Biz news: Piano star dumps French agency for German

John Borstlap says:

It is not a matter of accountability. The performance of employees at a music agency cannot be standardized, because the parameters of the efforts to get engagements for the artists are too haphazard and random and too different, also the contexts can be entirely different. For instance: one employee finds 17 engagements in a short period, but 8 are due to a festival that sudenly needed replacement for sick performers; another employee gets only 10 engagements but of 3 he/she has worked carefully over a year to get good contracts, say for a conductor. How could you assess and compare the work done for such different results? If under pressure to get a certain number of contracts within a time frame, employees may offer artists for lower fees to get a financial edge, which will create other problems later-on, or they will focus on artists who sell more easily than others while those others are much better players (thus stimulating commercialism instead of artistic achievement). And then, imagine the atmosphere among the employees, the anxiety, the rivalry, the invitation for intrigue and cheating. The result is another factor which threatens to kill-off classical music, I would call it the ‘maffioso factor’.