How Music Manager Commission Actually Works (15% of What?)

A music manager takes a commission, usually fifteen to twenty percent, and that sounds simple until you ask the only question that matters: fifteen percent of what. Gross or net. All income or only income the manager helped create. Forever or only while they manage you. The answers to those questions are the whole deal, and artists who do not ask them end up handing over a share of money the manager had nothing to do with, sometimes for years after the manager is gone. The percentage is the easy part. The base and the terms are where you get burned.

I negotiate revenue splits across a portfolio, and the lesson is always the same: the rate is a distraction, the definition of the base is the deal.

Gross versus net: the difference that hurts

Most manager deals commission on gross income, not net. That means the manager takes their percentage off the top, before your expenses. So if you gross money on a tour but the tour barely breaks even after costs, the manager still gets their cut of the gross, and you can actually lose money on a run your manager profited from.

This is not necessarily wrong, it is standard, but you have to understand it. On low-margin activity like touring, a gross commission can mean the manager earns while you do not. Some deals carve out touring to a lower rate or a net basis for exactly this reason. Know which one you are signing, because the same gross figure can be a good deal or a terrible one depending on the margin underneath it.

What income should and should not be commissionable

Here is where artists lose real money. A manager should commission income they are involved in generating: deals they negotiate, opportunities they bring, the career they actively build. A manager should not automatically commission income streams that existed before them or that they have nothing to do with.

Watch for these:

• Publishing and songwriting income you earned before the manager existed
• Money from a record deal you signed before signing the manager
• Passive catalog income from old releases

A manager commissioning your entire financial life, including money they never touched, is overreaching. Define the commissionable base narrowly and in writing. This is the same discipline as tracking what a manager should be responsible for per artist: if the value they add is clear, the commission base should map to it.

The sunset clause: what happens when they are gone

The most overlooked term is what happens after the manager leaves. Without a sunset clause, a manager can keep commissioning deals they signed you to for the entire life of those deals, long after they stop working for you. You could be paying a former manager for years.

A sunset clause phases their commission down over time after the relationship ends. Twenty percent the first year, ten the next, then zero. Insist on one. A deal without a sunset clause means the manager keeps earning off you indefinitely for work they are no longer doing, which is exactly the kind of open-ended obligation I refuse to sign in any context. Every arrangement should have an exit that does not bleed you.

Put the whole thing in writing before it matters

None of this can be sorted out later. The time to define the base, the rate, the carve-outs, and the sunset is before the manager starts, while you both still want the deal to happen. Handshake management deals turn into the same disputes that undocumented splits create: everyone remembers the terms differently once real money is involved.

Get it on paper: what the percentage applies to, what is excluded, how touring is treated, and how commission winds down when the relationship ends. If a manager resists writing those down, that tells you what the vague version was going to cost you.

Commission the value, not the whole career

A fair manager commission is a share of the value the manager helps create, on a defined base, with a sunset when they leave. An unfair one is a percentage of everything you earn forever. The rate barely matters next to those terms. Before you sign, know exactly what fifteen percent is fifteen percent of, and make sure it maps to what the manager actually does. Keep your income streams and deals tracked cleanly so you can see what is commissionable and what is not, which is exactly what a tool like Track Pitch is built to organize, and decide from the numbers instead of the pitch. Then whether you even need a manager yet becomes a clear-eyed call, backed by a system like Track Pitch rather than a vibe.