MBW’s World’s Greatest Managers series profiles the best artist managers in the global business. Mark Beaven is a pioneer in the world of songwriter and producer management, and continues to work with a roster that is behind some of the biggest hits of recent years. World’s Greatest Managers is supported by Centtrip, a specialist in intelligent treasury, payments and foreign exchange – created with the music industry and its needs in mind.
What do Nevermind, Appetite For Destruction, Ray Of Light, 1989, Back To Black and Purple Rain all have in common?
They’re all hugely successful albums that had a massive impact on wider pop culture, of course. But the hidden link between these – and many, many other – landmark records is that they were all shaped in some way by clients of Mark Beaven and Andrew Kipnes’ AAM producer and songwriter management company.
“We’re the people behind the people, behind the people,” laughs Beaven. “It means we really are in the middle of a lot of music creation.
“We’ve been blessed to work on so many different things that have not just connected inside the music space, but also shifted culture. When you see something go from the germination of a scene to really transforming the landscape and defining culture for a very long time, that’s fun!”
And Beaven has certainly had a lot of fun along the way. He started his career in New York City, running independent import record store Bonaparte by day and DJ-ing at clubs such as The Mudd Club and Danceteria at night. His dual role helped him build an artist and industry network like no other, while knowing exactly which records were connecting with the underground.
And so Advanced Alternative Media was born in 1982, initially as a marketing company to be a “bridge between what was cool, what should be commercial within that, and the community that can help tell that story”.
The first few years were tough. “The first five years of the company, we were going out of business every day,” says Beaven. “We’d have rice for dinner and rice for lunch, but it was fun. To get to eat was a miracle. So, if people took us out for a meal, they got a miracle. The rule is, three miracles and you can become a saint – we were like the sainthood!”
Before too long, AAM didn’t have to worry about lunch: it was employed by most of the big labels, working on everything from The Smiths and The Cure to Prince and Madonna and Nirvana and Radiohead. But the company really found its raison d’etre when production duo Steve Thompson and Michael Barbiero – who have worked on such landmarks as Guns N’Roses’ Appetite For Destruction and Metallica’s …And Justice For All, asked if they would manage them.
Back then, not many producers or songwriters had management, and AAM helped establish a new sector, earning a reputation for improving deals and boosting creator rights along the way.
Decades on, many of AAM’s early clients remain with the company, which stood by Dr Luke during his long-running legal dispute with Kesha, which was finally settled in 2023 (“We’re in an era where a lot of wrongs of the past are being addressed and hopefully we’re coming to a better framework of interpersonal working,” says Beaven. “But if I didn’t believe in his innocence, I would not have stayed”).
And, despite vastly increased competition, AAM remains the producer/songwriter management sector’s pacesetter, with 55 nominations for its clients – which include the likes of Greg Wells, Justin Tranter and Sarah Hudson – at this year’s Grammys.
Meanwhile, Beaven’s own contribution to the industry was recognized at last week’s MUSEXPO conference in Los Angeles, where he picked up the Lifetime Achievement Award.
Ahead of that honor, Beaven sat down with MBW in LA to talk Nirvana, negotiation, competition, and why songwriters still need better compensation for their work…
HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE WINNING THE MUSEXPO LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD?
I keep telling them they’ve got to give me a half-lifetime award, because I still have a lot more to do!
My partner and I have been doing this for so many years, it’s been an incredible journey, I’ve got to work with so many incredible people and artists. I love music, so being able to work with things I’m passionate about, work with people who are incredibly talented and be part of that journey for them, it’s been an honor.
YOU AND YOUR CLIENTS HAVE BEEN INVOLVED IN SOME KEY MOMENTS IN MUSIC HISTORY. DID YOU KNOW THEY WOULD BE SO SIGNIFICANT AT THE TIME?
I’ve been fortunate that, when I hear something that is pivotal and exceptional, I’ve usually been able to spot that.
The first time I heard Nevermind it was like, of course, this is insane. You don’t really understand the scale of change it can bring, but you’re like, ‘This is different, it’s its own thing, it’s so good that it’ll do well, people will come to it, it’ll make change’.
