Interview

Artist development, from the manager's side. A conversation with Eshy Gazit

By Eshy Gazit · September 23, 2026

This is the first interview on the blog, and it is with me, which is a strange way to start an interview series. The reason is simple. Over the next months I am going to ask managers, A&R people, publicists, music supervisors and artists to answer questions in writing about how the work actually gets done. It seemed fair to go first. The questions came from the EG Management editorial desk. I answered them the way I would on a call.

Q: People use "artist development" to mean almost anything. What does it mean to you?

Artist development is the work between a good artist and a career. Most artists I meet already have the talent. What they do not have is the order of operations. Which song goes first. What the story is and who it is for. Whether the live show can carry a room yet. Who is on the team and what each person is actually responsible for. How the first release pays for the second one. Development is putting those in an order where each step makes the next one possible. It is slow, it is mostly unglamorous, and it is the part that most people skip because it does not look like progress on a chart.

Q: What is it not?

It is not a marketing budget. It is not a playlist placement. It is not a viral clip. Those are outcomes, sometimes, of development done right. When someone tells me an artist "just needs marketing," what they usually mean is they have not done the work that would make marketing worth paying for. Money spent on an artist who is not ready buys you a spike and then a flat line, and you have taught the market that the artist is someone who spikes and flattens.

Q: You were the US managing partner for BTS from 2016 to 2018. What did that campaign actually look like from the inside?

I want to be exact about the role, because it gets rewritten. BTS were managed by Big Hit Entertainment, now HYBE. The label made the decisions. My company at the time, Gramophone Media, ran the American side of the campaign alongside them. That is the job of a US managing partner: you are not the manager, you are the operating partner in a market the home team cannot run from a distance.

The plan was television first. Then radio. Then collaborations with American artists. Then arenas. In that order, on purpose. American television was the door because it was the one place where an audience that had never heard of the group could see them do the thing they do, live, for three minutes. The 2017 Billboard Music Awards came first, then the American Music Awards performance in November 2017, which Forbes covered at the time as the result of an extended push, not an overnight thing. Ellen, Kimmel and Corden followed. The "Mic Drop" remix with Steve Aoki gave American radio a version it could play. The Wings Tour arena dates sold out. Every step made the next one easier to say yes to.

Q: What did people in the industry say when you started?

That it was never going to happen in the US. Billboard printed that quote from me in the 2017 year in music issue, and I stand by it. A lot of people mocked the attempt. The lesson I took from it is not "I was right." It is that the industry is very good at telling you what has not happened yet, and very bad at telling you what could. If you wait for consensus, you are late by definition.

Q: Then Monsta X, which you have managed since 2018. How was that different?

BTS was a partnership with a label that had already decided to go. With Monsta X I am the manager, so the decisions are mine and so is the accountability. The plan was the same shape and a different size. We signed the group to Epic Records in 2019. They played the iHeartRadio Music Festival that year, the first K-pop act on that stage, and headlined Staples Center. "All About Luv" went to number five on the Billboard 200 in 2020, an English-language album from a Korean group, which was the point. "The Dreaming" reached number three on Top Album Sales in 2021. "Unfold" reached number two on Top Album Sales this year. The group has been together over a decade, which in this business is the real result.

Q: What do you do all day? People outside the business do not know what a manager does.

I run the career. That sounds vague so let me be specific. I set the plan and I hold everyone to it. I build the team: the agent, the label, the publicist, the lawyer, the business manager, the creative people. I hire them and, when it is not working, I replace them. I make the decisions an artist should not have to make alone, and I take the call when something goes wrong at two in the morning. I say no to most things. And I am the person who has to make the whole thing add up financially, because a career that loses money every year is not a career, it is a hobby with a team.

The booking agent books shows. The label releases the record. The publicist gets the press. None of them run the career. That is why I keep saying that CAA, WME and UTA are not management companies. They are excellent at what they do. What they do is not this.

Q: What do you look for before you sign someone?

Three things, and they are in order.

First, the work. Songs I would play twice without being paid to. A live show, or the clear bones of one. A point of view that survives a second listen.

Second, the person. Are they going to do the work for years, not months? Do they take a note? Do they know where they actually are, not where they wish they were? I have watched more careers end from the artist's own impatience than from anything the market did.

Third, whether I am the right person for the job. I am a US manager for international artists. If someone is a great country songwriter in Nashville, there are people who will do a better job for them than I will. I would rather say that on the first call than a year in.

Q: You describe yourself as a US manager for international artists, and you now run a lot of your work with Asian artists as an operating partner rather than as a signing. Why?

Because that is what the market actually needs. An artist with a strong label at home in Seoul or Tokyo or Bangkok does not need a new manager. They need someone in the United States who can run the market for them: the television, the label conversation, the radio version, the press, the touring, the timing. That is a partner role, and it works best when the home team stays the home team. I did it with Big Hit for BTS. I have done it since. It is the model I would recommend to any label in Asia thinking about America, and it is the model most American managers do not offer because they want the whole artist.

For an artist in the US or the UK who does not have a team yet, it is the other track. There, the job really is management, start to finish.

Q: What has changed in the last ten years?

The audience got there before the industry did. In 2017 I wrote an open letter to the American music business saying, in short, this is happening whether you like it or not. A year later it had. Today there is no argument left about whether an artist from Korea, or anywhere else, can have a real American career. The argument is about how, and it has moved from "can we get them on television" to "can we build something that lasts after the first big moment." That is a better problem. It is also harder.

The tools changed too. You can buy attention now in ways you could not in 2016, and most people buy it badly. I built Bandkick partly out of frustration with watching artists spend money on ads with no plan behind them. But a tool is a tool. The order of operations has not changed.

Q: What is the most common mistake you see teams make with a developing artist?

Releasing too much, too fast, with no reason. The second is spending on an artist who is not ready, which I covered. The third is confusing the team's excitement for the audience's. If ten people who work for the artist love the song, that is ten people. Go find out what strangers do with it before you build a year around it.

Q: What would you tell a manager in year one?

Say no more than you say yes. Read the contracts yourself, then have the lawyer read them. Do not take a percentage of something you did not build. Return the call the same day. And pick your artists like you are going to be with them for ten years, because if you are doing it right, you will be.

Q: What is next for you?

More of the same, on purpose. Monsta X and Wonho on Intertwine Records. The management roster. The US partner work with labels in Asia. LUSIVEX on the press and marketing side. Bandkick as the tool. And this blog, where I intend to ask the people I respect the same questions I just answered, and publish what they say.

Sources

Eshy Gazit is a US music manager for international artists. US managing partner for BTS 2016 to 2018, manager of Monsta X since 2018, partner at Maverick Management, founder of EG Management, Intertwine Records and LUSIVEX. Billboard International Power Player 2021 and 2022. Contact.