Owen Husney: artist, manager, promoter

Why modern record companies invite mediocrity 

Owen Husney is an artist manager from Minneapolis. He was the first manager Prince hired, and was responsible for getting him a precedent-setting contract with Warner Brothers that gave Prince nearly complete creative control. In an interview at the website Artist House Music, he talked about his experience with Prince and the state of artist development in the industry.

“The biggest problem today is the lack of development of artists,” he says. He blames the state of the industry and the lack of people at the label willing to go to bat for their artists, stick their necks out, and get the artist the support they need. One of the reasons he gives is the lack of development and support within the record companies. He says that A&R people are not being developed. If they sign an act that fails, they are fired.

Husney suggests that artists need people who are passionate about their music. Warner Brothers signed Prince at the age of 17 chiefly because a senior vice president went in to management and told them that he would quit if they didn’t sign this promising young man. They signed Prince. “There’s no one who will do that these days,” he says.

When bands are not developed, he says, you wind up with a “McDonald’s atmosphere” and bands that would “…never leave their mark on this earth.” He won’t name names; he says we all know who they are.

The music gets played on the radio, but only because PR people are paying the stations to play them. He acknowledges that his opinion may not be popular, but in his day, people were more concerned about the development of the artist and less concerned about the numbers. The result was better music, music that mattered. Husney is a musician himself, which may have colored his opinion somewhat.

Still, his advice to up and coming artists remains solid: build your fan base and develop yourself. The market is simply too expensive for record companies to take chances. In the current environment, musicians must do the initial work that record companies used to do because record labels cannot take the same risks they used to take.

“That’s why people are complaining about music these days, for the most part,” says Husney.