Tim Tournier

Photo credit: Dan Surge

Artist Manager, Janus Music Management

Alter Bridge / Sevendust / Myles Kennedy / Tremonti

CHANGEOVER: Tell us a little bit about yourself: where you are, what you do and some of your background in the music industry. 

Tim Tournier: I'm in Chicago, Illinois and I'm an artist manager, kind of by default. I've done every job that there is to do in music from being a musician on stage to selling merch. The only two things that I've never done are run front of house and run lights. Everything else I've done. I've even driven trucks. I pretty much failed my way to the top. I learned how to manage bands because I fucked up my career so bad when I was younger. That's pretty much the long and short of it.

I was in a band a long time ago and got a record deal but that never really took off to the next level. When that stopped, I knew enough people that just so happened to like me to get another gig. I did that and hated it. I quit after two months. Got another gig, hated it and quit that. There’s an industry of being a hired gun for other people. They were really solid gigs, but I was young and dumb and didn't know any different.

I quit to go be a tour manager, guitar tech and side guitar player for a guitar hero of mine from when I was a kid. Three days from when I started working with him, the band that I had just quit - it was a pop gig and had played guitar - their song was on the radio and it was the “feel good” hit of the summer. He laughed at me and we moved on to the next thing. Then when I went and quit his thing, he said, “Oh, you sure you want to do this? Because I just got hired to go play guitar for this mega rockstar for the next two years.” Well, I moved on to the next thing. So it was kinda like that. If you want to be successful in the music industry, you have to employ me and then ultimately I quit and then that’s how you go to the top.

From there, I started a production company with Mark Tremonti. As time went by, and multiple records happened, we literally were sending out hundreds of thousands of units pretty much from our garages. We were really bootstrapping it. He would sell items through his website and I was managing it and would be shipping these things out at night from my garage.

Then one thing became the other which became the other. Opportunity comes and that's what a manager really is, an opportunist. You see something, you jump on it. Four years later I had the opportunity to take on Alter Bridge, which at that point in time was the biggest thing I had managed. I stopped doing the production company thing and started Janus, which is my management company. It just kind of built over time to where now it's Alter Bridge, Sevendust, Myles Kennedy, Tremonti. It's all the subsidiaries of the associated acts the guys are in. So that's the more abbreviated version. 

There’s been lots of fucked up stories along the way, but that’s it in a nutshell.

Photo credit: Dan Surge

How has COVID-19 affected your plans in the industry?

Completely. It stopped everything. When you're a manager of a band, you get to give the good news, but then you also have to give the bad news. For Alter Bridge, we just released an album that went number one on Billboard overall in October of last year. We had massive plans for touring. Every week that goes by it gets pushed back. It was, commercially, the most successful record of their career. We were selling more tickets than ever. A lot of good things were on the horizon for the band. A lot of good opportunities. It was like, “fuck yeah” we're finally hitting our stride. Then COVID hit and everything stopped.

All songs got released, all tours got canceled or moved, and then it was like, well, we're going to move this to August. Then August became September. September became October. Now it's like a tour that was supposed to happen in May, we're currently holding dates for that in December. Hopefully it plays off. All the other tours we've just canceled, and given everybody their money back, because we realized there are other things that folks could, and should, be spending their money on right now, instead of concert tickets. It stopped everything.

When you manage a band, you're not just managing the four or five guys in the band. You're responsible for their income, which is how they feed their family. So right there, it's not five guys, it’s twenty people. Then you’ve got a crew of twelve people and their families that all depend on the money. For one band you can have forty people, realistically, that are all like, “am I going to make money?” I helped the singer of the band the same as I helped the bass player of the band, which is the same as I helped the merch guy of the band because these are all people that get on a metal tube together and go down the street. Everybody's in it together and we're just trying to find new ways to bring in income.

One of the things that we were able to do for Alter Bridge, for instance, is that we did an honorary roadie shirt and we pre-sold it. We sold shirts that we literally printed ourselves. I have a barn where I live that's temperature controlled. We printed everything in there. We went through and hand packed all of these orders. We took a hundred percent of it and gave all of the money to our crew. It was the equivalent - to the crew - of being on a tour that never happened financially. Then they can come off of unemployment for about a month because of this income. Then they can go back on it and kind of restart over.

What have you been doing in the meantime while the music industry is on pause? 

I'm a workaholic. When the phone stops ringing is when I start getting nervous. Being a manager of multiple bands is that you'll have a band in Europe this month, and two bands out in the States and a band over here and over there. The phone always rings because, let's be honest, the artists and the crew don't necessarily give a shit if it's noon in mainland Europe and that it's four o'clock in the morning in Chicago. The phone is always ringing. It just started only ringing during normal business hours. There was a week where I didn't get the 11:30 at night phone call, or the three o'clock in the morning call. That hasn’t happened in a decade. 

