Almost every successful female musician has had a man initially help guide her career. Cher had Sonny Bono, then David Geffen. Joni Mitchell also had David Geffen and Elliot Roberts. Linda Ronstadt had Peter Asher (formerly one half of the British singing duo Peter and Gordon, and James Taylor’s manager). Beyoncé had her father, Mathew Knowles. Mary J. Blige had Sean “Puffy” Combs and record company executive Andre Harrell; then, for years, she leaned on her unfaithful, now ex-husband/manager Kendu Isaacs. Mariah Carey had her ex-husband and Columbia Records president Tommy Mottola, then manager Benny Medina, then a woman with whom she was recently embroiled in a lawsuit. Jennifer Lopez had Benny Medina, then guidance from Puffy, then Benny again. Tina Turner had Ike, then manager Roger Davies. Janet Jackson had her father, Joe Jackson, then Roger Davies. Lady Gaga had a New Jersey producer (who sued her), then manager Troy Carter, then Bobby Campbell—who worked for Troy—and always the involvement of her father, Joe Germanotta. From the get-go Adele has had Jonathan Dickins. Rihanna had two male producers who helped her get to Jay-Z and L.A. Reid, who signed her to Def Jam, with Roc Nation’s Jay Brown as her manager. Madonna had DJ-producer Jellybean Benitez, then label head Seymour Stein, then manager Freddy DeMann, and now, her longtime manager, Guy Oseary (who probably gets a retainer rather than a percentage), who helped her start and oversee her Maverick Records label. Dolly Parton had a mentor in Porter Wagoner and for years, a man- ager in Sandy Gallin. (There have been a few women here and there who have managed female performers, and a few women who have managed men—but they are very few and not always long term. An exception is Jane Rose, who has managed the career of Keith Richards for 35 years.)

Still, even with a male protector, women have always had to work harder, were faced with more obstacles at every turn, and didn’t always think to ask for what they financially felt they deserved. There were, of course, exceptions. Longtime music-business mogul Irving Azoff recently told me that in the music business, when it came to payment—to a male or a female—all that mattered was how many records or concert tickets you sold. “I remember in the 1970s, we had a Joni Mitchell tour and a Crosby, Stills & Nash tour at the same time,” he told me, “and Joni got three times as much as they did. You would get $10,000 to $15,000 for CS&N, and Joni was getting $35,000 a show. She played bigger buildings, like colleges, which had 10,000 seats—while CS&N played 3,000-seat theaters. When Linda [Ronstadt] was on Capitol, and David [Geffen] signed her to Asylum Records, she had a bigger deal than the Eagles.”

Also the so-called million-dollar deals everyone always hears about or are bragged about by artists’ managers or publicists come down to something like $1 million to sign—to deliver seven albums—$150,000 to put in your pocket, $150,000 to record the first album, and a ton of tour support and promotional support (which used to mean paying off radio programmers)—all of which is recoupable. That means it’s a loan that the musician or the band has to pay back to the label before earning a dime of profit. Today, even though the entire business model has changed with downloading and streaming and commercials and direct-to-consumer merchandise, “the artist is still getting fucked,” says Azoff. “Male and female. They’re making their money from touring, branding, merchandising, publishing, and a little bit on their recorded music.” So why do they still make albums instead of just concentrating on touring or their makeup or lingerie or sneaker lines? Apparently they still care about making new music because that’s what they do, that’s who they are. Or the more cynical view is that they care that the fans think that they care enough to make new music. And except for the current vinyl LP fad, for those who prefer analog or the generation that never saw them before and likes nostalgia, physical albums—CDs—have been phased out in favor of streaming—although radio still matters in country music and places where you’re in a car much of the day.