“I’ve been fortunate that, when I hear something that is pivotal and exceptional, I’ve usually been able to spot that.”
We marketed a lot of the earlier Radiohead records, and when you’re hearing that, you were like, ‘OK, nothing like it, genius’ – something so consistently exceptional has its own gravity and brings people to it. It’s always fascinating with outsider music, things that don’t fit in the current framework of pop music. Look at Oasis, when that came out, globally – boom! Where did that come from?
BUT DIDN’T EVEN NIRVANA’S LABEL HAVE LOW EXPECTATIONS FOR NEVERMIND?
Yeah. I had a phone call from John Silva: ‘Mark, we just signed to Geffen, they’re a great band, they’ve sold 10-12,000 records so far, we hope we sell 80,000 records and that they can tour and quit their day jobs’.
He asked if [renowned mixer] Andy Wallace would consider doing the album for a fee that was 50% of his current fee, because at the time he was probably the top mixer in the business.
God bless Andy, he said yes, we worked it out between ourselves and everybody was really happy. And the record just continued to evolve through every stage of the process and become that much better. It was like a force of nature.
WHAT DID YOU LEARN ABOUT THE BUSINESS WHEN AAM WAS A MARKETING COMPANY?
Everybody knew what to do when a record got to a certain place, but very few people knew how to start a record – and we did.
You can look at charts but, at some point, music actually has to connect with people, they have to care about it. What really makes a difference is people actually playing something and people hearing it and liking it.
WHEN YOU MOVED INTO PRODUCER/SONGWRITER MANAGEMENT, DID YOU REALIZE YOU WERE PIONEERING A SECTOR?
It was good that we had a day job! There were a couple of people doing management back then, including Sandy Roberton, who probably was the first.
But early on we were one of the few companies that really specialized. And what wound up happening was, we came into something much like an artist manager in the sixties who was like, ‘Why is my artist only getting four points? Let’s change that…’
“IF YOU have a problem, you have somebody that’s not going to run from it, somebody who’s probably seen it before and will help land the plan safely.
As records grew bigger, it gave us leverage to create a more balanced dialog. If you’re dealing with us, you’re probably going to pay a little more, but you’re going to have somebody who stands with you through the entire journey, making sure it’s a great one. We hopefully never have a problem but when you do, you have somebody that’s not going to run from it, somebody who’s probably seen it before and will help land the plan safely and keep things moving.
You have to look at business as a long-term relationship. If somebody’s not where they were two years ago and they’re that much bigger, they’re going to get more, that’s just the way the world works.
We’ve always fought strongly for our clients getting appropriate compensation, at times when they often weren’t. But we’re not there to hurt people, we’re there to help people and we’ve done that throughout our career. At some point it stops being a fight and becomes more like business as normal.
HOW HAVE THINGS CHANGED SINCE YOU STARTED?
Music is communication, and communication has changed incredibly.
When we went to digital files, we freed up music from itself. In the prior framework, if you were on a record and it had a hit, you made money. Your song maybe wasn’t the one that really heavily commoditized the record, but you were talented enough to be on it.
Artists made more money because, if you wanted that one song to play once at home, you had to buy the physical product. You saw a cycle where developing artists could live off 50-75,000 sales plus publishing and touring, allowing them to make another record and develop their skills.
But now you have a ‘make it or break it’ situation. Then, 75,000 records would be $125,000 approximately – in its day, that was reasonable for a band to live on. Now, a million plays [earns] $5,000, so how many plays do you have to have, and does a developing artist ever get that?
We’ve gone from a model that both rewarded volume but also allowed development, now we don’t really have anything that rewards or allows development, only the most-consumed things.
SO WHERE DOES THAT LEAVE CREATORS TODAY?
What are the two things that drive the entire music business? A great song and a great artist. We all eat off the plates of those people, we’re dependent upon them.
“What are the two things that drive the entire music business? A great song and a great artist. We all eat off the plates of those people, we’re dependent upon them.”
