International Journal of Humanitatis Theoreticus. Vol. 2, No. 1; May, 2019
Effective Talent Management: A Panacea to Self-Sustainable Career and Vocation in the Performing Arts and Culture Industry in Nigeria Stanley Ohenhen PhD,
Theatre Arts Programme Bowen University, Iwo, Osun State, Nigeria +234818 267 7808; +234 805 364 8999 [email protected]; [email protected]
Abstract The performing arts is a professional discipline with immense career and vocational opportunities and potentialities. These opportunities span both paid-employment and self- employment ventures that can be optimized by performing arts scholars and practitioners. Ironically, there exists an alarming rate of employment and entrepreneurial instability in the sector in that most performing artists and artistes do not seem to be able to sustain gainful engagement over a lifetime or at least over a reasonable long haul without them either veering into other seemingly more lucrative and sustainable means of livelihood, or completely fading into oblivion. This situation is often due to lack of deliberate attention to effective talent management, which incidentally is a critical success factor in the more conventional industries, be it an entrepreneurial pursuit or a gainful employment. This paper examines talent management as an effective intervention in the quest for enduring and sustainable vocation or career in the performing arts and culture industry, against the background of the persisting doubts over the economic and commercial viability of the sector. In-depth one-on-one interviews, focused group discussions and library research methods, are relied on, and data collected subjected to content analysis. The paper concludes that there is a habitual lack of concerted and consistent attention to effective talent management by both artist employees and artist self-employees in the Nigerian performing arts and culture sector, as against the practice in the conventional industries, and that, more than any other factor, this is largely contributory to the perennial self-sustaining career and vocational deficiencies faced by performing artistes and artists in Nigeria.
Keywords: performing arts; career and vocation; sustainability; talent management; employment and self-employment. Introduction The performing arts and culture is potentially one of the most commercially and economically viable industry in the global economy. It is an industry that is endowed with immense employability and entrepreneurial opportunities for potential and existing artist and artiste practitioners and professionals in each of the sub-genres namely: television, film, radio, social media, and then of course, dance, drama, dance drama and music. Across each of these sub-genres, there are vocational and career opportunities such as script and screenplay writing, script and film editing, directing for film and stage, photography, costume designing, make up design, acting for stage, television and cinema, dance training school, dance therapy palour, music producing, music school, set construction and design, lighting and camera works. This is to say the least about the career and vocational potentials in the culture industry. The creative ventures that could be explored in any and each of these talent areas are equally immense. These can be further broken down into sub-categories namely: • Creative Arts namely: literature, music, performing arts – dance, drama, music and poetry; visual arts (fine arts, craft, sculpture and textile
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International Journal of Humanitatis Theoreticus. Vol. 2, No. 1; May, 2019
• Cultural industries namely: film (Cinema), home videos, museums and libraries, heritage services, publishing, marketing, sound recording, television and radio, video, media related industries, advertising, architecture, design, fashion.
