Hearing that an artist’s school friends have been enlisted as management is enough to make many a veteran music business exec break out in a cold sweat.
While they may have their chum’s best interests at heart, a lack of music industry experience might cause headaches for anyone else involved, leading an artist’s career into disaster territory.
With experience and business savvy, however, they can help create a formidable and successful team, where each party looks out for the other with genuine love and respect, to create a healthy working environment.
Twiggy Rowley, who co-manages Charli XCX alongside her business partner Sam Pringle and Brandon Creed in the US, is part of the latter group.
She and Pringle first met Charli at school and have spent the last seven years as part of her management team. During that time, Rowley has gone from selling merch on tour to setting up the LA office of Charli’s former management company, Various Artists.
Then, in 2018, Rowley and Pringle exited Various Artists, alongside Charli, and ventured out alone alongside Creed. At the same time, they set up their own management company, Project Gold, to look after developing artists.
Under their stewardship, Charli had her first No.1 album in the UK last year with Crash (which was her highest-charting in the US, hitting No.7 on the Billboard 200). She also sold out the 10k capacity Alexandra Palace and, in May, won the Visionary Award at the Ivor Novellos.
Rowley calls her relationship with Charli “the most defining friendship of my life” and one which allows Project Gold to offer “a really unique” perspective.
“We have known each other for so long. We’ve lived in each other’s pockets, and we’ve travelled the globe. We’ve seen [Charli’s career develop] across 10 years of hard graft, from playing above the pub at the Old Blue Last in London to stadium shows around the world.
“Even when it’s difficult, which it can be, there’s an underlying level of respect and love for each other, which you don’t always get in working relationships.”
Today, the trio rep independent Canadian up-and-comer ELIO, Welsh musician and producer Kelly Lee Owens, LA-based artist THE BLSSM and media personality Linda Marigliano.
Here, we chat to Rowley about her approach to management, the value in staying independent, what she’d change about the industry, and more.
What impact does the fact that you’re friends with Charli have on the way you manage her?
You’re faced with thousands of decisions every day, every week, and when you come up against tricky ones, or things you might not have come across before, that awareness and understanding of who this person is as a person and how much you respect them, plays into the decision making.
“You don’t turn into a yes person, you have to be able to say no, and we’ve built up many years of excellent dialogue and teamwork.”
It helps us make the best decisions that we can and the right ones that you feel in your gut. It’s such a heavy word, but it helps you stay true. It keeps you doing what’s best for your artists because it’s someone that you really love.
You don’t turn into a yes person, you have to be able to say no, and we’ve built up many years of excellent dialogue and teamwork.
Do you have any rules or values that you abide by when it comes to managing artists?
Don’t do it! I’m joking. Trust your gut but don’t be afraid to ask for help and advice. Have a partner in crime. I really couldn’t do it without Sam. Behind being the artist, management is probably one of the toughest and loneliest jobs in the industry, at points.
“Behind being the artist, management is probably one of the toughest and loneliest jobs in the industry, at points.”
You really do need to have someone to help you see the lighter side of things, to vent with, to laugh at all the ridiculous things that have gone wrong that day with and to help you remember how to keep everything in perspective.
In terms of our general approach to management, we pride ourselves on being professional and very easy to deal with, but not afraid to take a stand for artists where necessary. I think we have a great level of taste, positive attitude and a unique outlook.
What kind of artists are you looking to work with at Project Gold?
The artist has to be leading the vision and the creative and we can then help facilitate it, expand it and connect it at higher levels. It has to be that real self-starter artist. We’ve really enjoyed learning about the independent route, which we’ve done with Charlotte, aka ELIO. When she came to us, it was important to her that she remained independent. We said, “Absolutely” and then quickly got on Google to find out how you can be an independent artist because at that point, we’d just worked with major labels.
I’m so happy we did that and figured it out with her together because it’s gone from absolutely nothing to building a really sustainable business and a solid audience. She just did a headline tour in the US and sold out a bunch of dates, whilst retaining all the ownership of and rights to her music. Ditto, her distributors, have been really fantastic partners for her and for us.
We’ve been doing it for a few years now but receiving quarterly royalty statements and making money from music is still quite a novelty. It’s all Charlotte’s that she’s worked for. Creating and understanding her business and having music as an asset class for her has been really rewarding and something you just can’t do in quite the same way with the major label structures.
We’ve also just started working with Kelly Lee Owens, who has an independent setup and a fantastic vinyl and live business. It’s not a no to working with major labels, but I think the independent business is definitely where we can add most value and have the most impact. There’s fewer restrictions and you can make the decisions and mould the business into what makes most sense for the artists and for us.
It can be tough for artists to achieve longevity in the streaming age. What’s the key to achieving a long and sustainable career in today’s environment?
We don’t bow to pressure from numbers on a screen. We look at the bigger picture and believe in musical and artistic integrity. It’s about creating in-person moments with your fans. It’s about sparking engaging conversations online and through community. It’s not just about your streaming numbers. It’s about your artistry and how you speak to your fans.