If great artists or great songwriters feel they can’t make a living… What if someone like Kurt Cobain was not so enamoured of music, was seeing it as an impossibility to ever make a living and wound up doing something completely different? What a loss.
Because of the framework we have, there’s no lower class in music, there is very little, if any, middle class, it’s just the people who are exceptionally successful that can make a living. You routinely see people who are getting cuts and placements and sometimes even singles who are driving Uber.
AS A MANAGER, WHAT CAN YOU DO ABOUT THAT? ARE YOU SEEKING MASTER POINTS FOR WRITERS THESE DAYS?
In getting a client the most for the work they’ve done, you have to understand the chain of commerce and where money is taken away.
The first thing you hope to do is create the most efficient chain of commerce, work the best relationships to predispose your client to the best treatment within those chains of commerce.
Then you can look at how you redefine the framework and moments of compensation. When someone like Spotify sees an opportunity to redefine the framework of transaction – with people who are struggling to feed not their families even but themselves sometimes – taking what can be 20% of their overall earnings as a songwriter away really hurts.
You wind up always trying to find the right way to amplify those messages to people and what’s always been a shame, but is the nature of art, is that there are organizations that represent labels and publishers as a whole. Songwriters? Songwriters sometimes have trouble because personality often brings the ability to write, but they don’t all get along, they don’t all [join] the same organization and they can’t unionize.
With songwriters, in a conversation of commerce, you’re going up against Apple, Meta, Amazon, TikTok, YouTube etc. It’s not that they’re bad, it’s just they have their manifest destiny to run a business, and we often don’t have enough leverage at the table.
“going from 100 million songs to 10 billion doesn’t necessarily make any of them better, it likely waters down the amount of music we actually connect with.”
So, sometimes in a negotiation, rather than being a critic, you want to be an educator. You want to talk about [what it means] when people don’t view it as a viable occupation and it becomes a hobby. Or when we think we can just have AI generate a song.
We like music and artists because they connect with us – and going from 100 million songs to 10 billion doesn’t necessarily make any of them better, it likely waters down the amount of music we actually connect with.
We have a finite amount of time in our lives. We want to spend it with something we care about as much as we can.
YOU’VE BROKERED A NUMBER OF CATALOG SALES. HOW IMPORTANT ARE THOSE TO YOUR CLIENTS AT THE MOMENT?
When you look at the market, taxes and the cost of interest, what is a dollar today worth in 10 years? You can probably do more with it today, if you have any idea what you’re going to do with it, and make more than you would make by holding it.
But I never tell somebody they should or shouldn’t. I’m like, this is what it would do for you, these are the decisions you have to make, these are the determinants you would want to look at – so what do you want to do?
And then there’s the other thing – what’s it worth? As somebody that has bought wine and other things for years, you know if you get two people that are passionate about owning something, they will bid it up.
WHAT DO YOU LOOK FOR IN A CLIENT?
Skill, heart and belief they can do it. Every once in a while, you’ll run into somebody whose skill is so much greater than they understand, but maybe the belief they can do it or the ability to sell themselves hasn’t evolved yet.
Or sometimes you get somebody that’s just a consummate artist and you have to help them learn how to be a little better in a room, but the music is so powerful it speaks for itself.
At the end of the day, you want someone that’s transformative, that inspires you and makes music you care about.
HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THE INCREASED COMPETITION IN YOUR SECTOR?
There was always competition and there always will be competition, but there’s enough room for everybody.
I don’t view it as negative; it inspires, it challenges. The people that are ‘competitors’ are my peers, we work together.
If you focus on your clients, telling a great story and helping them find the greatest artists and make the best music, the world will solve the rest.
AND WHAT COMES NEXT AFTER A LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD?
We’re looking at building the company in many different ways right now. It’s such a moment of change that there are incredible opportunities.
You’re always sitting there playing with the Rubik’s Cube going, ‘We have all these parts, what are we doing with them to transform things?’ I want a second lifetime achievement award!
