The Primary Job of a Manager is to Take Care of Your Lazy Artist!
When a westerner (an American for example) walks by the office of a co-worker, and the co-worker is quietly sitting there doing nothing, the westerner’s first reaction is that the co-worker is lazy and probably slacking. On the other side of the world, when an easterner (someone from Japan for example) walks by a coworker, and that coworker is doing nothing, the easterner’s first reaction is that the coworker is most likely engaged in deep thought whilst grinding away at a solution to some problem.
I want to say two things in this post:
First, You are probably never going to promote your artist to fame and fortune. I think it’s the manager’s job to help his or her artists earn enough money on a weekly basis until the day comes when the artist writes the song that puts the manager-artist partnership over the top. Yes there’s plan B, but that’s probably not why you quit your day job to manage artists.
Second, I am not a songwriter, but I practice my own form of art, and I’m pretty good at it. I find that churning out quality art takes a lot of iterations, physical iterations and mental iterations. Mental iterations are the toughest. When you have a lot of stress in your life and distractions around you, iterating can seem like riding a loop of barbed wire.
So if you want to help the lazy artist you believe in, take care of all the business you can, and someday he or she may pen the song you have been waiting for. After all, the music business is more or less a lottery; so you have to ask yourself, how many hours would you trade for the winning ticket?