• Copyright Industries namely: advertising services, motion picture and video, music, theatre and opera, press and literature, software and databases, television and radio, photography, visual and graphic arts, blank recording materials, consumer electronics, clothing, footwear, cinematographic instruments, ICT computers and equipment, household goods, gift items etc. There are over 250 sub-categories of vocational and career opportunities in the performing arts and culture industry, and this makes the industry a potentially high value-contributor to the world economy. For example, according to a UNESCO report cited in Ohenhen (93, 2017), “the arts and culture industries generate $1.3 trillion in jobs and income annually, and account for 7% of global GDP”. The report further states that “the culture sector accounted for 5.8% of employment in 2004 and 2.38% of Mali’s GDP in 2006, accounting for 57% of the national economy” In a similar report, again cited in Ohenhen (93, 2017), the Conference Board of Canada on its hosting of the International Forum on the Creative Economy in 2008, recognized the culture sector as the foundation of the creative economy, detailing further that “the economic footprint of the culture sector in Canada is valued at about $84.6 billion in 2007, or 7.4 per cent of total real GDP (Ohenhen, 93, 2017). The foregoing further establishes the premise that there is a lot going for the performing arts and culture industry around the world far beyond what the Nigerian artist and artiste career professionals and practitioners are taking advantage of. With a more careful and deliberate attention being paid to effective talent management, the performing arts and culture industry in Africa and particularly in Nigeria, can become a more dependably self-sustaining commercial and economically viable vocation and career haven for its practitioners and even the nations at large. Adie buttressed, when he argues that theatre as praxis is broad based; the practice can engage children in development issues (2019:18) This paper examines the potentialities of talent management in its assumed capacity at making the performing arts and culture industry a more lucratively dependable vocation for Nigerian artists and artistes against the background of the myth of poverty and immorality that challenge its employment and entrepreneurial capacities What is Talent Management? Talent management is a term that means so much to the conventional industries in the way it contributes to its employee engagement and intellectual capital development. Talent management has been a trending concept in recent years of the 21-Century economy. It has a positive effect on the ability of the individual or organisation to create a compelling, productive, and valued enterprise for all stakeholders — employees, customers, business partners and investors. Talent management facilitates employee as well as employer flexibility and enables the planned rapid growth and sustainability of the business as well as ensuring rapid alignment with the requirements established by business leaders as the company evolves. (Bayyoud and Sayyad, 2015) The aggressive competitiveness of organisations and businesses in the 21st Century has shown how companies, businesses and organisations benchmark top quality in their operations of products, services and ideas marketing or manufacturing. Many resort to sophisticated management systems, upgraded production equipment and materials, and more efficient manufacturing methods. Beside these, it has become evident that most organisations and corporate individuals have realised the need to also pay more cursory attention to the management of their talents. This is due to their realisation that better product quality, system
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International Journal of Humanitatis Theoreticus. Vol. 2, No. 1; May, 2019 efficiency, resolutions to problems, and innovation for growth can only be best achieved when the human factor in the organisation are best managed. That said, the focus and need for human capital is a major asset that needs unwavering attention and deliberate investment in the corporate or organisational set up. Talent management is, according to Bayyoud and Sayyad (2015), “that aspect of company operations that pertains to the people factor, that is, the leaders and workforce members that run the operations; and that it involves company planning to attain quality human talents and skills and to get a process to make that human resource methodology efficient and rewarding for the companies’ ultimate good.” The talent management process involves locating, selecting, training, developing, retaining, managing, promoting, compensating, and rewarding employees. To that extent, talent management implies finding the right leaders and personnel, or talent, and managing their abilities and competences to serve the purpose of the organisation as well as the personal and the career satisfaction of the employees or of the self-employees. According to Dries et al, as cited in Al Aris ed. (2014), “the talent management process should gear toward finding the right employee and bringing out the best in them for higher marketable values, and that, maximizing the factors of production namely: land, capital and fixed assets are no longer enough key resources for the organisations to be highly competitive in the current economy”. Human capital is a key resource to adapt the organisations to the contemporary global competition. Therefore, organisations and corporate individual management experts are competing against each other to acquire and retain talents in order to maintain their operations and continue to grow (Gardner, 2002). Determinants of talent management include; talent attraction, talent retention, learning and development and career management, each of these processes must be designed to fit the strategic requirements of the business as well as integrate with each other (Bayyoud and Sayyad, 2015). Dries et al (2014) posit that “talent management refers to the art of recognizing where each employee’s areas of natural talent lie, and figuring out how to help each employee (or self-employee), develop the job-specific skills and knowledge to turn those talents into real performance, elevating each person’s performance to its highest possible levels, given the individual’s natural talents. Goes without saying that a deliberate attempt to have specific talents, employees, entrepreneurs (self-employed individuals), get effectively managed, goes a long way to maximise performance and productivity, and in effect, bring about consistent and sustainable unprecedented marketability and viability. The people make the industry. If the competence, consistence and marketability of a person, product or service are to be optimised and become self-sustainable over time, the talents behind them have to be effectively and efficiently managed. Talent Management in the Performing Arts and Culture Industry. A negative public attitude and misconception against the performing arts ultimately has far-reaching implications on the various forms of public supports, sponsorship and patronages for the arts. This has also in a larger sense impacted on the survival of the performing artistes and artists in their efforts at retaining the arts as their means of sustainable livelihood. It becomes necessary therefore, that the artists either become better equipped in the art of do-it- yourself talent management or engage the professional theatre managers to manage their entire concerns in a manner that effectively confronts the said challenges on one hand, and for the most efficient deployment of their expendable and earned material and financial resources. This will bring about an optimisation of results and achievements of the utmost economic and commercial viability for the industry.
