “co-founder conflict”. For every Coldplay, there are thousands of talented bands now forgotten because they never survived contact with success.

The history of rock groups can be viewed as a vast experimental laboratory for studying the core problems of any business: how to make a group of talented people add up to more than the sum of its parts. And, once you’ve done that, how to keep the band together. Here are four different models.

Here they are, the four types:

FRIENDS

“We can work it out”

The Beatles invented the idea of the band as a creative unit in the 1960s. John Lennon’s and Paul McCartney’s artistic partnership enabled them to vertically integrate the hitherto separate functions of songwriting and performing. The band had no designated frontman; all four Beatles were capable of singing lead. Though Lennon was the de facto leader in the early years, one of the band’s innovations was not to call itself “Johnny and the Beatles”, as was conventional at the time. Partly because promoters and journalists found this new entity hard to grasp, friendship became central to the band’s image. John, Paul, George and Ringo were presented to the world as a gang of inseparable buddies. Their voices blended thrillingly. They cut their hair and dressed in the same style. They talked – oh how they talked – in synchrony. “We’re really all the same person,” said McCartney in 1969. “We’re just four parts of the one.” [...]

AUTOCRACIES

“I won’t back down”

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were formed in 1976 by five musicians from Gainesville, Florida, who had moved to Los Angeles in search of stardom. Petty was the group’s lead singer, songwriter and driving force, but the band split its income equally. Petty was talented enough to make it alone, but he loved being in a band: it gave him a sense of belonging after a fraught childhood scarred by violence. The Heartbreakers had an ethos of all for one, and one for all. By 1978 they had released two albums that sold well. Their next, “Damn the Torpedoes”, would go triple platinum and propel them into the big league. But before that happened, the band’s leader faced a tough decision.

The Heartbreakers had a new manager, Elliot Roberts, who, at 35, was already a grizzled veteran of the industry, having managed Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. The first thing Roberts did was sit down with Petty and tell him that he needed to be more selfish. “You can’t do this deal where you’re giving every­body in the band an equal cut of money,” Roberts said, “because there’s going to be a big problem at some point. You’re going to feel really bitter and used. I’ve been down this road with bands before. It explodes, and everyone walks away.” Petty listened. The days of equal shares were over. [...]

DEMOCRACIES

“Everybody hurts”

In 1979, Michael Stipe, a college student in Athens, Georgia, was browsing in a downtown record store called Wuxtry when he got talking to the clerk, a college dropout and amateur guitarist called Peter Buck. The two men bonded over a love of underground rock and soon decided to form a band, recruiting two fellow students, Bill Berry and Mike Mills. Thirty-two years later, their band, R.E.M., broke up amicably, ending one of the happiest collaborations in rock history.

Another regular at Wuxtry Records was Bertis Downs, a law student. An early fan of the band, Downs became R.E.M.’s legal adviser and manager. He told me that R.E.M. operated as an Athenian democracy. “They all had equal say. There was no pecking order.” This was not majority rule: “Everyone had a veto, which meant everyone had to buy into every decision, business or art. They hashed things out until they reached a consensus. And they said ‘No’ a lot.” [...]

FRENEMIES

“It’s only rock ’n’ roll”

Charlie Watts’s forceful rebuke to Mick Jagger came at a difficult time for the Rolling Stones. In the 1980s they came as close to splitting as they ever have. Their last album, “Undercover”, had sold disappointingly. Jagger embarked on a solo career and seemed to be seeking an escape from the band, possibly because he was tired of dealing with Richards, who had shaken off a debilitating dependence on heroin only to replace it with one on alcohol. But Jagger’s solo albums flopped, and he returned to his old partner. The two came to an accommodation. By the end of the decade, the Stones were back on the road again, promoting a successful new album. They have been touring – and the money has kept pouring in – ever since.

“In bands that survive a long time, there’s often an agreement to disagree,” says Simon Napier-Bell, a manager of multiple bands, including the Yardbirds and Wham! “People who don’t get on can get on in an interesting way.” It was possible for the Stones to come to such an arrangement precisely because they were never as close as the Beatles. It’s not that Jagger and Richards weren’t friends, but friendship was never as central to their image. When it comes down to it, they are there to work.

H/t Tyler Cowen.