Tag Archives | Artist as Entrepreneur

Will Artists Save The Motor City?

By | on August 13, 2009 | Comments { 1 }

NPR had a story on All Things Considered yesterday about people moving to Detroit lured by dirt cheap property costs and a belief in the potential the city has. (Listen to the story rather reading the text which doesn’t accurately reflect the audio.) Among those interviewed are a small group of artists hoping to establish a little colony that “are interested in working on houses but also interested in working in social ways. Be a part of the neighborhood themselves..”

It will be interesting to see if they bring vibrancy to part of the city…and resist being displaced by any gentrification they may inspire.

I haven’t really seen it as part of my career path, but I always thought if I had an opportunity like this and the resources to pull it off, I would buy up buildings or warehouses and turn them into spaces artists could practice their craft. Even though I am in the performing arts, I never really considered opening a performance space. I think I would have rehearsal spaces for theatre, dance and music as well as studios for visual artists. A good situation would also allow me to get an apartment building so that visual artists could be in residence a few months while they created and then move on. With other artists around, they might find inspiration and collaboration in the people and environment without actually having to move permanently.

While Detroit offers this sort of opportunity, I wonder if I have the energy to make something like this happen. I live a fairly spartan existence so the prospect of living in the back while renovating the front doesn’t bother me. I just don’t know if I can be a one man renovation squad for the time it would take to get things to a place where the project could start paying for the next phase. That is assuming enough artists move to Detroit interested in utilizing the spaces.

But as I said, since I never really saw this as part of my career path, I haven’t invested much thought in how I might accomplish it. The idea has mostly been idle speculation born of visiting many towns and cities that seemed to lack good rehearsal facilities for the individual/small group artists.

I figure it is worthwhile posting the idea here on the chance it inspires someone to explore doing it in their own town, say Detroit.

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Imagine The Kids After Salvador Dali Watched Them

By | on August 3, 2009 | Comments { 0 }

I recently became aware of a company that is offering artists in NYC and Chicago a flexible alternative to the waiting tables option. Sitters Studio provides babysitting work to performing and visual artists. The parents get a babysitter who offers creative activities to their children. The artists get an opportunity to employ their training and perhaps hone their skills and approach if they have any plans for bringing arts and arts education to children and families.

Sitters Studio trains their people in CPR, does background checks and bonds them but then appears to act as a clearing house for jobs. The sitters get a minimum of 4 hours pay in cash at the end of a session and help with cab fare after 9 pm. Rates start at $18 in NYC and $15 in Chicago. The interesting thing about the NYC side is that they seem to offer their services on something of a subscription basis. For $200/year you get priority service and a better rate than single time callers. They also offer cancellation forgiveness and bulk purchase and referral incentives.

All in all, it sounds like a great idea for all involved, especially if it results in kids growing up to appreciate the arts. The company provides their babysitters with a “Tote of Toys” that according to this story, serves as an ice break and source of ideas for the babysitting experience.

“We’ve given the sitters something from every art medium,” says Wilson. “We give them something that’s from a visual art, a theatrical art, a dance discipline and also from the musical discipline and we really find that it’s a great starting off point for the kids to engage in play.”

There seems to be a fair bit of potential in this company both as a business and as a way for advancing the interests of the arts community. There is certainly always an opportunity for conflicts of interest with people taking advantage of their close relationship with a family to sell/promote their personal work. But there is also opportunity for unified action. Last December all the babysitters had their charges working on cards for the armed forces overseas. I imagine that periodically Sitters Studio could sponsor some other unified initiative that reinforced the value of the arts in people’s lives without being pedantic.

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When Your Agent Truly Works For You

By | on May 18, 2009 | Comments { 1 }

This weekend, Drew McManus and I had a brief email exchange about the Chicago Tribune piece he discusses on Adaptistration today. My organization and most of my presenting partners don’t contract for orchestra related services. Chamber music groups are about it. However, we deal with many of the same agents. I mentioned in an email to Drew that we hadn’t really seen a reduction in fees this year. However, if the reduction in programming I have seen among my partners is echoed across the country, I thought perhaps we would see low fees in the following season. I also suggested that maybe the agents would boost the fees of the marquee artists to offset the loss of revenue from others and the A-list artists would only appear in the places that could bear the higher costs but suffer no significant loss of income.

I hoped that there might be a silver lining and the economic downturn might provide opportunities where the quality emerging artist finds success doing what they have always done–work their butts off providing a consistently great product for little money, make a reputation for said effort and gain employment at venues which may not have considered them a year or two ago.

Drew responded such a thing may not come to pass under the auspices of agents. He noted that a lot of the emerging and mid-level people had been increasingly marginalized by their agencies over the years in favor of names that sold themselves. (I am greatly paraphrasing.)

I wonder if agents really can hold all the cards anymore now that technology enables artists to to make direct appeals and handle inquiries online. I am not sure about the situation with classical music but from what I have heard, fewer presenters are attending the booking conferences in favor of researching prospective performances online. This from an agent whose artists seem pretty happy.

How long though before presenters move from following up with an agent after a visit to the agency website to corresponding with the artist directly? There have already been a couple events where I have worked so extensively with the artist, I wondered why I had spoken to the agent at all. It seemed all the agent did was assure the artist they weren’t being cheated.