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Talent Management possesses the required components and capacity to aid the performing arts and culture industry practitioners – employers and employees alike, to be more proactive, productive and proficient in making their practice become more socio-culturally acceptable and economically prosperous, well enough to sustain their livelihood. A talent manager in the performing arts is an individual or company who guides the professional career of artists in a manner that oversees the day-to-day business affairs of the individual artist, artistes or art troupe or company; advising and counseling the talents concerning professional and business matters, long-term plans and personal decisions which may affect the sustainability, growth and prosperity of their career. The talent manager in the performing arts and culture industry can also, in some contexts be referred to as an artist manager, band manager or music manager in case of a musical band. Talent managers are professionals who help performers handle their daily business. They may help actors select scripts and find new agents, help singers produce record albums and book tour dates, and plan and promote performers' upcoming activities. They may also identify people with performing talent and direct them to resources for developing that talent (http://www.wikihow.com/Become-a- Talent-Manager, 2016). As relevant and quintessential talent management is to the conventional industries however, the performing arts and culture industry, especially in Nigeria does not seem to pay it due attention. Talent management may however differ in some ways in its application in the performing arts than it is in the more conventional industry, giving that it is a most fluid, creative, and ever-changing industry. For example, could there be set rules to manage talents in the Performing Arts? The film/video and culture sub-industry for example works on different principles than regular corporate sectors. Being highly creative, volatile and erratic, and following different work schedules, artists and artistes hardly deem it necessary to subject themselves to the discipline of set management principles, rules and patterns. This makes the sector difficult to align with the regular corporate-style management strategies of the more conventional industries. For example, income earnings in this sector especially for most freelance artists and artistes (which are usually in the majority) do not come on a regimented periodic bases due to the nature of their often-one-off engagements, usually on a performance by performance basis, so this, as an instance, poses fiscal management discipline challenges to the earners. Howbeit, for the sector to become commercially and economically self-sustaining and viable for its practitioners and for the economy as a whole, it must submit itself to contemporary talent management systems, to which other conventional sectors in the economy, and incidentally, the performing arts subsector of most developed and even developing countries of the world, are equally compliant. India for example has the largest film industry in the world from where Bollywood takes its root. Indian films are watched all over the world. There are several centers of filmmaking in India, which produce films in several languages, including English. Indian cinema has survived and thrived for more than 100 years and has established itself as a unique cinematic aesthetic experience in the world cinema. (https://www.peoplematters.in/article/talent-management: 2016). However, a closer look at the talent management in their film marketing, distribution and showcasing sectors shows that the India cinema industry emerge as very diverse sectors, ranging from single person to small, unorganised, non-Talent Management based to very large, multi-regional and multinational, formalised corporate-style organisations. It is instructive to note, how this large industry and other allied sectors involved in cultural production manage their talents within the formalised organisations (https://www.peoplematters.in/article/talent-management: 2016).
The Talent Management in film and culture industry is of mixed nature. Many film companies all over the world including India and in Nigeria (as cases in point), that are involved in marketing, distribution and show-casing work in an informal manner, work closely with the
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International Journal of Humanitatis Theoreticus. Vol. 2, No. 1; May, 2019 actors, musicians, singers, producers, cinematographers and directors in a personal and case by case capacity. Some of them are one or two person companies and therefore could hire self- employed or freelance professional (Arts) Talent Managers to manage their concerns. However, a few of them are large conglomerates and have a full-fledged Human Resources management system, to acquire, train and manage their employees and to meet their business targets.
