International Conference Report 2004
The Mediterranean Perspective
Conference Overview
John Bickley (Conference 2004 Chairman)
The sun finally came out during the boat trip around Genova harbour, from the quayside to our final gala dinner at the magnificent Stazione Marritima. Genova’s combination of redeveloped quaysides and a working port, with ships leaving and arriving from all quarters of the Mediterranean and further afield, neatly symbolized the 14th IAMA Conference – a combination of hard work and congenial networking with colleagues and friends.
The Conference was given an intellectual kickstart by Carlo Majer’s provocative keynote speech. He was determined to get us thinking through his wide-ranging survey of the cultural scene. He reminded us to be aware of different perspectives, defining the concept of ‘cultural translators’ and suggesting that the notion of classical music in Europe follows the north/south and protestant/catholic watershed – although even this divide has obvious exceptions, for example Vienna, with its catholic culture inside a German protestant ethic. He challenged us to question what ‘global’ means in cultural terms – is it really epitomised by queuing for kangaroo sushi? What are the dangers of loss of local or regional or even national identity, as has happened in football? We must focus on the interaction between public and performers, where an analysis beyond marketing is needed: art is made of surprises which cannot be invented. The technocrats and EU legislators have done little to harmonise practice, for example the arcane relationships between agencies and promoters. But above all, we should carry the idea that we work for our history and our memory.
Two of the best sessions were those focused on the very specific topics of sponsorship and audience development. Ably chaired by Jonathan Denby of Anglia Railways, ‘Corporate Social Responsibility: the new sponsorship?’ looked closely at case studies of international, national and regional sponsorship. Giovanna Maniezzo described the situation in Rome, where corporate social responsibility has not yet overtaken hospitality as a key component of arts sponsorship; she emphasised how much corporates follow fashion, that for many Stravinsky is still ‘the future’, and that you still need to discover individuals within sponsorsing companies whose private passions align with your objectives. Anne Brookes discussed her experience of securing Sky’s investment in English National Opera, and how sponsorship-seekers need to identify and define their existing and future audiences so that they match potential sponsors’ targets, and how every element of the sponsorship package has to be valued. Jonathan Denby talked about the unique environment the arts can deliver for companies to build their stakeholder relationships.
The Audience Development session also benefited from well-prepared and presented presentations. Libby Christie (Sydney Symphony Orchestra) balanced theory (circular fulfillment: growing audiences – growing income – growing sponsors’ customer bases) with some illuminating anecdotes; Sarah Gee (City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra) emphasised that the orchestra is the brand; and Caroline Sanger-Davies (Wales Millennium Centre), who has the challenge of building an audience from scratch, emphasised the importance of research and listening. David Butcher chaired a lively discussion.
The session on The Mediterranean Perspective drew together speakers from Lebanon, Italy, Spain and Greece and did not avoid some of the political and religious issues which impact on the cultural world. One of the key messages was that festivals, promoters and orchestras in the region need to market their activities far more widely across Europe.
‘Doing Business in Italy’ lived up to expectations, provoking a lively debate about what the problems are: Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi assessed the financial instability inherent in the system, but suggested there were signs of change; Stefan Passigli analysed obsolete laws which prevented flexibility and restricted entrepreneurship, and recognised that money needed to be invested in audience development; Giorgio Van Straten was more optimistic, saying that opera in particular has buoyant and young audiences.
This was the first IAMA Conference to be held outside northern Europe, and this led successfully to an increase in the number of delegates from Italy, Spain and France. In fact the attendance statistics were the best ever, with 370 delegates from 35 countries. The collaboration with the European Association continues, and the new relationship with Opera Europa attracted a significant increase in delegates from the opera field. We also benefited from generous sponsorship from Genova ’04, the Region of Liguria, and several faithful member companies.
What could we still do better? The conference still represents excellent value for money compared with commercial conferences, but I realise many delegates still find it expensive. It would take an increase in the fees to enable a proper simultaneous translation system to be used (in Genova, English to Italian would have been the bare minimum), but this would make it much easier for delegates from, for example, Asia-Pacific to participate fully.
