So, how was your Brat summer?
Probably not as big as Ant Hippsley’s. The head of Milk & Honey’s London office spent the season fielding calls about his red-hot client Finn Keane (aka Easyfun, although he’s now “moving over” from that moniker, having aroused the ire of the ever-watchful easyJet last year).
Keane co-wrote and co-produced around half of Charli XCX’s latest album, including Brat singles Von Dutch and 360, putting the Easyfunster at the heart of a pop culture juggernaut.
“Finn’s been working with Charli on and off for about 10 years now,” grins Hippsley as he welcomes MBUK into Milk & Honey’s new Shoreditch offices. “He started as part of [record label/art collective] PC Music and now, 10 years later, it’s really paying off for him.
“Brat has become this cultural snowball,” Hippsley adds. “I don’t know if anyone saw it coming, but it’s been pretty mad. Every week, Finn calls us to sort something else out, because there’s a never-ending amount of things that he continues to do around the project. It’s great for him – he’s had some hits before and has always been pretty consistent, but this has blown the doors wide open…”
These days, few doors are closed to M&H’s clients. Hippsley started Milk & Honey’s UK arm just under five years ago, since when he’s expanded the roster significantly.
And the staff, including bringing in manager Josh Gulliver, Angus Murray and worked with George Corton, Dave Frank and Lucas Keller to establish the UK electronic division, which features the likes of Girls Of The Internet, Joel Corry and Tyler West, making M&H UK one of the leading writer-producer & artist management companies in Europe.
Its clients have scored a rush of hits and a slew of BRIT, Mercury Prize and Grammy nominations, while the company won Songwriter/Producer Management Company Of The Year at the 2023 A&R Awards.
And they can tap into Milk & Honey’s extensive international network and all the relationships that come with that.
It’s a fair way from the affable Hippsley’s start in the noughties as a humble touring musician, playing bass for numerous up-and-coming acts and doing studio work with the likes of Lily Allen and Tinie Tempah.
He packed that in when he saw the winds of austerity start to hit budgets for musicians, switching to management via an internship at Big Life (where his first client, Bless Beats, scored a No.1 hit with Tinie Tempah’s Not Letting Go while Hippsley was still working on reception).
From there, he moved to Spilt Milk, where he worked with Amy Wadge and Eg White, before setting up his own company and then, in 2020, joining Milk & Honey where, he says, the company’s “driving heartbeat is writers and producers”.
The company’s size and international presence under President Lucas Keller means not much happens in the music world without the Milk & Honey team hearing about it.
They often place multiple clients on a record and broker collaborations such as Tiësto, Rudimental and Absolutely’s 2023 hit, Waterslides, originally sparked into life when Hippsley randomly played Absolutely’s original version in the M&H office and his colleague Angus Murray suggested a Billen Ted remix.
But Hippsley also specialises in finding substantial projects for his clients, with Biff Stannard and Duck Blackwell working on much of Kylie Minogue’s smash hit Tension album and Stuart Price working across Halsey’s forthcoming The Great Impersonator record.
The perfect time, then, for Hippsley to sit down and talk MBUK through the brand of Milk & Honey…
How do you help Finn Keane follow up his Brat success?
The first thing we did was think, ‘What can we do to follow on from Charli?’ For us, it had to be LA. With where artists are at here in the UK, we couldn’t see a clear path for the obvious follow-ons.
He’s in demand here, but he’s going out to LA from mid-September through to Thanksgiving, and will do a lot of sessions out there.
He’s the sort of guy who gets his teeth sunk into one project, so we’re looking for that next thing that makes sense for him, where he can bed in.
Milk & Honey UK is obviously part of a big international business. How does that help your work?
What I got on board with when I joined Milk & Honey five years ago was that managing a big roster of people brings leverage and information.
You’re across so many different artist projects. If you manage a roster of 15 – and over in the US they manage far more – you’re naturally speaking with most of the A&Rs.