The Nigerian Movie industry, branded in a major sense as Nollywood, is one of the biggest in the world movie industry today especially in terms of production volume turn out. Al Jazeera in a report in 2015, according to Hammed (2018), states that it was worth five billion USD, making it the second world largest in the movie industry to India’s Bollywood, and way ahead of America’s Hollywood. Today, according to Udomisor and Anayo (2014), Nollywood as a film industry with a parade of several highly rated actors and actresses, and of course, several great directors, screenplay writers, producers, cinematographers, costumiers and other professional artistes and behind the camera artists, are seen as a platform for modelling the future and prospect of film making in Africa. More so, more of the teaming youth-population are seeking to make career in the performing art industry via Nigeria’s Nollywood (and of course some key African Counries’ like Ghana’s Ghallywood). Nollywood has become a point of reference for other African filmmakers and industries on the continent. Nevertheless, there remain many challenges that the industry contends with today that attempt to overwhelm the seeming bubbling image of the sector. Most of the lapses border on the lack of effective talent management.
Talent Management ironically seems the least of the concerns of most of the artistes and artists themselves as they seem not to appreciate its quintessence and therefore the lacuna created by the lack of it, in the Nigerian movie industry. It is indeed a critical factor. A larger percentage of the talents in the Nigerian movie industry are either not trained performing arts professionals, or are not effectively managed by professional Arts and Talent Managers in a way that will engender optimum productivity from them as well as enable them to be able to consistently retain their art as their self-sustaining vocation. This therefore creates a lot of career instability and inconsistencies in their self-acclaimed undocumented professionalism as well as the frequent possibilities of fizzling out completely from the vocation as fast as they had come in. According to Hammed (2018), some of the contemporary artists and artistes in the Nigerian Movie industry today actually pay to get their role assignments regardless of their expertise and virtuoso. Others get perhaps an average of a major engagement per annum. Many others have circled out in their numbers. These are the existing realities of the other side of the coin, beyond the veneer of the glamour that is the industry.
The Role of Talent Management in the Performing Arts and Culture Industry Understandably, performance is a huge part of the performing arts and culture, which encapsulates, amongst others, music, opera, dance, drama, film and television productions. Without talented performers, the other jobs in these industries such as behind the stage (or camera) activities would not exist. Every performer need someone to believe in them enough to give them the needed guidance, exposure, network, grooming and financial backing to maximize their in-built potentialities. To that extent, a wealth of careers dedicated to the discovery, development, promotion and management of talents becomes quintessential to the optimisation of the skills, talents and professionalism embedded in the individual performers.
Meanwhile, there are quite a lot of performers that are not naturally talented and also need some extra help to reach their potential. Even those people who appear to have the easy flair for song writing, or the ability to transform from one character to another so easily for
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International Journal of Humanitatis Theoreticus. Vol. 2, No. 1; May, 2019 example, often need some extra training, grooming and perhaps, tuition supports to really be at the top of their career. By and large, every talent requires a degree of talent management to be able to have his or her potentials maximized.
The roles and responsibilities of a talent manager vary slightly from industry to industry. For example, the duties of a talent manager managing a musical artiste differ from those that manage models, actors, writers, or directors. Artist Talent Managers face a myriad of challenges in today’s performing arts marketplace in Nigerian. These include the dearth of knowledge resource and required information for potential managers to understand the critical multifarious roles of management in maximizing the productivity and sustainability of the artist in the Nigerian performing arts terrain; in that the business of artist talent management is still a relatively new one in Nigeria; starting a company with limited or no funds and having to acquire adequate funding for business as well as for artist’s projects, and of course, the huge challenge of gaining access to the top-notch industry-players. However, the talent manager’s tasks, within which are actually hidden, the opportunities there are, for existing and potential artist talents managers in Nigeria include: the need to also grow their artist’s career, beside their own business; knowing how to build contacts for their artist; getting the right exposures for their artists on a limited budget; determining how to generate consistent income for their artists and appropriate divestment of such income into other ventures; dealing with enormous competitive activities, exposing their artistes and artists to strategic partners and investors locally and internationally and then of course providing exposure to favourable public and media relations; and ultimately developing a brand for their artists as well as themselves in the industry (http://www.wikihow.com/Become-a-Talent- Manager).
