Welcome to The Manager’s Playbook, my personal newsletter where I share weekly insights for aspiring artists, emerging music managers and executives on how to navigate the music industry, by Ruiz.

Note: For any links that are behind a paywall, copy the URL and paste it into this paywall ladder to read the article without any issues.

Ruiz Note:

“To Change Ourselves Effectively, We First Had To Change Our Perceptions”

Today, I have the great fortune to introduce you to an absolute Canadian Legend, Chip Sutherland. This is a man who has been very pivotal in shaping the foundation of my career and that of so many others today.

He’s an artist manager (Feist, Sloan) and lawyer (clients in abundance). He was recently honoured at a Canadian Award Show earlier this year for his contributions to the Canadian Music Industry.

He’s not an easy man to get a hold of. Most people didn’t even know what he looked like.

There’s folklore surrounding his aura.

However when he shows up, he shows up big. And that he did for us at The Manager’s Playbook. Truly an honour.

You may have never heard of him, but if you’re Canadian, and you’re operating in this business, he’s had an impact on your career.

For starters, he wrote the Canadian Edition of ‘All You Need To Know About The Music Business’ with the great Donald Passman. He also created the Canadian Starmaker Fund which has contributed 170 million dollars in funding to support Canadian musicians!

Like I said, he’s had an impact.

Below you can read excerpts from my conversation with Chip Sutherland from ‘The Manager’s Playbook’ Podcast. The full Podcast will go live 10am pt/1pm et next Tuesday July 30th!

Remember to SUBSCRIBE to the channel for all your music business insights!

-Ruiz

KEY PLAYS 
(FEAT. CHIP SUTHERLAND)

My Conversation with Chip Sutherland

Ruiz: How do you balance management and being a lawyer?

Chip: Well, the only tricky part is, of course, you never – Number one, I have no management contracts. You know, 35 years, I've never had a management contract.

Ruiz: That's important for people to know.

Chip: Yeah. I mean, and you know what? Most of the big managers, they don't.

If you're worried about locking an artist down with some piece of paper, it's the wrong artist for you.

I'm not saying it shouldn't be very clear how you're going to be paid, but having an agreement of, like, I'm going to get 20% of your net touring profits, let's say, you know, whatever, 20% of your net recording after recording costs or are taken off, whatever your profit is, you know. Let's just use that as an example, and the artist knows that's what it is, and when you do the accounting, you know, whatever, twice a year, whenever quarterly, whenever you like to do it, you show them the accounting. Here's the money you made. Here's my commission on that. And this is what I'm getting paid by the business manager. Okay, great.

That's the agreement. The agreement is the understanding I'm going to work for you. This is the formula on which I'm going to get paid. But the piece of paper is just useless. If it's just what percentage of what do I get paid, you know? Well, that's just one piece of paper. It's barely three sentences, so what's the agreement for?

Ruiz: Yeah. It’s pretty easy to remember too.

Chip: Yeah, and the term, you know, it's the other thing. I mean, now we're getting into sort of details, but go on deep dive now. Inside baseball. You know the term is another problem. These are the management deals I see and they’re like five-year terms.

And if you hired an accountant to do your taxes, the accountant doesn't get to say, “Okay, I'll do your taxes, but only if you're hiring me for five years.” If you’re going to hire a lawyer to maybe do one of your house transactions, do a will, like, “Okay, I'll do it, but only if I'm your lawyer for five years”? You just hire them to do the work, and they do the work, and they get paid by the hour, and you pay them, and then if you want to use a different accountant, you just use a different accountant.

So is management a professional service or is it some kind of like business equity? Which a lot of managers think like you know, we're in business. That's why a lot of managers own a piece of the label of their own artist.

You know, Sloan has their own label. I never owned it. Never owned anything. That was the rarity. They owned 100% of their label because it never would have even occurred to me because I had started as their lawyer. I'm like, well, the best thing for you is that you own it, so as your lawyer, because you're asking me the questions, how do you define the lawyer, the manager, well easy, if you're doing that then it's a lawyer first. If you feel a conflict creeping in like, if you feel like “oh wait, my interests conflict here.” Like if I had wanted to own a piece of their label, then I would have had to send them to another lawyer, and go, “Okay, well, you know, we're going to have to negotiate this.” So, we’re going “I'm going to send you back to another lawyer.”

Ruiz: But you knew that that wasn't in their best interest if you sent them to another lawyer.

Chip: Right. I knew that if I was that other lawyer, I would tell me “No.” So, I didn't even ask. It never even occurred to me, to be honest.

Ruiz: What is the first thing that an artist should be putting in place? You know, when they're getting into this world.

Chip: You know, finance, honestly. The sooner you start understanding your money and your cash flow, like getting a good accountant.

