What Terms are in a Management Agreement Part 2

The manager will want to be reimbursed for any expenses that they incur in connection with your professional career or with the performance of management services listed in the contract.

Tip 4: You should look to put a cap on how much they can spend at one time and over a monthly period without getting written permission.

For example, no singular expense can be more than $250, and will not spend more than $500 in a month or you might make it over a 4-week period to further limit the manager. The client should request itemized statements for all of the expenses incurred with supporting documentation to ensure that the contract terms are being followed. Most managers will want full reimbursement by thirty days after the receipt of the statement.

Books and Records

In an ideal situation, the client will have a business manager to ensure the proper and timely connection of their gross earnings and the business manager will follow up on payment, statements, and any payouts to the manager or other parties. The manager will want the business manager to have experience in the music business since the manager’s payment will be directly impacted by how much revenue is actually collected.

Realistically, most artists , especially early in their career, will not have the money to pay a business manager, but there’s no excuse for not tracking your money and plenty of tools to make it easy.

Other Parties

This section ensures that the manager gets their percentage even if the artist joins a group or forms a corporation or other legal entity such as a record label, publishing company, or furnishing company.

Notice

This section provides the contact names, addresses, emails, and phone numbers that each party will use to mail statements and checks to each other and to contact one another in the event of a dispute. This section will often reference the contact and address at the top of the agreement.

For disputes, there is usually a time limit for the offending party to reply and the clock can start when notice is sent or when it is received by the other party and may need to be sent via certified mail or can just be an email with specific information in the subject line and body of the email.

TIP 5: Ensure that you understand whether notice starts when the notification is sent or received.

Warranties and Representations

This section confirms that each party has the right to enter into the agreement and that there are no restrictions on each party from fulfilling their roles within the contract. This section also addresses certain roles that do not fall under the mantel of manager.

The manager contractually ensures that they are not directly responsible for securing employment for the artist and states that the manager is not a booking agent which is illegal in some states, most notably California. Many managers do hold other roles for artists.

A manager may own a studio or have their own record label and it makes sense that an artist should take advantage of these resources, but it’s important to realize that most if not all managers will negotiate an entirely separate fee if they play these additional roles.