One of the biggest reasons that DIY (Do it yourself) will not work is when I look back on all the times I have to save artists from making total asses of themselves.

Most of the situations are about that the artist doesn’t understand what is reasonable or not. Also, what is polite or not. The reason is mainly that they are rookies and not experienced in these things. Of course, as they grow bigger they get better to read the situation. The problem if they had done those mistakes they would never get that far.

Here are some of these situations that were close to disaster.

One band that we signed to a label wanted on the first meeting with the boss yell at him because they wouldn’t get to play on the company kick off. The thing was that they were signed two weeks before the event and the spots were already taken by far bigger bands on the label. Took me two hours to get them to understand not to even talk about it. My guess would have been that the band had been dropped if you start your first meeting with the crew by telling them that they are doing a bad job before you even start.

One I managed to see the rider the band was supposed to send into a festival we just managed by a really hard struggle to get into. Gene Simmons in Kiss had been jealous of that rider. After all this festival owned several other festivals so make these requirements would them laugh and probably not book them again,to the other festivals.

In one case a band needed money for a video. Their budget was bigger than the biggest video shoot in Sweden that year. And this should be put on an artist that just releasing their first album. There was no way they even get 10% out of that budget so this would just have been a disaster. Of course, we had to make another budget and another strategy.

In many cases, the industry is never forgiving and making stupid mistakes over nothing can be very costly. One artist that was recommended to us by her manager was very unpolite against what she thought was my “girlfriend”. Of course, that “girlfriend” was the boss of the company and she never forgave that and the signing went off even how talented the girl was.
Another band was arguing around a clause in the contract that you couldn’t change (and had to be there to make the contract correct).  Their stubbornness just made us walk away. When they understood that they came back with another offer, but the damage was already done there was no point to work with this band.
One band, we discovered two days before we released their debut album that they had taken the promo copy that we gave them for press and sent them to other labels to get a better deal. All PR for that band was just stopped and no money was spent on them.

Yes, what ever not kills you gets you stronger. The problem here is that this kills your career. And what we expect is that a DIY artist should just have the same experience as a person that has worked with it for 20 years is just stupid.