“One thing that we’ve recently been thinking about is going from trying to target everyone to leaning into the core fanbase and empowering those key fans.”
Music is only one part of the picture, particularly for the well-rounded artists that we like to work with. You’ve got your merch, there’s artist access and conversations. There’s the live show, the community, brands and collaborations. There’s placing your music in so many different spaces outside of Spotify and Apple: like film, TV, runways and games. You’ve got to keep that bigger picture.
To use the Charli example, it takes years and years and years of work to build the world. And one thing that we’ve recently been thinking about is going from trying to target everyone to leaning into the core fanbase and empowering those key fans. We keep saying, ‘lean into your niche’.
Would you like to see anything change that would have a positive impact on developing artists?
We need to figure out ways to make touring, and particularly support tours, more sustainable for independent artists. ELIO is Canadian so we’ve been able to tap into some very helpful government funding from FACTOR and Radio Starmaker. That’s allowed us to say yes to tour dates that we would have otherwise not been able to afford.
Cracking the touring and the support tour game would be a big game changer. I don’t know if that’s in the form of more funding, government support for the arts or ensuring more of the final ticket price gets back to the right places. Whilst you’re still developing, the model for touring as an independent artist is utterly broken.
What’s the biggest challenge that you’ve faced in your career and what did you learn from that experience?
Playing so many different roles in independent artists’ projects — you’re a semi-pro business manager, you’re attempting to be a tour manager, you’re trying to be the marketing strategist — is definitely challenging. But this is also one of the things that I love most about my role. You get to use your brain in a myriad of different ways in one day. Managers can, and indeed have to, wear all these different hats because you’re providing all these different services. However, at a certain point, you become aware of your own limitations and as your artist and their business grows, you need to start delegating out to experts in each of these areas.
The Charli Crash campaign last year was an absolutely fantastic campaign. With Atlantic, we ran it really well out of the UK, across the US, Australia and everywhere. But doing a big headline tour, immediately on top of the album release, presented quite a lot of challenges for mental bandwidth, energy and headspace for the team, who were having to choose between promotional opportunities and live activity. In hindsight, we learned that we should definitely give ourselves a little bit more breathing space. Artists can only be in one place at a time and those big album campaigns and worldwide tours require artists and their teams to defy the laws of time and space.
“When you can be your best self, get into a good rhythm with the people around you and you’re all working towards the same goals and hopefully achieving some of them, it’s so motivating.”
On a more personal level, one of the biggest challenges is keeping your motivation and mental headspace positive, happy and open. As a team, the three of us are always trying to make space for each other and lift each other up. It’s definitely hard and you have to be open and honest about where you’re at. We’ve grown up together, we’ve lived in each other’s pockets, and we live very much in the lives of our artists. That can be hard. On the flip side, when you can be your best self, get into a good rhythm with the people around you and you’re all working towards the same goals and hopefully achieving some of them, it’s so motivating. All the other noise and stresses start to fade away.
Touring aside, is there anything else you’d change about the music business?
I’ll get my world’s smallest violin out now… I wish labels could understand a little bit more about how truly difficult and gruelling the finances are for artists at the beginning of their careers.
“I wish labels could understand a little bit more about how truly difficult and gruelling the finances are for artists at the beginning of their careers.”
And in direct relation to that, how gruelling it is for managers. Ours is probably one of the only industries where people are still voluntarily working for free for many, many months at a time, if not years. That’s something that has sometimes been a bit frustrating.
How do you see the role of a manager evolving in future?
Before we all turn into robots and everything goes even more AI… the manager is always going to be the most trusted representative and the closest confidant to the artist. I think that’s never going to change.
If you could go back to your early career and tell yourself one thing, what would it be?
Advocate and fight for yourself more. Don’t accept things for how they are just because that’s how they’ve been. The music industry is a wild west and just because something’s been like that for a while, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s right. The good thing about it being a little fast and loose is that you can actually enact change. It’s such a young and malleable business, it’s constantly in flux. If you want to see change, go ahead and make it happen, because no one else will.
As a younger female in the industry, you do have to learn how to have a voice and hold your own in the room. It’s taken me eight, nine years to finally get to a point where I’m feeling really confident and good about what I do. In the early years, you don’t always feel like that. There have definitely been moments where I could have stuck with my gut a little bit more and been firmer on things.
How about future plans and ambitions both for Charli and her career and Project Gold?
To develop Project Gold into a home for talent and tastemaker artists who have global potential. As artists grow, we’re really excited to find opportunities beyond traditional music, where artist careers can intersect with film, TV, live talks, podcasts and fashion. For Charli, I wouldn’t want to speak for her but of course, I know there are lots of exciting plans and ambitions across music, film and fashion, which is incredibly motivating.
Virgin Music Group is the global independent music division of Universal Music Group, which brings together UMG’s label and artist service businesses including Virgin and Ingrooves.
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