None of this would have been possible without a huge effort on the part of Mario Ingrassia and his ARIACS colleagues, and months of work by Atholl, Melanie and Laura in the IAMA office.
Working Together to Disseminate Opera
Nicholas Payne
It was easy for me to accept IAMA’s proposal for Opera Europa to be associated with this Spring’s conference by supplying some operatic content to the programme. For someone who has been toiling in this business for more than 30 years, I still have a surprising number of friends in the field of artists’ management and find them, with the occasional exception, constructive and congenial colleagues. The prospect of convening in Genoa was alluring, especially when someone else is to be responsible for the arrangements. And I had a bee buzzing around in my bonnet, a mission to explain the need to expand the market for opera through recordings and television.
As do my member opera companies. They expend disproportionate time and expense and creative effort in producing shows which play for a limited number of performances to a necessarily limited audience. It is deeply frustrating when the attempt to disseminate those shows more widely is prevented by restrictive or prohibitively expensive media rights agreements.
Such agreements are more flexible than they were. Some, though not all, companies have house agreements with their artists which recognize the need for free access for TV promotional purposes. A few, like Barcelona’s Liceu, have negotiated the right to relay free to Universities as part of an imaginative education programme. Others, such as Covent Garden and Netherlands Opera, have developed comprehensive deals with their national broadcasting institutions which, if exploited, can deliver both radio and television relays to the public which pays for the product through its taxes. The Paris Châtelet spent millions on presenting Berlioz’s Les Troyens to a (capacity) audience of some 15,000 people, but only felt justified when it was televised to an audience of 1 million.
We debate among ourselves about how best to achieve this desired result. Peter de Caluwe of Netherlands Opera argues that it is a social and moral right to make our performances available to a wider audience, and that artists should receive no extra payment for it. Joan Matabosch of the Liceu is uncomfortable about paying nothing and believes that for legal reasons there should be at least token payments. There are precedents for a sliding scale of payments, based on varying percentages of the artist’s performance fee: a low percentage for local or national rights, a bit more for European rights, and more again for worldwide. My own view is that the artist does have rights, and that broadcasts and recordings do represent an extension of them. The question is how much, or perhaps how little, should be paid for them.
The other great unquantifiable is the proliferation of the means of distribution. Some agreements cover radio and TV but make no provision for DVDs. How do you police the internet? These unresolved issues equally affect artists and opera company managers, and we need to work together to solve them. Nor can we achieve our aims without carrying the broadcasters with us. That is why my opera panel in Genoa included, as well as its senior opera directors, Henk van der Meulen from the Dutch broadcasting corporation NPS and president of the Internationales Musikzentrum (IMZ) and Graham Dixon of the BBC and chairman of the music committee of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU).
It is my belief that, for progress to be made, we need a consortium representing the talent (the artists), the producers (the opera companies) and the distributors (the broadcasting bodies). Only by sharing common interests in a transparent and trusting manner will we have a chance of attaining our ends. I think that most artists’ managers understand that most recordings don’t make money, but we need them to be strong advocates of this reality to their sometimes disbelieving artists. Equally, there needs to be some safety net which ensures that, if a recording does make a lot of money, the profits should be fairly distributed among the partners. At the end of our session, I volunteered Opera Europa to represent the European opera companies on such a consortium by nominating a team of three, to be matched by three each from the broadcasters and the artists’ managers as represented by IAMA.
The task is difficult but should not prove impossible. I was impressed by the commonsense of the questions and contributions from the floor and by the attitudes conveyed to me by delegates informally in the corridors and caverns of the Palazzo Ducale. If we crack this one, it could yield so much benefit in terms of opera reaching a wider audience and thus helping to justify, in a political and social sense, the considerable subsidies necessary to keep it alive and creative. Failure, conversely, will inevitably shrink our support base and thus make poorer not only the opera companies but also the artists whose interests you represent.
Business Models in Artist Management
James Brown
The panel for this discussion was made up of four highly experienced and distinguished colleagues: Gonzalo Augusto, Virginia Braden, Peter Martin and Andreas Schessl.
The object of the session was to examine the standard business models most of us adopt, in respect of methods and levels of payment, "management" and "agency" services, exclusivity and general and local management. We also touched on the age-old debate "does size matter?".
