‘A lot of artists want a manager too early’ –

Team Talk is Music Ally’s interview series, where our marketing experts speak to music industry teams about their latest work, best practices, and smart strategies. You can find the archive here.

Charlotte Caleb is the founder and CEO of Ellevate, a startup offering a subscription-based platform that offers artists management expertise. In this interview she talks to Music Ally’s Amy Lilley about what the company is doing, and the challenges (but also opportunities) she sees for independent artists and managers in today’s music industry.

Amy Lilley: Tell me about Ellevate: what’s the background and what are you doing?

Charlotte Caleb: My first job was in management, I worked at !K7 Records managing Tricky. Since then I’ve been doing management, whether it’s for other companies or for my own roster. I also worked at AWAL for three years on the operations side, just as it was being acquired by Sony.

During that time I was always managing TĀLĀ, who’s a producer, artist and songwriter. We’ve been working together for 10 years now, and we always did things a bit differently. We were always thinking of revenue streams outside the norm.

She was never going to be a Top 10 hit artist: it’s just not who she was, and she doesn’t really want the trappings that come with that: being on tour eight months of the year! So we crafted a career around her that meant she could be really creatively fulfilled, make money, and do things that were not so obvious.

And then, when I had my little boy three years ago, I started thinking about what my next steps would be. I wanted to see how we could make the philosophy that me and TĀLĀ had  available to more artists.

So myself, TĀLĀ and Ralph, who began working with us last year on another project, we were talking about the idea of giving artists who were unmanaged access to management. We’d been talking to independent artists, asking them what were their biggest problems? And time and time again what came up was ‘I have to learn a million things, I have to figure all this stuff out, I have to do it on my own, I don’t really know what I’m doing.’

So that’s where Ellevate came from. Ellevate is flexible artist management for artists without management. We have a basic tier which is a bit more light-touch: they get access to a series of talks with experts on different topics; a whole bank of content,  how-tos and online courses they can take.

They also get access to artist manager office hours, so they can book a 15-minute slot and ask an artist manager anything. They get to talk to someone real: it’s not an AI! As much as we’re trying to automate the music industry to make it more scalable, it’s still a relationship business. It’s still a human business, and I don’t ever see that changing.

Then we send out a weekly email to all of our subscribers with accountability exercises and things for them to do. So on a Sunday evening you get an email saying ‘Okay guys, what are we doing this week? How are we going to keep this pushing?’ So we’re just like their cheerleader.

We then have a more premium version called Chrome for artists where things are really moving. They might be making a bit of money and just need more of a push before they’re ready for management or they don’t want or need a full time manager at all. That’s where they get paired with a manager and they get direct coaching – a little bit more hands on – as well as all of the other stuff. We like to call it Fractional Management.

Amy Lilley: Did this come out of pain points that independent artists without managers face? What are the big challenges you see for them?

Charlotte Caleb: One of the biggest issues is that more artists than ever can release music. I can record something on my iPhone today, and in two days it can be up on Spotify. So there are more and more artists, and the industry is noisier. It’s really hard for artists to cut through that noise, and they believe a manager is going to solve that.

I believe that a lot of artists want a manager too early. I think they need to understand what is required for an artist to be manageable.

Yes, there are situations where managers will take on an artist straight out of school where they’ve put no music out. I managed Eloise Keeble, who I met when I went and spoke at my old school and just fell in love with her. But that doesn’t happen all the time.

Most artists [who get picked up by a manager] there’s something happening. There’s an interesting brand there, there’s a story being told that really grabs a manager. They’re further down the road and have put in years of work already to get to that point. For me, that’s the big gap.

I think that artists think ‘oh, if I just have a manager it will open a door. They just need to get me radio play, or if I just get this one booking it will all happen’ and really its more complicated than that. We need to take it back to basics: we need build a brand, we need to understand our audience, we need to make sure we’re registering stuff with PROs and all of those fundamentals.

Artists are startups, and a lot of startups, before you hire your CEO or your CFO, will work with mentors and coaches. They invest in expertise to help them to avoid mistakes.

And obviously I’m promoting my own product here, but I truly believe that if artists invest a couple of hundred quid a month in someone to coach and mentor them and help them avoid problems, they’ll actually save money in the long term.

Amy Lilley: What are your goals for Ellevate Studios as it grows? What do you want it to be in five years’ time?

Charlotte Caleb: There are a couple of goals. At the moment it’s a web-based platform, but I want it to be an app, so that it’s super-portable for artists. Everyone’s doing everything on their phones. I also want it to be really global so it’s not just UK artists on it. I really believe in artists from emerging markets having access to knowledge just as much as someone who lives in, say, Dalston does.

Any artist that joins the platform, they are already taking it way more seriously than 90% of other artists. So I really see that we’re going to be nurturing and breeding this generation of artists who being really accountable for success, and serious about building a business.

I see this whole generation of artists that are abundant and making money sustainably, rather than it feeling really up and down.

And then the other thing is that in five years I really want to have someone on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury, who came out of our ecosystem. Like, Little Simz is working with AWAL, and they’re quietly in the background supporting Simz to do what she does in the best possible way, in the truest way to Simz.

So you see her on the Pyramid Stage, and then you think can she even do any more in the British market because we’re small? And then she just goes and does something else. The sky is the limit for that act. And I really believe we can do that, be that supporting under-layer to allow artists to keep pushing on their terms. That’s my vision for it!

Amy Lilley: How do you work with managers, and what trends are you seeing on that side of the business?

Charlotte Caleb: There is a change. For me, I’m in a different financial situation to what I was 10 years ago. Then I was a kid and didn’t really have bills! Now I’m 34 and I have a child and I have bills, so I can’t spend time on an act that is not going to earn money for five years necessarily.

Where I am in my career, that’s really difficult, and more and more managers – my peers – can’t do it either. Being able to give your time for free to an act is really challenging. I feel like there’s going to be this gap where managers are not going to be able to support early-stage artists, swallowing the risk in the way they did maybe 10 years ago.

The industry feels like in some ways it’s shrinking, and in other ways it’s growing in the independent sector. There are managers that have really great brains and expertise who we can pay to share their expertise in a way that’s super-flexible for them.

They can come in, share all their expertise and their wisdom they’ve learned from working in the industry and make a real difference to someone. But you’re not so responsible for that act, you’re just providing your expertise.

It’s more of a bird’s eye view because you’re not so emotionally invested. You just go ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, no scrap that, move away from that, that’s a waste of time’. It feels a lot more objective than when you’re so close to an artist, so I feel it’s quite a refreshing way for managers to work.

We’ve got some great managers working with us already, and one of my challenges is bringing more managers into the fold.

We spent the last year building relationships and trust with people. We’re not trying to cash grab: to just make money out of artists. It’s coming from a genuine place of wanting to be helpful, and wanting to build something that is going to build artists up.

Like I said, this is not some AI-driven bot thing. AI is great for some stuff, but in this area there needs to be a mix of technology and humans!

Our sweet spot with artists is when they’re ready to be put into a structure that is committed to helping them. Some people want to complain that the music industry sucks; that they don’t have access to stuff and it’s all gatekept. But we’re working with artists who make it work. That’s where it’s coming from.