There’s a lot of shared information, so having that leverage to understand where things are truly at, and working with your clients to strategise about particular artists or songwriters they want to work with, is a big thing.
I used to manage four or five writers/producers at a previous company and that was good from a time perspective; my life was less stressful [laughs]. But in terms of my real knowledge across stuff, it was limited to what we were involved in.
Writer-producer management is a different ball game, it’s a day-to-day hustle – but if you’ve got enough shared information and strategy for each person individually, you also know when to bring them into things.
What made you want to join Milk & Honey?
I really identified with Lucas’ perspective. He’s a perfect blend of business and creative.
I’d always worked with people who were either quite business-oriented and didn’t understand the creative, or people who were very creative managers but didn’t really understand [the business].
Music’s in my blood, but my family’s very business. I grew up naturally understanding negotiating, so it was instinctive for me that you had to do both.
I remember reading Lucas’ MBW articles and thinking, he really gets it. And he was from a playing background, he toured in bands before he managed stuff. I liked his perspective on how to grow a company and how he did it so successfully.
“I really identified with Lucas’ perspective. He’s a perfect blend of business and creative.”
We do a lot of catalogue sales – somewhere in the region of, across the whole company, $350m worth – for our direct clients, but also for other people.
It’s a huge move we’ve seen in the last six to eight years – copyrights being seen as assets, whereas before it was only publishing companies that were signing something, recouping it, making some money on top.
Now, when you’re looking to sell someone’s copyrights as an asset, or at least advancing against it for a number of years, it’s where some of the biggest business lies and I was really interested in Lucas’ exploration into that world.
Are catalogue deals always good for songwriters?
I don’t think one size fits all. But if selling your catalogue outright allows you to – post-tax, commissions and lawyers’ fees – bank enough money that, if you use it to invest or buy an asset like a house outright, is going to serve you and your family in a way that it wouldn’t if you just clung onto it for the next 10 years, then the short answer is probably yes.
There was one deal I was involved in when the business manager worked out that if [the client] sold his catalogue this early – which the client was really keen to do – there would be a substantial shortfall. But if we did it later, it would make much more sense from an investing point of view.
It was a deal that I’d already teed up, but we put it back. And that’s the key thing with catalogues – you can’t marry yourself, client or manager, to the money. You have to make sure you safeguard their creativity, but also their business.
Was that deal hard to walk away from?
Yeah, I got a few beers in that day! But you can’t lose your principles.
Interestingly, because we approached it with grace, one year on it did make sense. We picked the phone back up, ‘Right, we’re ready to go’ and he did end up selling it – and he’s been grateful ever since.
There was definitely an era of crazy multiples, now they’re quite sensible, so it can be more of a sensible decision. It’s less like, ‘Wow, yeah, why wouldn’t I, no-brainer’. It’s now, ‘Does it make sense?’
One of my clients bought his house outright for him and his family – and he didn’t sell everything, just a portion. That made a lot of sense – because now the income that does come through pays their yearly [expenses] and they have assets outright which they’ll never have to worry about again, which was a massive thing for him.
Are such sales vital because they maintain songwriters’ falling incomes?
Well, hits don’t generate what they used to, due to streaming taking over. You have to find avenues of making business around those records. There are ups and downs with streaming adjustments.
For producers, I find there are four different avenues – doing a deal for their neighbouring rights; being paid as a producer to produce or remix a song; publishing deals and advances; selling the catalogue.
So, catalogues are a big part of it. Radio still pays better, so always having multiple records at radio throughout a good chunk of the year is really valuable for our business.
What do you think of the battle to get songwriters royalty points on master recordings?
Raye’s amazing, they’ve been doing incredible work with the platform she’s got.
I agree a songwriter should have master royalties on records. What’s difficult is finding the tick box for the label to do that. If it’s a song that we own that we’re placing with an artist, rather than having written it in the room with the artist, that’s the key differentiator. You can then build the points into a production deal which there is a tick box for at labels.
