Schooled: Bandbasher Harnesses Management Knowhow and Tech Savvy to Help Music Visionaries to Ace the Business

Veteran artist manager DeCarlos Garrison has a telltale photo: A group of beaming people after a successful meeting at a major label, when an artist he repped got that coveted record deal. 

Fast forward to a mere ninety days later, and a very different picture emerged. The label stopped returning calls, ignored emails. The artist, so promising just a few months before, had done everything in his power to ignore good advice and plowed ahead with a deal that was far from ideal. Garrison fought hard to save things, but couldn’t.

Moments like these, when even the strongest managerial moves couldn’t salvage business matters, got Garrison thinking. “On my last tour in Europe with one of my artists, I had this moment,” he recalls. “I had put so much on the line to manage these musicians. Their success directly affected my life and livelihood. If they didn’t listen to my advice, it was painful, personally and financially.” 

Garrison knew there had to be a better way to help artists find a professional path forward. Bandbasher was born. The service offers musicians, managers, and labels everything they need to perfect their music business acumen, keep all their assets handy, monitor their social feeds, analyze the impact of promotional pushes, and deal with finances. 

“When we started Bandbasher, we wanted to get people knowledge, one bit at a time,” says Garrison, the company’s co-founder and now CEO. “We didn’t just want to share tips; we wanted to provide real instruction. You get the information and then go apply it. Then you come back and see the next step.”

These carefully organized video courses, customized for a variety of roles in the business (artist and producer are two popular tracks), get users started. Bandbasher then offers the very tools they’ll need to follow best practices, features from tracking projects to payment.

“We’re trying to change the whole way the business gets done,” Garrison exclaims. “We’re open to all users. We want artists and managers to succeed. We want labels to succeed. We’ve built our tools with this goal in mind.”

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From the second he heard Erik B and Rakim, Garrison knew he wanted to be in the music business. He joined a few hip hop groups as a young man, but then, while studying to be an engineer, he found his true calling: management and deal making. He scored a job with Def Jam, promoting their artists in his local community. “I got to talk to fans, to DJs, to all sorts of people, face to face, and I loved it.” He’d drop into phone meetings at the label, absorbing everything he could about all facets of the business. He forged ahead as a manager in his own right.

Garrison was soon managing several groups, one of which scored a top 40 hit. He closed big deals, travelled frequently. But he longed for his own business, one that would keep him closer to home and family. Then Garrison met his future business partner, Gleb Teper, a developer whose family came to Florida from the Black Sea port of Odessa. They wound up chatting one day and struck up a friendship that blossomed into a working collaboration. 

Together, they bashed out Bandbasher, based on ideas Garrison had been mulling over for years. “I had had the domain name forever,” Garrison remembers. “I knew I wanted to do something, but when Gleb and I teamed up, it really took shape.” 

They decided to provide career support for users the way a manager would. “We address something people don’t want to admit to. They don’t understand where the money is,” notes Garrison. “This is a great time to be an artist or to be a music professional, but you have to focus on the business. You have to know as much as possible.” 

Even signed artists, Garrison emphasizes, need to be well-informed and proactively pursue opportunities their label may not see. “A label or a manager can give an artist a lot, a lot of resources, connections, and advantages,” Garrison states. “But it’s still up to you as an artist to make the most of it, to put in the work.”

Bandbasher’s video-based learning resources reveal exactly where the work is and how to do it well. “Once you get to our platform, you can educate yourself,” explains Garrison. “It’s your base, and you can control your future from here. We’re gathering all your tools and resources in one spot, where you can check email, post to socials, track revenue, see your budget if you’re on a label, keep your files, work with your team. You can monitor your airplay, your publishing. You can see your whole career.”

“We show artists and their teams where they are gaining traction, the demographics on different platforms,” says Teper. “We map things out for them. Our goal with artists is to help them conduct themselves as a business, with both the right knowledge and the right tools.”


Bandbasher
Bandbasher is a digital platform which helps users perfect their music business acumen, keep all assets handy, monitor social feeds, analyze the impact of promotional pushes, and deal with finances. Their video-based learning resources cover a variety of subjects, including branding, collaboration, budgeting, project management, distribution, networking, music videos, and record deals. When users are ready to put lessons into action, Bandbasher acts as a master control hub.