In this introductory talk, Wendy Day outlines the essential components of building a professional support team for independent musicians. She lists the core roles—lawyer, accountant, manager, publicist, booking agent, social‑media specialist, and videographer—and explains why each is critical as an artist’s career scales beyond DIY efforts. Day stresses that a team can only be hired once the artist generates sufficient income, noting typical compensation structures (e.g., managers take 15‑20% of entertainment revenue). She argues that attracting experienced industry professionals requires visible momentum: growing streaming numbers, fan engagement, and a clear personal brand. Goal clarity is presented as the first step in any client conversation; without internal, self‑driven objectives, external goals lack traction. Using a childhood toy metaphor, Day illustrates the music business’s cyclical setbacks and the necessity of resilience—getting back up with equal or greater enthusiasm after each knock‑down. Finally, she emphasizes leadership qualities—respectful communication, gratitude, and genuine belief in the team’s members—as the foundation for a cohesive, motivated crew, urging artists to study leadership and influence literature to become effective team leaders.
Chapters
Hi guys, Wendy Day here from Rap Coalition. So today is one of my favorite topics, and I want to talk to you about putting together, um, a really strong team. And, um, I'm going to talk about it like in general, the overview, and then I'm gonna go through it, um, in the next couple of days discussing each person's role, how you find them, um, how to put your team to— like, how to assemble your team. But today I just want to do the overview of how to put together a strong team. And your team consists of a lawyer, an accountant, a manager, a publicist, a booking agent, a social media guru. And I think we should add, um, videographer, like somebody to collect content, because content is so important today that you almost need to have somebody with you like at all times so that you pretty much film your whole life. Like, it's like living out loud, right? Um, but your team is going to come along at a time when you can no longer do this yourself. And most of you do this yourself now, so you understand how much work it is and how difficult it is. But it's going to get to a point where you're not going to be able to handle all of this yourself from um, you know, designing and implementing the merchandise and booking the shows and putting together your plan, negotiating contracts with sponsors and, um, um, publishers, and, um, getting all of your content together, knowing what's going to drop on what day and setting it up so that it drops in an orderly fashion, um, getting blogs to write about you, uh, what else, um, that's pretty much it. At some point you're going to need to have a team of people around you, and in order to have a team of people around you, you're going to need to have some income coming in in order to pay these people. Like for example, a manager gets paid 15 to 20% of your entertainment income, so If you're not making any money and you want to attract a great manager— and by a great manager, I mean somebody that has experience and that does this for a living, um, somebody that has the connections to help you get to the next level— you're already struggling. That's where you are now. You are, you are the mayor of Struggle Town right now. So you want to be in a situation where you can attract people that can help get you to the next level so that you can get rid of some of the struggle in your life, so that you don't have to keep doing all of this yourself. And one of the ways that you attract a great team is you show that you've got movement forward. Nobody wants to become part of a team where there's no movement and no excitement and where nobody else is involved. So you can't just wake up on a Monday and say, okay, I'm going to be a rapper, and then on Wednesday expect to attract a team. It's just not realistic. You might be able to enlist your friends who love you as a human being to become part of your team, but you're not going to really be able to attract people that are already in the music industry that have value and that are already doing this for a living. And in a perfect world, that's what you want. You want somebody that's got a track record of success so that they can help catapult you to the next level. But in order to do so, you need to be moving around. You need to have your numbers building. Um, you need to have your views building with real fans. You want to have your Spotify and your Apple numbers in terms of streams and in terms of people that are subscribing to your, um, to your Spotify channel or following you on Spotify and Apple. You want those numbers to be increasing as well. And you want to have a pretty solid idea of who you are and what your image is and what your goals are. You know, the first thing that, that I ask when I sit down with a potential client, the very first thing that I ask is, what are your goals? Because if you don't know where you're going and what your destination is, I'm not sure how to get you there. I can tell you what I think your goal should be, but you're probably not gonna work as hard on goals that somebody assigns to you as you are on goals that are inside of you and driving you and pushing you forward every day. You know, the music industry is very much like a bitch who doesn't love you back, or a man who doesn't love you back. It's, it's sometimes thankless. It's sometimes going on in the face of adversity. It's sometimes picking yourself back up after you get knocked down. It kind of reminds me, like, when I was a kid, I had this, um, plastic blow-up toy and it was a clown, and it had some sort of a weight in the bottom, and it was about my height, maybe a little taller than me because I was pretty little. And I would punch it in the nose and it would lay down, and then it would spring back up, and then I'd pop it again and it would lay down and spring back up. And sometimes I feel like The music business is doing that to me, like I'm the clown that gets knocked down that has to spring back up. And my goal in life with any struggle and any adversity is to get back up. So anytime something knocks me down, I want to fully recover from it and get back up. And I want to get back up with the same enthusiasm and motivation that I had before I got knocked down, if not even more. And then the last thing I'm going to say about building a team is you've really got to learn how to treat people. You've got to learn how to communicate with people. You've got to learn how to be grateful and say thank you. And I know that I've covered this before in one of my really early videos, but I can't stress this enough because people go hard for people they like. So if you're surrounded by a team of people that believe in you, and they're just there because they want to make a buck. That is so different and so inferior from being surrounded by a team of people that believe in you and love you and really want to see you win. It's just such a different vibe. And if you can treat people with respect and you are a good human being and you can convey that to the people around you and you can inspire them and lead them as a leader to get to the next level and to help you get to the next level, you will get there faster, you will get there stronger, and you will have a more solid foundation on which to build your career. So in, in saying all that, and, and I know a lot of this comes back to me telling you guys to go do the research, but go read some books on leadership and go read some books on how to, um, influence people and inspire people because that's what you need to do as a team leader. And they work for you. When you put a team together, they all work for you. And this also means that if you've got