To that extent, the role of a typical artist talent manager in ensuring the survival and consistent economic and commercial viability of the performing artist in Nigeria cannot be over emphasized. Ironically, the awareness of the entrepreneurial leverage to which the performing artists are exposed is still very low. A lot of ‘star’ artists – musicians, actors and even other non-management dramatists and performers such as dancers, playwright/scriptwriters, models, designers, talk-show artistes, directors and itinerary repertory troupes go about their businesses with a do-it-yourself talent-management disposition, without taking advantage of the proficiencies of the professional talent managers.
While most performing artists and artistes might even be able to perform many of these talent management tasks themselves (which a few of them invariably do, and well too), it however becomes too cumbersome, distracting, disorienting and dis-organising for them attempting to combine the nitty-gritty details of talent management activities such as business development, marketing communications, public relations, budget and expenditure and income management along with the artistic and technical bits of writing, rehearsing, recording, touring, the actual performance and the usual public relational interaction with fans and the media.
The artists are therefore hardly left with sufficient time to do much else, and the resultant implications therefore would be a burn-out and likely eventual crashing out of circulation in no time including many other negative effects. This then opens up the individual artists or the industry at large becoming even more vulnerable to the said challenges already facing the sector. The talent managers’ role is to do much of the technical analytical work that helps to chart a course for the artist to take, while leaving the artist to concentrate on the creativity and performances as well as engaging the fans.
Talent Management Strategies for the Performing Arts and Culture Industry
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This research in this section provides some technical details on what may be required to effectively talent-manage talents in the performing arts and culture industry. The following are some of the strategies of Talent Management across the performing arts and cultural sectors:
1. Talent grooming a. Appearance: The appearance of any talent on and off stage and the screen matters immensely. Most artists and artistes are extremely careless about their looks, their attires, personal hygiene and overall appearances whether in public or on stage, in the name of being ‘creative’ and therefore, ‘unconventional’ people. This goes a long way in determining the perception of the publics about them, which may be either that of respect or disdain. Because of the appearance of most artists, parents and guardians decide against their children or wards becoming performing artists in the first instance. They tend to pose unduly tardy, weird, deviant and sometimes-schizophrenic outlooks, while others perpetually pose the image of immorality and promiscuity, which becomes put-offs to potential patrons, audiences, fans or sponsors. Talent management efforts that aims at a dignifying, respectable and very professional appearances whether on stage, on screen or in public, or even in the artists’ private lives, goes a long way in promoting public acceptability, patronage and support. b. Emotional Intelligence: An artist or artiste that must endure in their profession and earn a lifetime living therefrom must learn to become well self-aware, self-managed, and sensitive to the emotions and sensibilities of their audience and publics as well as effectively managing the discerned emotions and sensibilities. Most artists ironically believe that a necessary part of stardom is insensitivity to the feelings of their publics, wearing snobbish outlandish looks as though the world revolves around them. These uncharismatic tendencies put off potential patrons and supporters. An effective talent management package must therefore include a grooming of the employee or self- employed artist/artiste in emotional intelligence, which enables them to become smart with their emotions and that of their publics and thereby able to effectively manage those emotions. This will ultimately become an attractiveness index between the artiste- talent and his or her publics. c. Business Ethics and Etiquette: The performing arts and culture industry, like its counterpart conventional industries, has a set of ethical rules and regulations that guide the conducts, operations and overall transactional relationships of the practitioners. For example, tendencies like responsiveness to time management, promise keeping, respect for other artists, and decorum in personal and interpersonal conducts, appropriate aesthetic distance in interpersonal relationships, are usually guided with some form of code of conducts – written or unwritten. It is therefore the business of talent management to ensure that the talent subjects are well schooled in these professional ethics and not flout them at the peril of their own business growth and sustainability. d. Relationship Management: Every performer within a performance process requires other set of individuals, be them equally artists/artistes or behind the scene people or members of the public, to be able to perform effectively and repeatedly. Even in a solo performance, the performer needs at least one or more other persons to make his or her performance stage or screen-worthy. Beyond that, the performer also eventually needs the audience, the fan, the supporters, the sponsors and patrons. A concerted positive and favourable relationship with this cross-section of individuals or groups of persons, for the talent-artist therefore becomes a sine qua non. To that extent, every employee/self-employed talent must become relationship managers to survive and thrive remarkably and consistently in the industry. This can however be achieved or aided by a professional art/talent manager.