A lot of the A&Rs we work with are on the side of the songwriter, they want to honour and value the songwriter as much as the producer, but they’re working within their own systems, which don’t always allow that. So, until that model changes, it’s about finding avenues for them to be able to do it.
Outside of the majors, we’re seeing a lot of labels pop up that are more flexible on all aspects. It’s not about just majors changing their infrastructure; as more pop up around them, people will be forced to look at it.
But it’s based on the deal as well – if you’ve got a record with an artist signed to a major and they’ve had to put a fuckload more money into it, then they have to gain more back as well. There’s a model there I can understand.
If you could change one thing about the music industry, right here and now, what would it be and why?
[Laughs] Can I have 10 please? We’d like to see songwriters and producers championed.
There is more of a spotlight on them now, but there’s a huge deficit in payment by comparison. Everything starts with the song. Oasis have just reformed – the beating heart of Oasis was fucking brilliant songs.
If the people who are writing and producing those songs aren’t paid appropriately, there’s going to be a time when it starts to deplete. There are not that many artists left that write the songs themselves 100%, so if you don’t have writers and producers, it’s going to be difficult for the industry.
You can’t just have track 10 on an album and live comfortably. You have to have singles, they have to do well at radio, they have to stream enough. Just having a couple of tracks on the deluxe edition isn’t going to change anyone’s world.
The other thing that’s changed is, it’s more saturated. There are a lot more people being songwriters. It’s like anything, if there’s more competition it becomes harder.
How do you feel about the trend for multiple songwriters and producers on tracks?
Well, there are more songwriters so there are more people for collaboration. Maybe you write a record, they send it to two other producers to finish and get someone to finish the chorus… There’s a lot of that going on, which has its pros and cons.
You get stronger records, you’ve got to cut through the noise these days because there’s not as much gatekeeping in the streaming era. At the same time, it means it’s diluted in terms of income.
What’s changed is, you can’t just do one thing. When I first started, there were people who were the lyrics person. Bernie Taupin has done brilliantly, but in the era we live in now, you have to be an all-rounder.
I was going to be a rock star when I was 17, just playing bass, but I had to learn to do 10 other things to make a living, and then I had to learn to be a manager to make a proper living!
Similarly, songwriters need to learn to co-produce, do a demo, do vocal producing, be a multi-instrumentalist. I hate saying it but, even as a creative, you have to have an eye on the business.
British artists are struggling internationally. Is that also the case for British songwriters and producers?
No, it’s the opposite. In the UK, we’ve got more brilliant songwriters than when I started.
Some people point fingers at labels [for not breaking artists], but we’re in an era of reacting to things that have been breaking completely out of their natural control.
We’ve been party to that. You can work on a record for a year, it’s got all the right A-list artists on it and had a massive major push – and it does absolutely nothing. Then a record with none of that goes viral, and is being signed for hundreds of thousands. If you’re the record label, that’s a tough gig.
“In the UK we’ve got more brilliant songwriters than when I started.”
So, you can’t rest on your laurels. Our roster works every day. We don’t just sit around here. When we take people on, that’s one of the main things we talk about. I’ve spoken to producers before who are really happy in the lane they’re in. I say, ‘That’s brilliant, but we’re probably not the right people for you because we’ll be too keen to send you here and there’.
One of our producer duos, The Elements, with the lanes they worked in, there just wasn’t enough going on here, so we’d send them to LA all the time. One day I said, ‘You should just move there’.
And that’s exactly what they did – and because Milk & Honey is set up that way, the two guys in the US that loved them just took them on. It’s [about] the understanding that there is a bigger picture.
What’s next for Milk & Honey UK?
I’d like to keep expanding with managers and clients, because the more we do collaboratively, the stronger it becomes.
These last five years, we’ve grown from the four clients I brought in to 15-plus, and the staff from me to four people. We want to double that and triple that and it’s the perfect company to do so, because the business model’s been set up correctly.
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