How To Choose Your Music Career Team

Choosing Your Music Career TeamChoosing Your Music Career Team

This part of the ‘How To Build A Fan Base Guide’ will answer the questions for people asking:

“When Do You Need A Manager Or Certain Team Member?”
And What do you look for in them. (With True Stories I’ve Experienced)

tip

I’ll start off by saying that I don’t recommend you worry about building your team up until you are more established. This allows you to:
1) Learn the ropes of things yourself so that you can know if the team you eventually get is doing their job right
2) Saves you getting mad at people that can’t even really help you because you have no career to manage or book shows with yet.
Once you have everything rolling and you are making noise. Everyone will start popping out of the wood work to sink their hook into you. Everyone wants to be involved with someone on the rise.

The problem is really deciphering who is someone right for you and who the people you need to avoid are. Don’t worry, I’m here to help guide you.

Smiley Face
We all like to see the good in people, at least that’s the person I transformed myself into.

Also I’ve came a long way from being incredibly naive and now I judge people on their actions more than their words.

What you need to do before you consider anyone for your team

1) Make sure you actually need that person.

Don’t just let people tag along and waste your time, resources and energy. I made this mistake because I didn’t know better.

I had 2 pot heads on my team that were lazy as fuck and did nothing but drag me and my other good guy down as I’d delegate tasks that they would do for 2 days then go back to their own random habits like sleeping or watching ESPN or playing video games all day.
One couldn’t even work with out adderal, and the other slept 12 hours a day and constantly made statements like “You are a beast man, Idk how you live off of 4 hours of sleep a night everyday and still have energy.” It’s because I am driven to make something of myself you weak mf.



Years later they are all still bums living at their parents house and they are like 27 mad at me wondering why I didn’t blow up over night right when they joined my team.

Also they are wondering why at the time, I couldn’t bring them to the top level so they could be in a super star rappers clique so they’d get bitches and money and fame.
I’ll tell you why, they had no drive. They just expected me to do everything. Hi Guys! Hope you’re well. Not that they read or anything…. This isn’t on ESPN and it’s not Call Of Duty so I doubt they’d see this……

2) Whoever you choose for your team, needs to have a CLEAR, CONCISE understanding with everyone else on the team that you are all working for the same GOAL.
If your team is over there working to get you radio play, but you understand that you have no radio material and that isn’t going to happen. You aren’t going to get very far. But if you all understand touring is your next big step in moving forward in your career, than you can all 100% focus on lining up a tour TOGETHER.

Everyone needs to be working on the same goals so they are accomplished faster and you can move to the next goal. That is what TEAM WORK is. 
3) Your team should have their own network of people 

The larger your teams inside network, the better for everyone. They can connect you since they work for you. They can open more doors when things arise. They also are probably more trust-able if they have a large network. Chances are people like them and you probably will too.

4) Background check these people.

Google is a beast. You can also ask around about these people, especially if you chose someone who has a vast network. Everyone knows them, right?
Before I signed with my 5th manager, I had a well connected radio DJ in Chicago call his connects and make sure these people were on the up and up. When someone I trusted approved it. I felt much more comfortable and moved forward. Unfortunately, Though they were on the up and up, they just weren’t right for me at that point in my career.

Sometimes you might make the wrong decision and trust a person you shouldn’t have. This happens. It happened to me and that is why I am explaining all of this to you. For this reason, I highly recommend that any contract you sign with anyone is no longer than a year.

I recommend that you put a clause for 60 days to give them a trial run to make sure they are actually doing something for you and MOST IMPORTANTLY you must have a termination clause somewhere in the contract.

Major Note

AGAIN, YOU MUST HAVE A TERMINATION CLAUSE SOMEWHERE IN THE CONTRACT.

This is so that there is an ending to the contract and you can get out of the contract if you have a valid reason. If you can get them to manage you with out signing anything, all the better. I did that with my 3rd and 4th manager since I was so scared of contracts from my mistakes with my 1st manager.

Last thing you want is to be stuck in a contract with a guy that is doing nothing for you. Then you can’t sign a contract with a new manager that CAN do something for you.

You don’t want to be paying the bad manager 20% of what you are making when he isn’t doing anything. And you especially don’t want to be paying TWO managers 20% of anything you’re making. Ridiculous!!!!

 

[button link=” https://www.smartrapper.com/level4part5 ” type=”big” color=”orange”] Previous: Where Do I Get T-Shirts, Flyers, Hats And Other Merchandise Made? [/button]

[button link=” https://www.smartrapper.com/Level5Part2 ” type=”big” color=”orange”] Next: How To Choose A Manager [/button]

Scroll to Top