Young conductor goes for smaller agency

UK Arts Manager says:

It’s down to what sort of representation a musician wants. Mr Phillips has chosen to leave an agency who, amongst the c.150 artists they look after, represent more than 40 conductors, with Intermusica listing 32 staff to look after that list. Thus Intermusica have a lot of clout within the industry but maybe Mr Phillips wasn’t always top of their list. Instead he moves to an agency which (including him) lists 7 conductors amongst a total of 26 individuals/ensembles, managed by 5 listed members of staff.

So the proportion of artists to staff is roughly the same across both organisations, but at Sulivan Sweetland everyone is presumably deeply “hands-on”, whereas at Intermusica a more corporate ethos necessarily has to rule, though of course individual artists will still deal day-to-day with their own artist manager and assistant. Just a different approach behind the scenes, and certainly a different style of “sales pitching” (anyone who has seen the big agencies hoovering up all the available tables and arranging meetings from morning till night at annual conferences such as IAMA will have seen how the big agencies necessarily function). Over the next years it will be interesting to see whether those large agencies continue to control the majority of the market, mainly by having enough of the big names on their books, or whether the more specialist agencies gather more influence.