Mary Jo Kaczka (Tour Manager), Kevin Lyman (Vans Warped Tour), Eric Mayers (Red Light Management), Dan Parise (Diversified Production Services) and Lindsey Sokol (C3 Presents) addressed these challenges in a panel dubbed Stage Management 101 – or Rosetta Stone Stage Management, as moderator Charlie Hernandez (Just a Bunch of Roadies) put it.
3 comments:
The music industry is in great need of all types of management, people that manage the artists, the shows, and the festivals. Without a great management team, you cannot have a tour or be able to organize any semblance of a festival. The title of this article could have just stopped at communication is everything because without that level of attention that managers pay to time a show can't happen. Nowadays communication is as easy as creating a google calendar that everyone has access to. Something else that I would have liked this article to mention was the faults in personal managers for these artists that often hold back information and cause some of these problems to ensue. When I attended the F*** Yeah Festival in Los Angeles a couple years ago the main headliner was Frank Ocean for a very long time until the week before the festival where it was announced that Frank Ocean dropped due to unknown reasons, and the reasons still remain unknown to this day. The headliner was replaced by Kanye West, who was great and all, but I know many were really mad at the change and caused an uproar. Communication is key in these scenarios, not just for the festivals but for the fans as well.
Management can make or break a production and can help promote people of all industries especially music. Without a great management team and basis an successful artist can take their career into the hole. A great example of this is the Zac Brown Band back when the band first started they were under professional management and had a team built up around them of industry professionals. But as they got more and more well known they started to bring on more and more family members to the company eventually culminating in a bad project and a deterioration in the product as a whole caused the band to hit a huge decline in both profit and popularity. This crosses industries and is important to all walks of communication without good structure and organization a system is set up to fail. And with good team work and good manager bad things can turn good.
To me, managers are often the unseen heroes of complex events, but always the first to be blamed int he event of a miscommunication or unforeseen circumstance. Especially for music and festival settings, there are so many factors and logistics to be controlled that those people who do those jobs are, to me, simply incredible. The added level of human uncertainty in music especially can cause major problems if not at least prepared for. Cancellations, sickness, or any other number of reasons an artist or group could cancel cannot really be predicted but always need to be prepared for. I was interested to see how this article wrote about this concept in relation to multi-act productions, but I think this concept holds true in every area of management. Communication is always everything, because if a manager doesn't know something, there is no way he or she can deal with or prepare for it. I think with google and the ability to share information so quickly and easily, there is no excuse for not communicating.
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