It was a lot of calls from other managers. All of my managers, booking agents, we all kind of do the big round robin call with each other asking “What have you heard? I don't know. What have you heard? What's happening with touring here? What are they offering?” Everybody's talking and comparing notes, but that takes up two hours of the day. So what do I do with the other twenty-two? I only sleep six hours a night. Now what do I do with all those other hours? I have a board here in my basement, which is my office. It's just the ideas board. If I see somebody that does something that I think is cool, I put it up there. If I just have a random idea, it might not make any sense whatsoever for any of the bands currently. If I see something cool, I just put it on the board. Or if I have a cool idea, I put it on the board. Usually with how business normally works is you don't have a ton of time to start developing all those ideas. Well, now that's all that it's become, because touring just keeps getting pushed farther and farther back. It’s time to start developing these ideas.

We're just trying to create other sources of revenue and income to be able to not only keep the band going, but like I said, those core groups of people. People see a band and they see it as the four people on stage, but it really isn't. It's all of those other people that get on that bus because those are the people that are putting the amp on the stage and making sure that everything's coming through. It's all those people that are also with the band. We’ve got to look out for them as well. 

Photo Credit: Dan Surge

What do you feel is the future of the music industry? 

You're not going to be able to go out and tour until there's a vaccine. The different genres are able to approach this thing in different ways. I have friends that are in the film side of the industry and they're already going back to work. They have to get tested every single week, and have different protocols, but they're already back. Some folks that work in country that I know are already back out and doing shows.

The drive-in concert, isn't one that, once you hit a certain level, you can do and have any kind of financial gain. The people who do do it, they're not making any profit. They're doing it just to keep their brand out there. What it costs to put on a show like that, versus how much money can be made off of those cars, it's a complete shakeup for the industry because now the band has to do it for relatively no money. They're doing it just hoping that they can break even to keep their name out there. That stage costs money. The insurance is ridiculous. The math doesn't make sense. People that are doing it are in fields, and old drive-in movie theaters, because they're kind of built for it. But even then a hundred cars, with five hundred people, there's a certain level of artist where that makes sense and you can do that. For anybody else who has a crew that has to fly, or you have to travel to go do it, it's immediately a losing acquisition. 

Everybody's making new records right now. People are trying to be creative in this time at home. Regardless of when you put out your last record, they’re already trying to make a new one. I think next year is going to be filled with new releases and then pockets of touring. Instead of a tour being twenty-five dates, it's going to be eight dates at ten days to tour in pockets of the country. Maybe a little bit more than that in other spots of the world but it's going to be really difficult to make that happen. Technology made the world get a lot smaller and now when something like this happens, it really limits how you can move throughout it. So it just made the world get a lot bigger again. What I mean by that is, when you're a rock band going into 2021, you'll be able to play Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, maybe Indiana. Some of those states, but that's it. How many markets are there? Places where we used to be able to put fifteen shows, just going down the East coast, that's not going to be there anymore. It will come back, but when will it come back is the question. That's why I think it's got to be tied to a vaccine.

You see a lot of people doing live streams right now. People are tired of the live streams and things like that. You now have all these new live streaming companies who come in wanting you to pay twenty grand in expenses and they want to take 30% of the ticket. It's just another way for somebody else to fucking rip you off. You can sell a ticket online for fifteen bucks, and if it's a really premium product maybe twenty, but the way that people share those streams it becomes compound interest getting cut down.

I think I did twelve calls with different providers and it's going to cost $17,000 for a film crew. You have to figure out the location, they'll take care of the actual broadcasting over the internet, which how hard is that, right? You cover all those costs and they get 30% of whatever you make, whatever you sell. When you look at it like that, well, there's 30% to this company X, then your booking agent takes 10%. The management takes 10%. Then you have to pay your crew. Now you're down to a band making 40% of what the ticket was and then they have to pay tax on it. Then they have to split it. Everybody else takes their hand so the industry is going to have to change with that.  

People are going to have to go back to actually supporting the artist. I'm having those conversations now where we're starting to pull things back. We're only going to sell stuff on our website where we can handle it, fulfill it, do everything, and make it all ourselves. That money needs to go to supporting the band and supporting our crew. It's going to be a matter of who could weather the storm. Bands that have a brand already, that have a legacy and a built-in base, they will be fine because they have the fanbase there that will support them. I would not want to be a new band in this day and age who doesn't necessarily have that base or their fanbase is one that doesn't have the ancillary income to be able to afford it.

To wrap this up, is what is the greatest piece of advice you've ever been given?

When I was a kid, my grandpa told me this. If you can't wow with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit. That is something that I have used just about every single day in my life. If I don't know the answer, I'm a good enough talker that I can buy myself some time to be able to figure out what the right answer is. If you can't wow with brilliance baffle them with bullshit.