In a necessarily short article it is difficult properly to represent everything that was said, so I will try to summarise the key points.
There was a general consensus that the cost of running an artist management business is rising steeply. As the volume of red tape increases, more and more resource has to be directed at legal, accounting and immigration issues. In addition, the market itself is shrinking slowly and therefore becoming ever more competitive, requiring increasing resource in order to be effective. Cashflow is a major problem in the industry as artist managers are not paid for their work until an engagement is completed, anything up to five years later than the booking is made. We acknowledge that this is a problem that we share with our artists, but as they demand an increasingly intense personal management service, it becomes more and more of an issue.
We discussed the pop model where there is usually a manager charging 20% and a booking agent (who arranges only the concert engagements) taking 15%. It could be argued that there are also two distinct roles in classical music, but we perform both, with a similar overall workload. This led to a discussion about whether artist managers could charge a fee or commission for management services and commission for "booking". In the UK, for example, retainers have just been banned as part of the new Employment Agency Regulations. It would be very interesting to test the law in respect of "management fees" for general career advice. Clearly it would not be easy to introduce this idea in an industry where commission is the norm, but a monthly management fee would go a long way towards easing cashflow problems.
If nothing else, there was certainly a consensus that commission rates will have to rise. This led me to make a humorous remark in my speech at the gala dinner on the final night of the conference that I was "delighted at the proposed universal shift to 35% commission". A few days later I was approached by a well-known arts management publication with a name not entirely dissimilar to our own, asking me to comment further on this issue for an article they were preparing on this (presumably outrageous) proposal. I suppose this incident should teach me to be a little more careful in what I say, but actually, I'm glad the issue has been raised and I hope we will all look seriously at what and how we need to charge for our services in future. I would like to charge by time, as lawyers do, but that may be a little unrealistic!
There was general support for the concept of exclusive management/agency. The consensus was that exclusivity was far more effective for both the manager/agent and the artist. As we all know, there are agents who function non-exclusively with artists, really working more on behalf of promoters, particularly in specific and well-defined territories. This model sits uneasily alongside the idea of exclusive management and it is one of the more difficult challenges the industry faces at present, to reconcile the two models.
There was strong support in the session for local managers, who are seen by many as offering an intensive and informed service to their clients. As finances become more difficult, there is inevitably an increasing tendency for general managers to work directly, but the feeling in this session was that this is not always in the best interests of the artist, who then loses the specialist knowledge and contacts local manager can offer. What was very clear was that local managers want and must take the opportunity to demonstrate these advantages, both to the general manager and directly to the artist. On some occasions, particularly when there is a change of general manager, local managers feel that they are removed without proper consultation or consideration. It would greatly benefit relations between agencies if there were to be better communication between all parties, including the artist, in these situations.
The debate over the ideal size and structure of a classical music agency is one that is unlikely ever to be resolved conclusively, with good examples of every option obvious to us all. More interesting is the fact, which comes through loud and clear from the recent IAMA survey of members, that the industry is very static, with little significant growth or even change. Whether you look at profits, commission income, turnover, staffing or areas of business, there is very little development. Furthermore, expectations are for little change going forward. Even if we all want to change, can we do so given the present state of the industry and our standard business models?
As chairman of the session, my main conclusion was that we all need to look increasingly hard at the way we do our business. Personally, I think we often undervalue our services and should have the courage to charge realistically for them. I hope this session stimulated many of us to re-examine our businesses and question all the things we generally regard as "given". I believe very strongly in the value of the services we provide and I would like to see IAMA encourage members to value and respect both their own work and that of their colleagues, whilst also encouraging innovative thinking and new business models.
Improving your Negotiation Skills
Saturday 17 April 2004
Karyn Prentice
Facing the challenges in the Mediterranean was part of the flavour of this year’s Conference. The negotiation skills workshop was full to the brim with people from a wide range of cultures, countries, perspectives, all with a huge range of experiences.