And as hard as it is to believe, people still care about the Billboard charts and Nielsen SoundScan—both of which keep track of how many albums are sold each week. Hence: “bundling”—a relatively new scam that helps the musician sell more albums and rise higher on the Billboard charts. If you purchase a concert ticket, it can be bundled with some merchandise—a T-shirt or some nonsense like a laminated pass that might get you into a mass meet and greet with the star at a concert—and an album. Or you can opt in to download the album along with the concert ticket, and that album is then considered a “sale.” If Taylor Swift sells four slightly different versions of the same album—one with a deluxe package of lyrics or another with a bonus track—some sucker will buy all of them and that’s counted as four sales. Or if you stream the same track from an album 10 times, that’s also considered a sale of that album and helps it get higher on the charts. This has caused extraordinary competition and chaos in the business as well as unbelievably creative ways to sell music, concert tickets, and merchandise. And of course it soothes the musician’s ego by making certain she gets higher on the charts.

Despite the fact that every so often, women dominate those charts, women in the music business today still go through many of the same things that their older counterparts did. Lest we forget that “wardrobe malfunction”—when Justin Timberlake mistakenly ripped off part of Janet Jackson’s bodice and exposed her nipple on the 2004 Super Bowl telecast. The result was that for years Janet was virtually blackballed from performing or appearing on Grammy shows. Justin Timberlake, however, was invited to headline what turned out to be a truly awful set at the 2018 Super Bowl halftime show. And we all know about how Neil Portnow, the then head of the Grammys in 2017—when there was only one woman nominated for album of the year (Lorde), and she was not even asked to perform on the telecast—actually said, “Women need to step up.” (Which women was he talking about having to step up? The multi-Grammy winners—Beyoncé? Adele? Rihanna?) Women in the industry were so outraged by this that their public outcry did force Portnow to finally step down.

A lot of the ongoing misogyny is most obvious in the world of hip-hop. Despite the fact that rap recently became the largest-selling music category all over the world, and that back in 1998–99, Lauryn Hill sold 15 million albums and won five Grammys for The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, women in the rap game have problems. There are hundreds of rappers currently recording today; only about 10% of them are women. For years women were seen as bikini-clad playthings in male rap videos. Then after Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown started performing in various stages of undress, using their sexuality the way Madonna had years before, Nicki Minaj, Cardi B, and a slew of others followed. Sex sells. Label executives want their female stars to be sexualized: They still think that all women should want to be her, and the men should want to fuck her.

So even when the stars are so famous that they can get dressed in free gowns from Balenciaga or Balmain or Givenchy, we’ve arrived at a time when the ensembles are getting skimpier; half naked is the norm. (It’s funny to remember that there was once a time in the 1970s when Linda Ronstadt raised eyebrows performing onstage wearing an adorable Boy Scout uniform with little shorts.) These days it’s hard to find someone other than Billie Eilish or Adele who is fully clothed in concert. All that cleavage baring and butt flaunting has reached a level that eschews any mystery whatsoever and leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination.

And then, too, there are those male executives who don’t want to sign a woman; they think she’ll be too “expensive.” The budgets won’t cover the hair, the makeup, the styling. They want a diva, but they’re not sure they want to front the money to pay for one.

In 2016, Adele told me, “Money makes everyone act so bizarrely.” While Adele didn’t need the money she was making as she reluctantly trekked her way across the U.S. on tour, she said she felt an obligation to perform live for all her fans who had bought millions of her physical albums—especially 21 and 25. “I don’t come from money,” she said. “It’s not an important part of my life. But people are intimidated by it; it’s like I’m wearing my fucking money. Obviously I have nice things and I live in a nice house, but money was not the goal. I just wanted to get out of where I was living when I was ‘growing up.’”

“When I started out I never had any real examples of people who had a rough time in the music business. It’s not like I had a friend who was thrown around like a piece of meat. I’ve never been treated like that, although obviously I’ve seen other artists treated like that. But when I walk into a room, and there are 12 fucking men in fucking suits who think they know more about my career than I do, I like making them really nervous.”

