In this episode, Chris is joined by multi-award-winning music agent Emma Banks.
As the co-head of Creative Artists Agency’s London office, Emma is the representative for the world’s leading musicians, including ‘Red Hot Chili Peppers’, ‘Florence + the Machine’, ‘Katy Perry’, ‘System of a Down’, ‘Muse’, ‘Kraftwerk’ and many more. She is the recipient of the highly prestigious Music Industry Trusts Award for her contributions to the music industry, a nine-time winner of Pollstar’s UK Agent of the Year Award, and was honoured twice by the UK’s Woman of the Year Awards for the Music Industry.
In this conversation, Emma reflects on her journey and reveals how she got involved in promoting shows during her time in the RAGS society at Reading University, where she found her passion for live gigs and the business element of music — eventually leading to her career as a music agent even though she did not initially like agents.
The discussion moves on to how the business of being a music agent changed in the 2000s as American agencies began to expand their books globally and how this pushed Emma to accept an invitation to start the London office for Creative Artists Agency in 2006. Emma reveals her working relationship with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and describes how she came to be their agent outside of the US and Canada.
Together they also discuss the differences and similarities between being an agent and a manager, and Emma explains why she wouldn’t like to become a manager. She touches upon what it is like working with high-calibre artists such as ‘Florence + the Machine,’ ‘Lorde,’ and ‘Katy Perry.’ She shares how Katy Perry built her career through playing live shows and why this sets her apart from other pop artists.
In this episode we discuss:
– Managing the world’s biggest music artists
– Red Hot Chili Peppers
– Katy Perry
– The change in the 2000s