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e. Exposure to Training in Professional Areas: In the performing arts and culture industry, the artists and artistes must realise soon enough that talents and gifts are not enough. In fact, while a lot of artists and artistes may have the good fortune of been talented in their areas of performative arts, quite a lot are not as fortunate. They have to struggle a lot to get into the practical details of the art with which they have to do. But even at that, a lot of trainings both in the direct line of business of the artist, or in allied disciplines, is required on the job and off the job for on-going horning and updating of the profession. This will enable the artist-performer become acquainted with latest developments in their fields and professional specialisations and therefore remaining ever relevant and sought out in the industry. 2. Business Goal-Setting, Planning and Budgeting: Goal setting, planning and budgeting are generally management orientations that requires a deliberate projection and setting of business goals for the future and determining the strategies of achieving them now. A larger number of talents do not have the aptitude nor attitude for disciplined business planning and budgeting, nor do they even deem it necessary in the first instance. This is because they do not even see their art as business and could therefore hardly separate it from their personal informal life. The job of talent management therefore includes molding the perspective of the employee or self-employed talent to appreciate his or her art as a business concern, which therefore requires such business orientations as goal setting, planning and budgeting. 3. Personal and Corporate Financial Planning: In consonance with No. 2 above, deliberate efforts at financial planning both for the personal and corporate life of the talents is as important as the need to sustain their art and livelihood over a lifetime. Talent managers help their talent to design an income/expenditure annual personal and corporate financial plan, which will help to ensure strict financial discipline and survival. 4. Strategic planning: Strategic planning includes a holistic planning process that envelopes the entire corporate essence of the artist and his or her organisation. Every individual employee-artist or self-employed artist should evolve a vision statement, which states where the subject intends to be; a mission statement, which states the day-to-day process of getting there, and of course a set of core values and culture guidelines. All of these provide a lifetime howbeit, reviewable platform for corporate day-to-day operations and guidelines. According to Webb (2004, 128), a well-crafted mission statement should be able to “motivate people inside the organisation, inspire and invite support (from outside), must be understood to provide a lot of flexibility to the organisation as it considers how to accomplish its goals”. Ivancevich et al (1994, 207) posit that “an organisation’s mission is its raison d’ etre, (French for ‘reason for being’), the fundamental purpose it is designed to serve”. 5. Fund Sourcing and Management: Very critical to the survival and sustenance of the performing arts and culture talents in business is a regular substantial source of funds for diverse events management, depending on the vocation genre of the said artist employee or artist self-employee. A typical talent manager has the technical resource for sourcing needed funds by way of loans, equities, or other forms of investment capital and then manage them appropriately. 6. Public Relations: This is the image and public goodwill management aspect of the talent management efforts. The British Institute of Public Relations (BIPR) defines public relations as a deliberate, planned and sustained effort targeted at building mutual understanding (Cutlip, et al 1994:1, 2). It is the ability to effectively identify, analyse, and understand one’s publics and plan, establish and sustain a mutually beneficial relationship with these publics. The talent management public relations efforts include an interaction with the media, host communities and all key stakeholders in the Talent’s business affairs to ensure that public opinions and perceptions are always favourably disposed towards
