CRISIS MANAGEMENT.

Managers are still seen as the bad guys when the relationship with an artist breaks down.

The appearance of Jonathan Shalit and former protege Charlotte Church outside the High Court in November was yet another reminder of the fact that artists and their managers are not always friends for life, And even though 15-year-old Church was spared a court appearance by the last-minute intervention of her label, Sony Music, her experience of the sharp legal end of the music industry will nonetheless have bestowed her with the wisdom of a battle-scarred artist twice her age.

The turn of the millennium has seen a rash of artist-versus-manager spats, many of which have reached their conclusion only with the ruling of a judge.

Elton John, Richard Ashcroft and LeAnn Rimes are currently involved in such legal action, while Shalit settled his differences with his young discovery for a figure generally held to be around the 2m [pounds sterling] mark.

Despite the routine deployment of increasingly detailed contracts, some of them dozens of pages long, the legal position of managers seems to be increasingly open to dispute. The time has come, according to many managers and even a handful of lawyers, for a reappraisal of the manager's role, along with an end to the off-hand dismissals, grudging pay-outs and courtroom face-offs which have come to characterise the public face of artist-manager relations.

The cornerstones of such disagreements are invariably money and, to a greater or lesser extent, control. Few managers take on an artist solely out of love so much as a conviction that, together, they can succeed and, ultimately, make a lot of cash. According to Shalit, it is only when that money begins to roll that artists begin to question their need for this kind of profit-sharing partnership.

"An artist never complains when a manager earns 20 [pounds sterling] out of 100 [pounds sterling]; it is when he earns 200,000 [pounds sterling] out of 1m [pounds sterling] that they start to resent it," he says.