A – Who you pick to be on your professional team, and especially your manager, can set your career on fire or guarantee you a place on the next You’re A Star! No artist likes having to deal with the business side of things, but it’s your career, and if you pick the right people now you can literally set your life on automatic pilot and only have to check up on it periodically. I honestly believe that at the start, music as a career is not a business in the normal sense of the word. You’re more concerned about being true to yourself than being true to your bank manager.
Your goals and bottom lines are to do with the quality and sound of your record, they’re not about profit margins and controlling overheads. So although not a business in the usual sense, I firmly believe that music as a career must still be managed as a business. Although most artists would rather ignore business matters, like the rest of us, they have a built-in radar that tells them when something is wrong. So if you’re feeling weird about something, then usually you have a problem. Ignoring the issue won’t help, so you must deal with the problem head on.
Nevertheless, it is a vital part of your manager’s job to hype you to everyone he meets and at every chance he gets. In your case it seems he’s overdoing this or you’re just uncomfortable with his way of doing this. This is a classic case of non-communication and I urge you to sit down with your manager and get your concerns out in the open.
Hopefully he’ll understand where you’re coming from because he cannot manage your career effectively if he’s getting something as basic as this wrong. No one enjoys confrontation, but for your manager (or any other member of your team) to do his job properly there must open communication between you. He must understand your goals, your music, the image you wish to project, and you must understand and agree with how he intends to achieve success for you.
If you can’t bring yourself to do sit down and hash this out with him, get someone who can do it on your behalf. But I think it is always best to sit down face-to-face. The last thing you want to do is let small things snowball into major issues and then possibly confrontational issues, and it does seem that the situation with your manager is rapidly becoming a confrontational issue.
When you’ve sat down and discussed things, hopefully you’ll have reached agreement on how to move forward, but if not, then a change in your management may be necessary. If talk doesn’t resolve your problems then you must make changes. Like all the people who work for you and with you, such as accountants, lawyers, agents etc. your manager is simply the hired help and can be changed if the need arises. Just make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons. Loyalty is very admirable but it should never be blind and it should be a two-way thing. Losing confidence in someone, whether for the right reason or the wrong reason, is like falling out of love, it’s very difficult to fall back in again.