“I hate it when artists blame their managers,” Adele added. “Each time an album flops, they blame their manager. Your record just ain’t fuckin’ good enough. My manager and I butt heads all the time, we raise our voices, but if he says, I don’t think you should do something, I’m like, fine, I won’t do it. There also are things that I haven’t wanted to do that he said would be good for my career, and I’ve done them. But we probably say no more than any other artist. I’m a control freak, but there’s no way that anyone can be involved in every single thing. I trust him completely with my career.”

A note here about what a manager actually does: My husband, Richard Robinson, once likened managing a musician to “running backwards holding up a mirror.” A manager can do anything and everything from getting a record deal to negotiating the terms of that deal. Schlepping the guitars to the van after a club gig when the band is on the way up, to negotiating the arena or stadium tours when the band is big. Finding a record producer, a band, a choreographer. Working with—or fighting with—the record company. Overseeing the terms of all the concert fees, corporate gigs, merchandising, royalties on album sales or, these days, streaming percentages. Getting endorsement deals. Getting the act on TV. “Creative” decisions about clothes, glam, styling, music. Getting the calls in the middle of the night that the equipment truck broke down in Detroit. Or that the guitars were stolen from the equipment truck. Helping staff the household if there’s money for a household staff. Finding a house if there’s money for a house. Helping to furnish the house. Making the best private-plane deals or finding the best gluten-free chefs. Approving interviews and magazine photo shoots. Approving final video edits. Dealing with travel and hotel room needs. Dealing with—and often initiating—litigation. Setting up the act’s social media accounts. Often pretending that the manager is the act on social media (although that job usually falls to the publicist). Finding doctors and dealing with the star’s health issues. Preventing drug problems. Enabling drug problems. Managing drug problems. Finding rehabs or sober “coaches.” Enrolling children in school. Watching the children. Paying the employees. Buying the groceries. One manager I know used to cut the food for his client right at the table. There have been managers who have become famous themselves—Brian Epstein with the Beatles, Peter Grant with Led Zeppelin, Irving Azoff with the Eagles, Paul Rosenberg with Eminem, to name a few; most famous managers have been men, including Scooter Braun, who has been managing Justin Bieber since Scooter discovered the teenage Justin on YouTube. Scooter also manages Ariana Grande and Demi Lovato and has advised Kanye West.

There is no end to both the larger-than-life deals when an act is a success, to the minutiae and the chores—whether the act is big or small. The job is a combination of a parent (especially when it is a parent), babysitter, businessman/woman, lawyer, psychiatrist, teacher, and saint. The real job is to provide support, encouragement, and success to help the musician realize her hopes, dreams, and ambitions. And to give advice. But if the advice is not what the star wants to hear…when the management is no longer the Greek chorus, if the star needs that chorus, the partnership can fall apart. It is, frankly, very often a thankless task. And when the act has a success, they did it all by themselves. And when they fail they usually say it’s the manager’s fault.

Lorde is a successful young woman who had no hesitation walking into a record-label meeting and telling the executives what she wanted to do. “I never felt like it was frightening or a big deal,” she told me in 2017. “I was so sure of what my work needed, and that only I could protect it. What else would I do? I was a teenager and I knew what wouldn’t fly with other young people. But a lot of it had to do with being 16 and having no qualms about walking into a room and shooting down a bunch of million-dollar ideas.” And, she added, “I’ve been told that they could work out the numbers of how recognizable I am in certain markets—which is not a good thing to know. I’ve told people I don’t want to know the numbers; I don’t want to walk around with a number in my head.”

In 1994, Salt-N-Pepa’s Cheryl James told me, “As females, you have to be more demanding and more assertive. But that’s not just in the music business, it’s in any business. It’s sad but it’s true; you just have to let people know you’re intelligent, that you can do the job, and not question you because you’re a woman. If you’re wimpy and you take a lot of crap from people, they’re going to give it to you.”