That might be the type of model that emerges. If an artist is touring, it is difficult to field questions and make decisions about future dates. Some centralized source that manages information will likely be important. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be a formal agency anymore. It could be a cooperative effort by artists where employees located across the country work from home to respond to inquires. Artists would still be represented by an agent(s), but in this case, the artists retain much more power in choosing which people will represent them.

If the promotional information all resides on the artists’ websites, all that is needed is a well designed central web presence to differentiate the members from others of their genre in a web search and help move it to the top of the search. Obviously, there shouldn’t be too many artists listed on the central site lest the visitor get overwhelmed by the choices.

Actually, heck with one site. If the cooperative is smart, they have a lot of specialty sites to appeal to different niches. The one for bars and clubs positions the members with one type of image. The one for colleges gives another. If there are 40-50 groups in a cooperative maybe an individual group appears with 15 others on one site that appeals to colleges, with a slightly different mix on one for small venues, on another for clubs and another for folk festivals.

Personal contact with presenters and other probable buyers is likely to always retain some importance. So perhaps the cooperative arranges for one or more of their telecommuters living near a city with a high frequency of tours to attend their performances as each group passes through so their agent can speak intelligently at conferences.

Depending on the design of the cooperatives, there could still be a lot of inequities in the representation. The groups which bring more money to the cooperative either directly or by the frequency of their performances might demand more prominent placement on websites or aggressive pushes at conferences. The larger groups may insist on agents in places their tours frequent more often leaving the others more weakly represented. They may run into a Catch-22–the small groups insist their agents book them in Raleigh so the agent can see them. Unfortunately, because the agent hasn’t seen them, she can’t speak with enough conviction to get the group a booking in Raleigh. (The solution being, if the closest the group gets to the agent is Atlanta, buy a plane ticket to Atlanta.) Over time, a group might move from one cooperative to another that better represents their philosophies.

Maybe these sort of arrangements won’t emerge but I feel pretty confident in saying that the continued development and use of technology is going to change the agent-artist dynamic over the next few years. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the next five years brought a significant shift with agents either playing a much diminished role or being valuable for entirely different reasons than they are now.

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Artists As The New Entrepreneur

By | on April 6, 2009 | Comments { 1 }

I was reading an interview on Inc.com with Jim Collins, author of Built to Last in which he says being an entrepreneur is less risky, though much more ambiguous, than working for someone else.

Not risk. Ambiguity. People confuse the two. My students used to come to me at Stanford and say, “I’d really like to do something on my own, but I’m just not ready to take that much risk. So I took the job with IBM.” And I would say, “You’re not ready for risk? What’s the first thing you learn about investing? Never put all your eggs in one basket. You’ve just put all your eggs in one basket that is held by somebody else.” As an entrepreneur, you know what the risks are. You see them. You understand them. You manage them. If you join someone else’s company, you may not know those risks, and not because they don’t exist. You just can’t see them, and so you can’t manage them. That’s a much more exposed position than the entrepreneur faces. But there’s lower ambiguity on the paint-by-numbers path: very clear but more risky. The entrepreneurial path: very ambiguous but less risk. Of course, the truth is that it’s all ambiguous, anyway. If you think you can predict the future, you’re crazy.

One of my first thoughts was that if this were true and everyone thought this way, everyone would be an entrepreneur and no one would be around to work. Is it the illusion of security predicated on the belief that a company has a business model and system that will ensure salary and medical insurance payments are made that causes so many to work for another instead of themselves? Who wants to handle all the legal paperwork and accounting associated with running one’s own business when you can work for someone who has lawyers and accountants to do that work already? (Though lately few are investing too much confidence in accountants and lawyers.)

But on the flip side of things, I wondered if the relative lack of security associated with working in the arts is one of the reasons so many arts organizations pop up. If the prospects of success are chancy across the board, I suppose it is logical that you cast your lot with the devil you know rather than joining someone else. You figure you can out economize them. If they are putting on good shows eating frozen pizza, you can do a better job while surviving on ramen noodles all the while hoping you will be eating better at some point down the road.

I think people in the non-profit sector embody Collin’s vision of entrepreneurs pretty well in that many do understand the risk and ambiguity involved with working for another or one’s self. I almost wonder if it might not be worthwhile encouraging people in the arts to apply this energy and willingness to endeavors outside of the arts. We have all been told, if you can imagine doing something else, do that rather than pursue a career in the arts. I am sure everyone has envisioned what that something else might be. In some cases, it might involve working for someone else, but that vision might be easily be diverted to working for oneself.

I really suspect that the internal drive an arts person has that sustains them in starving for their art is the exact same drive entrepreneurs employ in starting up their companies. The only difference is that the arts person may see growing their vision to a 500 employee company as selling out. To be fair, the whole process of meeting with venture capitalists, dealing with human resources, accounting and laws can seem intimidating and impregnable barriers. They say the next phase of the economy will emphasize the creatives. What if this might portend the emergence of organizations and processes which take advantage of the drive and vision of the artist and facilitates with the removal of the barriers either through training or performance of those functions in a manner which the artist can easily relate.

Let me be clear, I am not necessarily talking about empowering artists to be more successful artists. Yes, it would be great if solid arts organizations emerged. I am referring instead to arts people bringing their drive to the thing they would do if they weren’t in the arts. I am thinking about directing that drive toward game and software design to restaurants to human resource companies.

Wouldn’t be heartening to have worked in the arts for 10-15 years and realize that your hard work and relentless drive proves you may just have the tenacity to embrace the risks inherent to starting up a new company and there are people who want to help you do it?

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