“So, do you think I’m good enough to make it?”: The Scope of Duty in the Representation of Musicians

He’s twenty years old, oozes confidence and hipness and coolness and lots of other ‘nesses that haven’t been made up yet. He’s a musician. His demo tape is ridiculous. Everything about him promises multiple revenue streams, if the public ever gets the chance to react to him.

He’s forty-three years old. Two-hundred twenty-three pounds. Five foot four inches tall. He’s a musician. His demo tape is rough. It’s not rough; it’s scary.

You are a lawyer. Both of them visit your office within a few hours of each other. Both agree to pay your $5,000.00 retainer to perform work on various issues related to their careers in music. One of them asks you to shop the demo to major and indie labels at an hourly rate. The other only wants you to do copyright, trademark, contract and general business work. You are a musician, too. And you know, with reasonable certainty, that the hip twenty year old has the potential to go somewhere. You also know with equal certainty that the forty-three year old does not. If you take the forty-three year old on as a client, do you have a duty to tell him what you think about his talent and the odds of achieving his dreams of success? Should you listen to the demo tape before cashing the retainer check? Or is the talent level or your opinion irrelevant? Suppose later on the forty-three year old asks you to leverage your hard-earned major label connections to shop his scary demo. Do you risk your rep with your label folks? If not, what do you tell the client, if you’ve already billed $3,000.00 worth of work? “I thought it was okay to charge you a lot of money to set up a career that I knew was never going to amount to anything.”

Or, as my friend RJon Robins mentions in his comment on my previous post, suppose you’re a manager or other professional entertainment industry advisor? Are you duty-bound to advise the old guy that he’s not going anywhere? Or do you just perform the tasks that are requested, take the money and let the chips fall where they may, keeping in mind, of course, that Kenny G has sold a lot of records.

My thought is if the client only hires me to perform certain tasks related to setting up business structures for furthering her career and protecting her intellectual property, then whether she can sing or play is irrelevant to me. If a client is a plumber and I perform legal work related to his business, I don’t render an opinion on his ability to work on toilets and, thus, the prospects for his career, before I do the requested tasks.

I have encountered this as a producer, actually fairly often. Someone hires me to produce his project and along the way, asks me whether I think his music is any good. If I say “no,” maybe he doesn’t finish his project with me and looks for a producer who will “believe” in him. As a result, since I don’t want to lose the business, I learn to tap dance. And the really perceptive client will tell me that I have no future in tap dancing.

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