“The reason Salt-N-Pepa have been around so long,” she continued, “is that we have never limited or confined ourselves to any rules of what we can or cannot do. A lot of rappers feel that they have to just be a certain thing and only that thing, but we don’t accept that. We do what we want to do. Our expectations of what we think we can do are very high.”

Joan Jett has been in a partnership with Kenny Laguna since the breakup of the Runaways in 1979. Laguna, a musician, songwriter, and producer, is more than just Joan’s manager. He and his wife, Meryl, and their daughter, Carianne Brinkman—who runs their Blackheart record label—and Joan’s band, the Blackhearts, are Joan’s family. Everyone says this about the people they work with, or their “team”—but in Joan’s case it’s really true. “It’s like a gang,” she told me in 1982, “but without the violence. Kenny did not tell me how to dress or how to talk; we wrote songs and they spoke for themselves. Even though he’s not onstage, he is a big part of the band; he’ll play things on the record, or he’ll help with the arrangements. But it’s definitely not a Svengali situation; I’m not his puppet. It’s just good to know that there’s someone around to make sure you don’t run off or get into trouble somewhere.”

While Joan has basically been slogging away on the road for over 40 years, despite her recent (and long-overdue) induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, she had the usual problems with radio: “I was told, ‘We can’t play you on the radio,’” she told me in the 1980s. “‘We’re playing a woman already. We’re playing Pat Benatar.’”

Pat Benatar may have had radio airplay in the 1980s, but things weren’t all that easy for her either. Like Alanis Morissette, she felt she was a “victim of other people’s ideas.” In 1986 she told me, “There was a time when I felt like just chucking it all because I was trying to be my own person, and I got caught up in what everyone else wanted me to be. Now I’m in control of everything, because otherwise what happened before will happen again. Maybe because I’m little, people think I’m easy to push around, and I’m not. You didn’t know you’d have to be the big business mogul, the corporate woman, and maybe you don’t have to be. But I don’t want to wake up in 10 years and have someone say, ‘Sorry, the money’s all gone.’ I work too hard,” she said. “I’ve got to care. I know where the money goes—I worked in a bank.”

In 1984, Cyndi Lauper told me, “At first they wanted me to be Pat Benatar. Then, when I was being myself, they said you’re just like Debbie Harry. I didn’t do the business thing, I just did the work. But I went through a lot of stuff. My albums weren’t promoted right, and I was touring and I kind of lived under the tyranny of what I was allowed to do, or what I was told to do, or what I was told I shouldn’t do. I’m not a rules kind of girl. I had to go back to doing what I knew was right for me. I was tired of fighting for years and years. You can’t take somebody who comes from left field and try to make them be mainstream.”

In 2010, Donna Summer told me that in the beginning of her career, she was incredibly ripped off because her deal was with the Germany-based producer Giorgio Moroder, who then licensed her to Casablanca Records in the U.S., and the German mark to the dollar was not in her favor. “Later, when I got successful,” she said, “I tried to rectify it as much as I could. But part of the problem was that [Casablanca label head] Neil Bogart wanted to keep selling records and I wanted to grow as an artist. There definitely were conflicts. Neil wanted to give ‘Bad Girls’ to Cher, but I wrote the song, and if anybody was going to sing it, it was going to be me. Neil thought it was too rock and roll,” Donna continued, “and it sat in a closet for two years. Then I went back to Germany and played it for Giorgio and for Neil, and then he liked it. The same song. Then I wrote ‘She Works Hard for the Money’ because of all the women who work hard and aren’t paid properly. They basically run companies for their bosses and their bosses take all the credit. Neil and I definitely had our conflicts, but we resolved them, and in the end,” she said, “he was a mensch.”

Excerpted from NOBODY EVER ASKED ME ABOUT THE GIRLS: Women, Music and Fame by Lisa Robinson. Published by Henry Holt and Company November 10th 2020. Copyright © 2020 by Robinson League, Inc. All rights reserved.

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