Any musicians who are using the Internet networks to showcase their music such as Facebook, Myspace and many other social networks should be aware of people that may try and take advantage of them. Over many years as the music industry has seen a decline in revenue and they have had to let many members of staff go. These members of staff that have worked for the big record labels have enough knowledge to be able to set up on their own. They create their own titles such as booking agents, managers, and publicists and try and make a lot of money from the musicians. Although the people approaching you may have indeed worked for a music label and seem to know what they are talking about it still might not mean that they have your best interests at heart and may want to just get a large cut of your money for doing absolutely no work at all. Unfortunately with the amount of record labels making redundancies steadily over the past decade the numbers of these scam artists are forever on the increase. The way in which these scam artists work is by contacting people on their social network pages and sending them a message. To gain the musician’s trust they usually start by saying that they used to work for a major music label and then go on to say everything that the musician wants to hear. This is usually a sales pitch such as gushing with compliments and praise and telling them that they will be the next big sensation in the industry. There is no musician that doesn’t want to hear this and it makes it easier to believe, but please don’t be fooled. Like anyone that offers you something make sure that you check them out first and ensure that they are indeed who they say they are and that you check up on any references. Any contracts that you are given should be taken to a music lawyer or a lawyer from the entertainment business to ensure that everything is above board and correct. On careful research it should be known that any manager that is asking to manage you and help you to become professional should on average only take 10 percent of the money you take so don’t be fooled into giving someone a 40 percent cut when you are the ones doing all the hard work.

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