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MMF to outline expansion and revamp plans tonight
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 3 June 2009
The Music Managers Forum will hold a briefing session for journalists later today to reveal the trade body’s plans to relaunch itself as a bigger, better, leaner, greener and, erm, meaner (?) trade body. Well, something like that.
Moves have been afoot in the artist management community for a while now to reinvent the MMF, which many managers see as being outdated given the certainly changing and arguably more powerful role artist managers now play in the wider music business. The MMF had traditionally been primarily a networking organisation for artist managers, with a training division tacked on. But the organisation has been evolving in recent years, not least through the appointment of Jon Webster as a full time CEO in 2007, and it’s known that recently elected MMF chair Brian Message of Courtyard Management and ATC Music is keen to see the Forum relaunch as a fully fledged trade body more along the lines of those that represent the record label sector, BPI and AIM.
Artist managers met in London yesterday to discuss what a revamped MMF could and should do in terms of representing the management community to the rest of the music business, to government, and to the world at large. It’s thought the new look body, which may well take a new name, would play a more proactive role in lobbying government, would aim to be a first port of call for other businesses looking to work directly with artists, and would expand the current training operation into a wider education and mentoring programme, especially for new managers.
More specifics, presumably, will be forthcoming at tonight’s briefing, on which we will report tomorrow. It will be interested to see how the all new MMF plans to complement UK Music, Feargal Sharkey’s music business wide trade body, to which the Forum is affiliated, and how it plans to interrelate with the Featured Artists Coalition, the newish artists organisation initiated by the MMF last year, but set to operate independently from the management body very much run by its artist members.
A bigger better MMF is also an interesting development for the main record company trade body BPI, once the primary music industry trade organisation, but which has recently found itself increasingly competing with newer bodies, like the Association Of Independent Music, Sharkey’s aforementioned UK Music and the FAC, for the wider world’s attention. The increasing importance and profile of UK Music and, now, the new look MMF, is, of course, illustrative of the fact that the record companies the BPI represents, and especially the major record companies that distinguish BPI from AIM, have a less dominant position in the wider industry as record sales continue to decline.
Nevertheless, the record companies still inject the most cash into new talent, and the BPI remains the best resourced trade body. While some of the biggest issues in the industry – the sound recording copyright extension and harsher methods to combat illegal file sharing – have some consensus across the business (though, arguably, not completely from the FAC), it makes sense for the various sub-sector trade bodies to collaborate (and BPI is, of course, also affiliated to UK Music). But with several trade bodies now being increasingly proactive and vocal, it will be interesting to see what happens if and when the big issue in music results in conflict between different parts of the industry.
