photo by Erin Elizabeth Bradshaw
by Lauren Rosier
The music industry is a business that is constantly evolving and ever changing. Whether it be for musicians or someone looking to work towards a music industry career, it’s crucial to learn the ins and outs of a business that has affected everyone at some point in their life.
I recently had the opportunity to speak with talent agent Tim Borror of United Talent Agency. He is a panelist at this year’s Launch Music Conference and Festival later this week. We discussed how he evolved from a young twenty-something helping friends’ bands across the east coast to a music business professional opening his own booking agency to discovering new musical talent with United Talent Agency.
Music was something that Borror both discovered on his own and grew up with at home. Just like many young teenagers, music was the soundtrack to his life. His father played music, and influenced him in cultivating a passion for it during his teen years and early ’20s, where at that point, he was all into music.
“I used to go to shows and was playing in bands. The way kids would take sports seriously and going to the pros, that was kind of the amount of attention I was giving music. Going to shows and playing in bands,” Borror explains.
Following high school, Borror attended Drexel University studying Economics. “I went to Drexel for one year. I wasn’t completely disinterested, but I wasn’t completely engaged. It wasn’t relatable to me. I’d look around the room seeing my peers, envisioning my world, and I was going to college kind of for the sake of going to college,” he reveals. “I took a step back and realized I didn’t want to do it, I wanted to stay focused on music, and started promoting shows with the money I had saved.”
Borror was proactive in changing his direction with where he was going to school. There were some schools in Philadelphia that were offering music business programs, but it wasn’t until a career day at the Art Institute that he was really able to begin his first venture into the music industry. “There was an agency based out of Lansdale, PA that was managing bands that I really loved at the time. I reached out to them and said, ‘I have to work there.’”
He started working with a software company called Fox that developed software for tour managers, agencies, and other entities related to the touring side of the business. In the early 1990s, Fox managed some bands on the side, and needed shows booked for them up and down the east coast. It went from DIY booking – working with friends’ bands in the punk/metal scene simply calling up other bands to book – to booking with Fox.
Back then, the punk/metal scene was so different. “When I was doing the thing for Fox, I was so into the punk/metal scene, I had a lot of friends that had real bands. Bands that were popular in that genre from Boston to Virginia out to Chicago level,” he explains.
However, things are very different now, he says, in that bands expect now to be a big band. It went from simply helping friends who were in real bands to helping his friends’ friend’s band and so on and so forth until it progressed to the point that bigger companies were trying to “take bands from me.” Borror grew from DIY booking agent into someone that bigger companies felt pressured by, to a talent agent at United Agency Group.
So now he’s working in the music industry, searching for the next big band or solo artist, and trying to find something that he can connect with. “I look for stuff that feels original. The bands that are meaningful and have legacies are relatable to a genre or scene. They stick out. They are hard to find,” he admits. “I look for originality. The bands that sound like someone else, they can have a career, but the originality and quality is important. When I do find those qualities, and we do develop it into something together, it’s the thing I feel the most rewarded about.”
When I ask him about what separates the bands that are ready for their next level of their career to the ones that are missing something, he says, “I don’t know. There are plenty of bands that I didn’t think were missing something, that didn’t make it, or there were bands I thought that were missing something, that did make it.”
One thing he does mention is that band chemistry is critical. “When people in a band find chemistry, it’s magic,” he says. “It’s special when they find people on the business side, management side, booking agency side, that can plug into that as well, can create a vision and path. When all those things can happen together, when you think of the likelihood of that happening, it’s a very small percentage.”
So, with that said, what can bands do to move their name in the industry? Social media. Being viral, having a great YouTube channel, being able to survive together, writing quality songs, and proving you have a solid work ethic.
On the other end of the business, breaking into the industry as a music industry professional, however, is not for the weak at heart. “I have some level of success now, but I went through years in my early 20-30s when it went from passionate to where I could barely survive to be here. You really have to be passionate about it. You have to deliver on the things that you commit to people. You have to be lofty on your goals,” Borror reveals.
With that said, once “you can put your passion together with being able to execute on your word, you can develop a career of some level. You need to learn how to manipulate and drive culture. It’s a thing, so there are a lot of variables and it starts with passion and dedication. Being real and being honest.”
And networking with industry experts is critical. “It’s a social business. Almost everybody’s life has been driven by the art, not driven by spreadsheets, and machines that produce stuff. It’s a people business. There’s a lot of corporate America type stuff, but is driven by the music that people make.”
All of this is why Lancaster’s upcoming Launch Music Conference is so special.
“Jeremy Weiss and I have known each other through punk rock/metal music, playing in bands, and that stuff before we knew we’d be in the music business. That fact that he’s trying to do something organic and getting people into the music business, bands or music business professionals, it’s a really cool thing. You look around the country and there’s not a lot of things like Launch.”
If you’re attending the conference, you can catch Tim Borror tomorrow at 11am and 1pm.
