If there is a popular up and coming band is being unprofessionally and/or haphazardly managed can a label do anything about it before investing in them? Can a label make the band boot a poor manager? Is the manager’s contract inviolate? How do these deals usually go down?
A label would love if the band has a bad manager. That means the band gets even more screwed.
If it were a case of the manager screwing with them, they will point the manager to their contract and say, “these are the rules. Follow them or else.”
If a manager is very small-time, and a band are about to hit it big-time, often both the band and the manager will know that the current situation isn’t going to cut it. I’ve seen cases where the band simply change management (sometimes without the original manager approving, sometimes with their full co-operation in a deal which is negotiated by them), and also cases where the small-time manager has joined up with a larger, more experienced management company who have taken over (and a deal is negotiated on how earnings are split).
Management contracts (at least ones I’ve seen or been involved with) are set up so that the band can stop working with a manager when they want to, but still have to pay commissions of earnings to the original manager, usually of decreasing percentages over a certain number of years, and all this would be set out in the original management contract. Of course, if a manager was incompetent, or just an inexperienced newby, their contract might not have any of these conditions and its bye-bye band and earnings.
As for the label’s role in it, they might theoretically want a poor manager for the band when negotiation a contract, but no-one wants to work with poor management on a day-to-day basis. It’s really not in the record label’s best interest to work with a bad manager. The record company wants a band to succeed and if you are working with management who are incompetent at what they do, that’s going to be hard to make happen. Record company folks would find ways to quietly point out the problems with retaining their current management and suggest that they might want to look around for someone who can push them to the next level of success. I haven’t seen it happen, but I could certainly imagine that it would be easy for the record company to make it clear to the band that, if the management was bad enough, they would need to change it before the label would sign them.