Even the smallest band, understanding like, for Canadian acts, it's like get an HST number. How does HST work? What can I write off? What can't I in my little personal business? What about court? Because that's just that's a little microcosm of your business.

You know, you don't have to learn to read a balance sheet or anything, but you just need to know how to balance your check book. And, you know, have a relationship with an accountant.

So yeah, finance and you know, and then some kind of like marketing, booking help. Depends on the style of music of course, like if it's live based then you know, you want to have someone who can book your shows and someone who can help manage your money to start out with, so you keep track because so many times I see artists are so keen and they get opportunities out there on their spend. They're not really ready for like, “Oh my God, how much does that cost?” You know, it's like “Wow,” and then they find themselves sort of piling on the debt.

Ruiz: In 2013, you wrote Canadian edition, coauthored it, All You Need to Know About the Music Business with Donald Passman. If you haven't had a chance to read that book, I don't know what you're doing. If you're in this music business, you absolutely have to read it. Pivotal. Are you doing a second edition?

Chip: No, and it kills me because it was a such a fun project, and we had such a good time. And Don, he's just like, you know, of course, he's like my hero.

It’s like Wayne Gretzky calling you up. “Do you want to go take shots?”

Like when he called me to say, “Hey,” he'd call me because he had to do a lecture in Montreal, and he was like, “Is there anything I need to know?” I was like, “Holy Jesus, there's a lot you need to know if you're walking into Quebec. It's a whole different world, how it's structured and everything.” And we had a really good chat about it and he decided not to do it. I felt bad because I basically talked him out of it. He was like, “Oh shit, that sounds like a lot of work. I'm not doing that.”

Anyways, it came up, he called me and said, “You know, we've done this British edition.” Would I want to do it? I'm like, you know, it's Wayne Gretzky saying, “Hey, want to come to my backyard pond and take shots?” Like, “Yes, sure, dude.” So, the way it was structured, I wrote at the end of each of his chapters, we had a little Canadian flag. So he's writing, and then rather than interspersing, it'd be too difficult, and then I wrote the little kind of commentary of like, well, here's how that works in Canada. Sort of the same, but not quite the same. And so it was super fun. We had a great time doing it. You know, it's just awesome. What an experience to get to sit in his office and just shoot the shit, you know?

Ruiz: That actually leads me to my last question here that I ask every guest that I'm with. And if there's books that they could recommend to somebody to read, whether it's in the music business or not, what would they recommend? I think we've covered one book. Maybe we can say two for you. What are two books that you would recommend?

Chip: That's a good one. I think, really, you should read the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey because it's just a good approach to everything. It's a timeless kind of advice. The self-help book before really was something called self-help. It's really a philosophy book, so don't be fooled by the cover and the marketing. It's philosophy.

Ruiz: Yeah. I read that when I was like 21, but I read like 20 pages. I was like, I'm not ready for this. I'm not ready to face this human being yet, but I revisited it again and it was a phenomenal book.

Chip: Yeah. So you know, for just working in business especially a really personal business like this is, he has all these habits of people like, try first to understand before seeking to be understood. Like, understand what someone’s saying to you before you start trying to push your opinion on them. You know, there's just stuff like that which is just timeless advice. Anyways, that's just sort of human being advice.

And then probably read Hit Men, which is the book all about payola and that. It's not that it's relevant anymore necessarily, but it's just a great insight into the history of the music business, and it kind of gives you some context. Take some of the mystery, like it's a little bit of the secret sauce of the music industry because a lot of the principles, like the record deals are still based on stuff that happened here back then. So that would be my other. If you can't find my book, read Don's book, of course.

PAY ATTENTION

Mick Management = World Building

Jonathan Eshak (broski to Justin Eshak who is Co-CEO at Island Records) and his business partner Michael McDonald deep dive on their approach to modern management.

*sidenote: Paywall later life so make sure to click HERE and insert the link of the article to read.

How The Spotify Music Discovery Algorithm Works!

Streaming music is easy. Understanding how to get discovered on these DSP’s is not. Read the blog post for some free game to get a better understanding how it can work to you/your artist advantage.

Circle Your Calendar

Be in the know.

Have a look at what’s happening across the globe for music industry related events for the rest of the year + a few for top of 2025.

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You tap in yet for the insights?

Bio

I’m Mauricio Ruiz, the Founder/CEO of 8 Til Faint, an Artist Management company with over 5 billion audio streams worldwide. Our past and current clients include Grammy nominated, Juno Award winning multi-instrumentalist and singer/songwriter Jessie Reyez, Marley Bleu, Skratch Bastid and more. I am also the Co-Founder of Mad Ruk Entertainment, a content agency with over 3 billion long form video streams worldwide. Our client list includes The Weeknd, Eminem, and Celine Dion, along with renowned brands like Nike, Pernod Ricard, Canon, and the NBA.

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