Negotiation is a conversation. You could say that we succeed in life one conversation at a time. No one conversation is guaranteed to change the trajectory of a business, yet any single conversation can. In this short session we tapped into some aspects of this complex process: focusing on 5 key skills to help make negotiation a more robust and meaningful conversation and in so doing create better outcomes, whether it concerns a contract, a festival, or an issue with a colleague.We started the session by looking at 4 truths:
1) Negotiating is not rocket science. It uses a combination of interpersonal skills, especially our most used, and least taught, skill that of being an exquisite listener.
Linguistically, conversation is a ritual and that means unless we are using the same ritual we are highly likely to misread someone’s meaning.
2) The second truth is that if one person wins and the other loses, both really lose in a negotiation. Your work is constantly involved with building relationships. We do that one negotiation at a time; one conversation at a time. Here’s a thought: our relationships aren’t about conversation. The conversation is the relationship.
3) The 3rd truth is that age is no automatic guarantee of wisdom. Would that it was!
4) The most important skill, in this century, according to the CBI, is the ability to learn. Everything is changing all the time. As leaders you need to be active learners all the time. Are you? How will you tackle the challenges of tomorrow otherwise?
One abiding thought: In your work you are highly tuned to music, catching the tiniest nuance in your artists. There is music, too, in negotiation and we must listen well. As in music it is the rest between the notes, the intervals in the phrasing that add to the magic of the piece. The same applies in conversation and very much so in negotiation.
Through some very participative work in trios this bite-size workshop drew out the threads of 5 keys of improving negotiation:
• Build your observer position
• Listen (really listen)
• Speak their language- WIIFM (what’s in it for me)
• Ask better quality questions
• Know what will make the difference
Key 1
Practice the art of stepping back in order to be more aware of the process so you are not caught purely in the content. What do you see? Who is reluctant, even if they say they are not? Where is the power shifting to, really, in this conversation? Building our own compassionate observer is a life skill.
Key 2
Listen. Be there and be prepared to be no where else.
Most of could us could be more acute listeners to each other. We may succeed in hearing every word yet miss the message all together. Go home and ask someone near and dear to you for feedback!
If we really listen then we have focus and focus is a key to better performance in a negotiation. Maintaining focus is critical. Most concessions in a negotiation happen in the last 20 minutes, just as people think it is all over and relax!
Key 3
Speak their language. This is just as critical when 2 people speak the same language, but use different signals and rituals, which can mean two opposite things at the same time depending on the interpretation! Add another culture and we multiply our chances of being misunderstood. How will you maximise the wide range of perspectives you come across every day in your work?
Key 4
Learn the art of asking better quality questions. One of the most powerful tools in negotiation is knowing how to get the right information. What is the most potent step for you to take to be sure your questions are the right ones?
Key 5
Find out what makes a difference. Don’t overlook the fact that something small to you may be the all critical, make-or-break concession to someone else in the negotiation.
Everyone wants to know what will be a benefit to them in a negotiation. If there is no benefit perceived it is hard to do business successfully. There may be features of a programme, a festival, or a concert opportunity but without a benefit it can easily remain a nice idea (and they’ll let you know about it, maybe..).
In a short hour this was only a taster on a big subject.
Give the best of you in every encounter. Make sure that people walk away feeling that negotiating with you was something they want to do again and again. We all know about the other kind.
Doing Business in Italy
Denise Petriccione
In my role as President of the Associazione dei Rappresentanti Italiani de Artisti de Concerti e Spettacoli, I was happy to accept the opportunity to take part in the organisation of the IAMA conference. I felt it was important to host such an event in Italy, as agents and promoters here seldom have the chance to meet to discuss ideas and problems relevant to the current international economic climate. In addition, the conference offered the opportunity to meet with our colleagues from around the world.
The panel session "Doing Business in Italy" drew together Italian opera and agents, and was chaired by Cristina Rocca who worked for many years in Italy prior to her current post as Head of Programming at the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. Representing the world of opera were Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi, Giorgio van Straten (Maggio Musicale Fiorentino), Stefano Passigli (President of Amici della Musica in Florence), Francesco Agnello (President of the Association of all concert associations and chancellor to the Minister of Culture), whilst the agents were represented by myself and Mario Giovanni Ingrassia (member of ARIACS and co-organiser of the conference).
