Booking agent vs manager: how they work in the music industry

Booking agents are mostly focused on show planning for live performances and tours. Artist managers look after the overall well-being of artists, protect their creative lives, and plan and enhance their careers.

Managers help create the expression or brand of the artist while remaining authentic to their unique creativity and sound. Of course, artist management also has a bad reputation for manufacturing pop stars, driving artists too hard, and pushing for more money.

We spoke to Max Mäder, CEO & Founder of 1182 (Eleveneightytwo), an artist development agency that helps artists grow without the burnout. Max only signs artists he’s truly excited about who make music that he connects with. For him, this approach is essential to bringing the best out of his artists. It’s also not hard for him to travel on tour with his artists for more than half the year when driven by passion—except now that he’s become a father for the second time, of course!

The long road(ie) to artist management

It all started about 12 years ago when Max moved back to Germany from Australia. He was playing in a few local bands and began looking into the business side of things to better manage their schedules, do marketing, and book more gigs. Besides making music (playing various instruments and producing), he also performed a bunch of miscellaneous jobs in the music industry—from stage setup to merchandising.

“And that's kinda how it developed for me becoming a professional in the music business. I was a promoter doing, like, local shows in mainly small-capacity venues and a couple of festivals. And I was managing a couple of artists, but mainly the ones where I was a musician in the band as well.”

Max believes it’s all about getting your hands dirty and nose bloody. Start anywhere in the music business and get better at what you do. You’ll soon find more and better opportunities to grow and learn. From managing his own bands, he also moved on to work with big companies on exciting projects, most notably FKP Scorpio in Germany who are responsible for well-known festivals like Hurricane (since 1997, over 80,000 attendees) and Southside (which has welcomed the likes of Ed Sheeran, K.I.Z., Bring Me The Horizon, The Offspring, SUM41, and Avril Lavigne).

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Other cool projects he worked on include BBC Tours (Planet Earth, Frozen Planet, etc.). These huge arena tours required maneuvering a gigantic LED wall display and a 70-piece Czech orchestra around Europe, which he says was “quite interesting.” He then went on to work as an artist manager at the Wacken Open Air—the world’s biggest metal music festival, if you don’t know.

“And that's really when I got into professional artist management—around about five years ago,” Max says.

But how did Max go solo? How can you take the leap from working for a company to being an independent artist manager? For Max, it was all about timing. He reached a point where it was just the right time to shift his career, as he had put in the work and had all the tools he needed to start his own agency.

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Eleveneightytwo was started by Max, Ben, and Flo—three music industry professionals with diverse backgrounds. Max’s experience in tour and artist management combined with Ben’s publishing skills and Flo’s marketing background created a solid base for their new venture.

What does an artist manager do?

Artist management is a deep involvement in the acts you represent. You could even say you become an off-stage band member. “I tend to go fully into the acts that I'm working with, and mainly, they become friends and family because you're an extension of the artistic vision in a lot of ways,” Max says. Being an artist manager means taking the drive that the artist has for themselves and using your ‘set of keys’ in your network to unlock success for them. What’s success? It’s amplifying their reach and also helping them grow.

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As an artist manager, part of your responsibilities is your artist’s finances, music recording and distribution, and merchandising. Your work also involves implementing structure here and there where it's necessary. While there are certain rules you need to obey to make it in the music industry, Max says there's no real template for artist management: it’s as individual as the acts you represent. So, you always need to be flexible in your strategy. You can have certain key components in how you manage, but the way you put these components together and in what order will differ from one artist to the next.

“I can't apply the way I'm working with one artist to another necessarily. Components, yes, but not everything.”

How booking agents & managers collaborate

SystemOne is used by artist booking agents and agencies to manage artist schedules, sign contracts, and do show planning, so we really want to understand every aspect of how booking agents work with artist managers like Max.

One of the ways we’ve noticed an overlap between these two music industry roles is how both agents and managers are super involved and invested in their artists’ careers. While booking agents are solely responsible for the live performance aspect of the artists they represent, they also often assist with branding and marketing the acts. On the flip side, artist managers work holistically with their artists to help them gain more exposure on all the right platforms—including career choices like which stages to play.

“It overlaps for sure,” Max says. “But also here, it really depends on how the artist manager or booking agency respectively actually works or interacts with the artist themselves.”

Max explains that some managements shelter their artists, so they want to be the sole point of contact, and everything needs to go through them before it reaches the artist. But he prefers a more collaborative approach with his partners, working together with the label publisher, booking agent, and artist as a team.

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The main goal is to accelerate the artist’s career, and Max finds an open collaboration between all parties works best for everyone—especially the artist. “I think it’s very, very important because, in the end, we all pursue the same goal: we wanna make the artist grow.” But open collaboration is also where the risk of miscommunication and conflict comes in. And it happens a lot in the music business, where communication is very casual and not necessarily well-documented.

If you’ve been in the music business long enough, you’ve probably experienced the negative side of it, too.

Max recommends surrounding yourself with good people you can trust. It takes time, but if you build the right partnerships, you’ll end up working with amazing people for decades.

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If an artist has a booking agent, do they need a manager?

We’ve seen how artist management and booking overlap and complement each other, so the real question is: does an artist need both these roles in their professional lives? Max says yes. With a booking agent for live gigs and an artist manager for everything else, these two sidekicks will help any artist find the right slots and meet the right people.

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There are also cases where artists are publishing their work but not doing live performances. One of the artists Max manages, a Japanese act called SOME≡LINEZ, is an example of this work dynamic. In this case, Max has started helping the band increase reach, and now there’s demand for live performances. Up until now, there wasn’t a need for a booking agent because the band was publishing their music online.

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This equation doesn’t always work out, though. Max has seen the opposite can be true, too: some acts have a massive following on social media, but nobody rocks up for the live shows. In the end, ticket sales is the true measure of an artist’s following, and this is where a booking agent can help artists really succeed.

Check out how IMN booking agency manages over 1,000 shows per year using SystemOne.

Do indie artists need managers?

Another question that comes up is whether independent or self-publishing artists need managers. So many artists choose to publish their work independently with music distributors or aggregators. These artists usually pride themselves on taking on the music industry on their own terms, with their own resources, and producing their own records. How, if at all, could a manager help these acts while still maintaining their ethos?

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Fast forward to today, and we're living in a time where artists have more resources than ever. We’re seeing AI tools popping up out of the ground like mushrooms and independent distributors who make recording and distributing quite easy to access. This means artists are more discoverable across the globe, which is fantastic. But it also comes with challenges, as the music scene is flooded with every musician and their cat.

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This is especially true in niche markets like metal, where Max predominantly works. “It’s about who you know, and in metal, it’s just a handful of people,” Max says. While he still works with record labels, he sees many metal bands handling recording themselves and using a distributor. Apart from a small cut for management, the rest is independent and goes straight to their revenue. This seems to be more profitable than signing away their percentages for a lifetime to record labels.

“It’s quite tough to break through without the network as an indie artist, but it’s possible,” Max says.

Becoming a booking agent

You should now have a thorough understanding of the differences, overlap, and collaboration between artist managers and booking agents. Artist managers like Max are involved in every aspect of the artist’s career, while a booking agent specializes in booking and planning live shows.

If live performance makes your world go round and you’d love to work with venues and festival promoters, then booking is for you. Learn more about becoming a booking agent and what it entails.