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them (the Talent). This also covers the management of the reputation and general image perception and ultimately the brand perception of the talent. This goes a long way in ensuring the sustainability and growth of businesses. 7. Marketing and Advertising: Talent management strategies should include marketing and advertising activities, selecting the right and most effective medium to sell the talent or his or her performing arts’ cultural products and services. Choosing the most effective and cost-efficient marketing and advertising methods goes a long way in determining success in creating the right level of awareness amongst the right audience for the right performances. This also ensures that the right kind of performances are selected for the right audience. Any error of miss-match in this could lead to a lot of frustration and business failure. 8. Forecasting and Trends Management: The following are different forecasting and trends management concerns that an effective talent manager must constantly raise and provide answers to:
• Which of the artists’ products sell the most (downloads, physical products, custom items, tickets, subscriptions, etc.), and which sell the least and perhaps should be discontinued? • What new products can be added and which new revenue streams can be exploited? • Which pay models work the best (fixed price, pay-what-you-want, donations, bundles, etc.)? • Which campaigns are the most effective (virtual street teams, newsletters, videos, chats, vlogs, blogs, etc.) and which ones generate the most feedback and results? • Which calls-to-action are the most effective (e.g., sign up to the mailing list for a free download, pre-order a limited edition, autographed CD, etc.)? • What trends or patterns are developing, and how to best take advantage of them? • Which platforms/widgets are most useful and relevant for a particular artist (review demos and sign up for trials to find the best fit)? • Which songs, videos, images, t-shirt designs, etc. resonate with fans the most? • Who are the artists’ “super fans”, and how to leverage that relationship to generate more sales? • Which questions to include in polls to figure out what the artists’ fans want? • Which ways do fans most wish to engage and interact with the artist? • What actionable information can be extracted from comments and feedback from fans and listeners? • Where are fans most clustered and what are the best ways to route a tour? • What does the data reveal that will result in an increase in sales and income? • What are the true costs of the artist’s operations (i.e., what is being earned vs. what is being spent)? (https://www.artistmanagementresource.com/articles/22, 2016)
9. Business Investment Advisement: The trend amongst the talents in the Nigerian performing arts industry especially the movie and music sub-sectors is the competitive and voluptuous appetite for the acquisition of trending ostentatious wealth expressed in the acquisition of state-of-the-art automobiles and buildings properties in the highbrow districts of the urban cities, and other squandermaniac style of living, all coming at most prohibitive costs. Incidentally, these buying decisions are unadvisedly made with every new income earned from sporadic performance engagements, and without a careful plan for the future. However, one of the strategies of effective talent management is introducing a formal structure into the business life of the talent ensuring that appropriate investments decisions are made from their huge earnings.
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Conclusion The paper has sufficiently argued that the performing arts and culture industry is richly endowed with existing and potential capacities to accommodate equally well-endowed talents as well as the potential to be commercially and economically viable enough to sustain its talent with self-sustaining careers and vocations. However, this is ironically not the case as most of the talents that are engaged in one vocation or the other in the performing arts eventually find themselves abandoning their arts for other seeming more lucrative careers and vocations in the conventional industry. Engagement of employee or self-employed artistes and artists over a long haul are usually very erratic and uncertain. The paper concludes that the lack of effective talent management as practiced in the conventional industries, which incidentally contributes to their high performance, is the main bane of the performing arts and culture industry. Talents no doubt are the best assets of any organisation – performing arts or otherwise. The higher performing a set of talents are, the greater the organisations they represent. Effective management of these talents therefore becomes a highly recommended panacea to making engagement in the performing arts and culture industry more attractive, more self-sustaining, and more commercially and economically viable, and therefore making it become a more self-sustaining career and vocation haven for existing and potential artists and artistes.
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