Italy has many beautiful venues and over 250 concert societies work every year to organise their own seasons. The Italian State is a generous supporter of musical activities but moves so slowly and unreliably that promoters must ask for expensive and unnecessarily long-term bank loans, and the recent tightening of public expenditure imposed by the European Community has exacerbated the problem. Despite these difficulties however, Italian promoters are able to make things happen at very short notice and with great success.
The session raised curiosity amongst foreign managers. We discussed that, in the past, Italy has been very attractive to foreign artists and managers thanks to its beauty, historic venues, the law ostracising the work of Italian agents and relatively high fees compared to other European countries. The situation is changing as Italian agents become more proactive and promoters elsewhere offer comparable fees. However financial constraints and complex Italian law have made the market less appealing to foreign managers thereby favouring the local managers’ position.
Conference Summary
Ashutosh Khandekar
‘The Mediterranean Perspective’ was the theme of this year’s IAMA conference, but one Mediterranean aspect that was distinctly missing in Genoa was the sunshine. Not that it mattered: no amount of rain could dampen the ardour of 370 delegates from around the world, who had assembled in the Ligurian port city for a three days of lively professional debate and networking amid the imposing Renaissance grandeur of the Palazzo Ducale.
One of the most important aspects of this year’s conference was the involvement of Opera Europa, the service organisation representing 75 of Europe’s leading opera houses (and set to expand), under its chief executive Nicholas Payne. The world of opera in many ways embodies all the practicalities, problems and pitfalls that artist managers have to negotiate on a daily basis. The scale and complexity of the art form, its international reach and the fact that it embraces so many areas of artistic endeavour (with a mind-boggling range of contractual implications), means that there’s always plenty to talk about when an opera boss encounters an artist manager. Imagine, then, a panel of opera managers confronting a distinguished and vociferous collection of artists agents for a session entitled ‘How do we disseminate opera more widely?’. The subject of media rights went straight to the top of the agenda, with opera bosses trying to explain why so many artists (and therefore agents) don’t seem to be reaping the rewards of burgeoning new technology in the arts, resulting in live relays, internet downloads and DVD releases of opera.
Shortly before this session, I met a distinctly shifty looking Nick Payne in the lobby of the Bristol Hotel, intent on getting his side of the story straight before facing the onslaught of questions. From his members’ point of view, the bottom line is that in spite of the dissemination of opera through new technology, no new revenue is being yet being generated in this sector, which means that opera houses simply would not be able bear the added financial burden of negotiating media rights and paying out royalties for artists.
All this new technology is certainly bringing the arts within easy reach of new audiences, though the commercial implications for classical music remain rather sketchy, especially when ordinary mortals (opera managers included) can find it difficult to keep up with the rapid pace of technological change.
In one example of technological innovation, Joan Matabosch, general manager of the Liceu Opera in Barcelona, described an astonishing initiative in his theatre whereby performances were streamed down the internet to several universities around Spain. This has enabled them to build up an invaluable educational resource, stirring an interest in opera among young audiences (reflected in a sharp increase in young people actually attending the opera). So new technology is bringing tangible benefits to the arts in terms of audience-building and providing a genuine public service within the subsidised sector. But these social benefits, it seems, have to be treated as distinct from the potential for commercial exploitation. Is there any money in new media for hard-working artists and their managers?
In the event, the session proved to be surprisingly free of animosity. Nick Payne himself had to admit that the assembled company (even Helen Sykes and Virginia Braden, both on feisty form) had "behaved themselves remarkably well". Everyone accepted that the issue of rights and royalties in relation to new broadcasting media was a complex one which needed to be negotiated carefully. It was agreed that IAMA and Opera Europa should work together to draw up guidelines for the mutual benefit of their members and to ensure that the arts sector was making the most of the opportunities that new media has to offer. A good result all round and an important new initiative to have come out of the conference.
Back then to our Mediterranean Perspective . It’s not often that an IAMA conference has a theme that you can taste. Lunch, incorporating the glorious flavours of basil, parmesan, olive oil and wine, served up in copious quantities in Le Cisterne, the atmospheric underground vaults of the Ducal Palace, was a daily reminder to delegates of the some of the enchantments of Mediterranean living.
