Every act wants to reach the top of the charts – even if they say they’re only in music for the fun and the art of it. Having an album reach number one can mean the difference between being admired and being adored. So how does getting to the top spot work? Can you do it on your own? Do you need a group of people to get you there or do you need just one other person: a manager who knows how to clear the hurdles and win the race?
“The deeper I went,” says Michael Mary Murphy, the author of the recently published Pop Music Management: Lessons from the Managers of Number One Albums, “the more I realised the only thing that unites all of the good managers is that they care. The foundation of management – and the question people should be asking whether they’re in the bank or in school, and certainly if they’re an artist or football player – is this: does your manager care?”
When he was working in the music industry in London and New York, Murphy came to regard Jon Landau, Bruce Springsteen’s manager, as ideal in this respect. Landau “is there, pretty much, at every gig. He is the last person Bruce sees as he walks on stage and the first person he sees when he walks off. More and more, upper-echelon artists want eye-to-eye contact with their manager at every gig. They want everything sorted.”
Contemporary music management, according to Murphy, took shape in the early 1960s when Brian Epstein saw The Beatles play at Liverpool’s dank Cavern Club. Remarkably, they were his first act. “Epstein’s genius is that he’s from outside the industry. He’s a product guy from a family of entrepreneurs, but he is the definition of care. He loved his band and quickly realised they could write great pop songs, so he forced record labels to step back from looking for people who would churn out songs.
“He thought his guys were good enough to be their own mini Brill Building,” Murphy says, referring to the New York hit factory where professional songwriters helped to create the soundtrack of the 1960s, “and he was going to protect them from anyone who said they weren’t good enough.”
Epstein isn’t just the benchmark. “He was so brilliant and so revolutionary that we’re still living and working in the industry he created.”
Other managers developed an equally useful set of skills, Murphy says. One was Arlyne Rothberg, the first woman manager to help a client – in this case the American singer-songwriter Carly Simon – to the top spot.
In the late 1960s Rothberg was in charge of the entertainment bookings for Hugh Hefner’s 19 Playboy clubs around the United States. She was introduced to Simon in the early 1970s. By 1972 she had guided the singer to the top of the Billboard album chart, with No Secrets.
“Songwriters are often very sensitive souls, so they need protection, a sense of security,” Murphy says. “You can’t force them to write hit after hit, even though their record label would love that.”
Simon writes in Boys in the Trees, her autobiography, that Rothberg was the best manager and the best friend anyone could have. “She’s not out to make money with me at all. She really believed in my talent and wanted me to do whatever I could in the most comfortable and best circumstances available. I don’t think a man would be able to do that.”
“History does something really interesting to women,” says Murphy, who teaches entrepreneurship and the music industry at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology, in Dún Laoghaire., “It forgets them and pushes them out. Rothberg was astonishing in that she broke a barrier, yet it wasn’t even acknowledged, which is something that makes the history of the music industry suspect. It means that the stories about the great managers, well, maybe some weren’t that great. Maybe they were just the guys who got the publicity.”
There are now more women managers, more women record-company chief executives and more women in the industry from the ground up, he says. More women artists are also centrally involved in every important decision of their career, which isn’t how it always used to be.
“Taylor Swift would be the premier example,” Murphy says. “Her management firm is a thoroughly protected company, run partially by her parents, but the singer takes a hands-on approach. In 2023 the journalist Ashley King described how Swift ‘is known for keeping her circle tight and her business close. Swift typically takes an active role in her business activities rather than delegating them.’
“Swift’s well-developed management process was capable of protecting not only her artistic integrity but also delivering large profits. This has been proven time and time again, most recently when her Eras tour became the first in history to generate more than $1 billion in revenue,” says Murphy. “Anyone who wants to be a successful manager should be studying her, as well as Beyoncé and Madonna.”
Caroline Downey, Hozier’s manager, is the first Irish woman to take her client to the top of the Billboard charts, with Wasteland, Baby!, his 2019 album. “And Hozier is her first client, so how that developed should be studied as a great example.”
A textbook case of how to get an act to number one happens to be Irish. Under the management of Paul McGuinness, U2 topped the Billboard album chart seven times, from The Joshua Tree, their 1987 album, to No Line on the Horizon, from 2009.
“Paul McGuinness is very much Ireland’s Brian Epstein. Both had a sense of sophistication that their bands admired, and they viewed film, the visual experience, as a way to make their bands iconic. Also, both of them stayed away from the artistic side of things; their role was strictly business.”
For Murphy, whose previous books include Sounds Irish, Acts Global: Explaining the Success of Ireland’s Popular Music Industry (co-written with Jim Rogers), a key element of U2’s initial success was down to everyone involved stretching resources as far as they would go.
“The wives, and future wives, of U2 and their management were crucial in their early development. McGuinness was married to Kathy Gilfillan, who supported him financially to some extent. Bono, meanwhile, in the official U2 account, recalls how in April 1979 he travelled to London in an attempt to attract media interest; he was accompanied by his girlfriend – later his wife – who funded the couple’s trip.
“Before U2 signed a record deal, as they were prepping a UK tour, one London publisher offered the band a deal for around £3,000. In return the publisher would acquire the rights to some of U2’s songwriting earnings for decades. With UK concerts booked, and having invited other key London tastemakers and music-industry people, the band frantically searched for alternative ways to fund the tour.
“McGuinness borrowed some money from his film colleagues Seamus Byrne and Tiernan MacBride, while the remainder was borrowed from the band members’ parents. The ability to access funds without dealing with the London publisher probably saved the band millions of pounds.”
McGuinness also hired a string of brilliant women, Murphy points out. “U2’s management team has always been overwhelmingly female. This prevented their image and self-presentation from ever becoming too overtly masculine.
“U2’s management approach closely resembles that of the Tamla Motown record label: appoint very smart, motivated women to key positions. The US music journalist Lisa Robinson wrote in Vanity Fair that the U2 management team was ‘an organisation staffed mostly by women known for efficiency and good manners in a nasty, nasty business’.
“Over the years the management team has included Sheila Roche, who rose to become the MD of Principle Management” – McGuinness’s company – “in the US. In 1983 McGuinness hired his first management assistant, Anne-Louise Kelly. She was later promoted to the position of MD of Principle Management in Ireland. By 1984 Ellen Darst was heading up the band’s management operations in the US.
“U2 have also appointed women to key roles in their stage and visual presentation. Sharon Blankson has been a crucial part of this in terms of the band’s styling, and Cathy Owens has directed some of the band’s most impressive visual and film work. Both Blankson and Owens were pivotal in Dublin’s punk and postpunk scene from 1977 to 1984.
“It is almost unique in the music industry for women to hold the majority in a management organisation of U2’s size, but their success proves that women make a difference,” Murphy says.
“Epstein’s interpretation of his managerial job was to ensure his band had everything they needed to write, record and tour. Effectively, nothing else mattered. McGuinness had a similar approach – and he took a band from a small country and made them one of the greatest touring operations in history.”
Pop Music Management: Lessons from the Managers of Number One Albums, by Michael Mary Murphy, is published by Routledge