Mediterranean means, of course, ‘the middle of the earth’ – a cultural crossroads which is home to some of the world’s greatest civilisations. For me, one of the most fascinating aspects of this year’s conference was the insights that it gave into the incredibly diverse cultures of the region. Myrna Bustani, the founder and President of the Al Bustan festival in Beirut, gave her particularly cogent impressions of a region where many different worlds touch. For western Europeans, ‘Mediterranean’ conjures up thoughts of France, Spain, Italy and Greece. But the region encompasses Turkey, Israel, Syria and Lebanon on its eastern shores, the Balkan coasts of Croatia, Bosnia and Albania to the north and Algeria and Morocco at the Western extreme. Indeed, as Ms Bustani reminded us, around half the Mediterranean’s inhabitants are Muslim.
It’s a sobering thought that for many people in the region, life has been dominated by religious conflict and the devastation of war. Ms Bustani spoke of the importance of keeping culture and communication alive in an era of fanaticism and fundamentalism which seeks to destroy a shared cultural heritage that has developed over centuries. Culture, she emphasised, is a key to peace in the region and a way of reminding people of the common history and values that bind them, rather than the differences that tear them apart. This was a message reinforced by Nikos Tsouchlos, Artistic Director of the Megaron concert hall in Athens. He delved back into history to show that, whereas western classical music is a relatively recent import to Greece, Arabic musical influences stretch back over centuries. This session demonstrated that cultural identity is far more complex than some politicians and religious leaders would like us to believe.
I heard extraordinary stories of the resilience of culture in the face of conflict and social disintegration. In Zagreb,for instance, the opera and ballet companies continued performing throughout the war in the Balkans, in spite of the opera house being hit by shells on several occasions. Conductor Zoran Juranic told me of a performance where several dancers were severely wounded in heavy shelling. The show went on. Emir Nuhanovic, director of the Sarajevo Philharmonic said that during the war, audiences were hungering for music and the orchestra regularly played to overflowing halls. Ironically, it is in times of peace that complacency sets in and the public has to be reminded of the value of a cultural life that has been hard won.
The Mediterranean aside, this IAMA conference was extraordinary in its global reach. I bumped into Angelo Gobbato, general manager of Cape Town Opera, full of the excitements of a recent staging of Beethoven’s Fidelio on Robben Island, the prison where Nelson Mandela was incarcerated through the years of apartheid. The performances had been a turning point for opera in South Africa, given an ovation by an influential local audience, and proving once and for all to the powers that be in South Africa, that western classical music had cultural resonances that go far beyond ‘white, Eurocentric imperialism’.
Of course, for much of the conference, it was business as usual for many delegates, including a healthy number of newcomers from eastern Europe and the Baltics, on the verge of joining the EU and taking their first steps into the hard-nosed, commercial world of arts management, western-style. Exploring sponsorship opportunities, building new audiences, getting dates in diaries – these are all bread-and-butter activities in today’s arts world and the IAMA conference served its delegates well in presenting lively, well-informed sessions on these subjects.
Business is just part of the conference package of course and, taking a break from the wheeling and dealing behind the scenes, it was especially good to hear from a great artist. Mirella Freni threw light on some of the murky secrets of success of being an opera singer, providing insights into harnessing natural talent, and giving a few tips on how to fend off the unwelcome attentions of lecherous conductors!
But my lasting impression of this year’s conference is that it encouraged us to lift our heads beyond the hurly-burly of our immediate lives and experience a world of passionate commitment to the arts (often in the face of great adversity) that lies beyond our own doorstep. It seemed fitting then, that the event ended with a convivial boat-trip, sailing into a sunlit (at last!) Mediterranean Sea, with the merest hint of voyages of discovery in bygone ages (at least that’s how I saw things after my third glass of prosecco). Poetic license aside, the 14th International Artist Managers’ Association Conference was the biggest, and by all accounts, the best to date, showing us very clearly how the arts can play a vital and positive role in reinforcing relationships between nations, and in opening up new horizons for creative people around the world.