‘There Is Next To No Margin For Error In This Industry’: The Story Of Runway Artists & What It Says About The State Of Business

Matt Hanner founded Runway Artists in 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, after having spent nearly a decade at major agencies including Coda (now Wasserman Music) and ATC Live (now ROAM).

He knew that Runway needed to excel in the quality of services it provided for artists if it wanted to become a serious contender in the agency world. And despite throwing everything behind the creation of a company that wouldn’t meander down the path of “boutique irrelevance”, as Hanner puts it, the team was forced to abandon their ambitious mission at the end of 2025. This is his story.

In order to live up to the goal he had set out – in his words, “working with great artists and giving them a platform for a long and successful career” – the most important element was Runway’s staff. He knew that good people, who know what they’re doing, form the backbone of any successful business. Steve Backman joined in 2021, after almost 20 years at Primary Talent International, immediately elevating the newly formed business by bringing his roster, network and reputation to the table.

“We both wanted to continue to work at the level we had been used to working at,” Hanner recalls, but the biggest names on Runway’s roster were heritage artists, such as Public Image Ltd. or Sleeper, who definitely generate some good business, but, as Hanner puts it, “aren’t setting the world alight in terms of new music. They’re not breakthrough names that are only going to get bigger and bigger.”

Nevertheless, he continues, “we wanted to be able to keep our seat at the table while not having any of the bigger names. We also wanted to do things a little bit differently. We wanted to build long careers for artists as well as our professional staff. We wanted to deliver the kind of service these artists were used to receiving at bigger agencies.”

The way to achieve that, of course, was hiring competent people that could provide such a service, but without a corporate infrastructure to sustain it all. “A lot of small agencies start out as one, two or three people,” Hanner explains, “and they initially do everything themselves. You’re doing all the paperwork, the finances, while still trying to be out there representing and advocating for your artists the best you can.

“We took the decision to bring in support staff relatively early, to allow us to provide a really good level of service. Heather [Mosselson] joined us as our Senior Assistant, brought in years of experience from Primary Talent, Glastonbury and other places, and she was able to lead all the training of our younger members of staff we brought in. We brought in a bookkeeper, because up until that point, I was doing all the money, and there’s a limit to how much of that you can do before you start to go a bit crazy, especially as the roster grows.”

Runway hired a great mix of people, former agents, veteran agents, newcomers, who were young, “and we believe that they have the makings of great agents who would have great careers.”

A reasonable salary for an agent starting from scratch comes down to more than 40 grand a year by the time you’ve paid all the company obligations in the UK, according to Hanner, who adds, “It’s going to take at least a couple of years before you’re getting anywhere near to breaking even on that.”

Investing in a team Hanner felt “would give us the best chance of success in the long term also presented a risk: if it didn’t work, if it didn’t stack up, there was going to be a shortfall.”

Over the coming years, the team went to work. That’s when it became clear that today’s live economy doesn’t work in favor of a small agency with a relatively small roster.

“The vast majority of the shows we were booking were under 1,000 capacity, and the majority were under 350 capacity. We were working a lot in grassroots venues, these aren’t big fees. You’re maybe getting paid at best £1,000 pounds ($1,364) in the UK for some of these. Obviously going into Europe, which involves higher costs, it’s difficult to get more than €300 to €500 out of shows in grassroots venues. It’s very hard to keep a business running long term on that basis.”

The festival market, too, is no longer a place where an independent agency can book slots for a roster of new acts. Festivals have been particularly affected by the rising production costs, many feel they cannot afford to take anymore risks on their lineups – once a defining quality of the festival business.

“There are very strong relationships between certain festival producers and the bigger agencies, because they know that’s where their talent pipeline is going to come from,” Hanner explains, “a lot of these events are not curated as artistically as they once were. It’s data driven, and how certain artists might impact sales. Obviously people running events are always trying to sell tickets, but it just feels like it has become much more that way, especially for those that are controlled by big corporations. There’s just less incentive for these companies to really be bold. Why waste your small slots on companies like ours, when you could do a favor for someone that might be giving you your headline act next year.

And he continues, “The people you’re dealing with to book festivals are no longer necessarily curators or even programmers. They’re talent buyers. It’s something that has really shifted. Obviously the festival circuit is tough. It’s an expensive business to be in, especially if you’re not going to go down the route of big sponsorship. There are smaller events that had to go down a route of booking more mainstream names in order to attract a different audience that would save them from having to fold. You start booking bigger headliners, you get fans turning up to see those headliners, rather than go and experience three days of a festival where you might find something new. There are still a lot of great independent festivals out there, but it’s not getting any easier.”

In the end, there just wasn’t enough business to be found in order to sustain a company of Runway’s size, no matter how motivated the team might have been when they took on the challenge. Eventually, some of them began looking for jobs that promised more opportunities and financial security, and Hanner doesn’t blame them. “It’s just a shame that we weren’t in a position to go back to these people and give them a bit more of what they needed,” he says.

His experience is shared by others in the industry. “As I talk to other people that run independent agencies, it becomes clear that this is a tough landscape, whether you work on your own or in a small team. The costs aren’t getting any lower, there’s a lot of people now, who are just working from home to keep costs down, but that also leads to an element of isolation. You’re not as well connected, you’re not feeling part of the community. When I think of grassroots music and independence within the music scene, I think of collaboration, community, great scenes of years gone by like the punk scene and things like that. That’s what it was all about, but it’s something we’ve lost, especially within the agency world.”

Looking back at the past five years, there wasn’t a deciding moment that sealed the fate of Runway Artists, or as Hanner puts it, “not necessarily one big thing that’s come out of nowhere and really hit our cash flow. Our biggest investment was people salaries, our costs outside of that were quite limited. We’d pay agency expenses up to a point, and we decided to have an office so that we could sit together, have conversations and develop an atmosphere where it was fine to ask questions and people could learn. But even our office was a drop in the ocean compared to what we were paying out in salaries, because we wanted to commit to people.”

That included giving everyone full-time contracts, “because if you still have to work two or three days a week in another job just to fund being an agent for one or two days of the week, it quickly becomes a vicious cycle: you end up doing less and less of the job that you want to do because you’re trying to fund doing the job you want to do, especially in London. People should be paid what they need to be paid to live.”

A few more incremental industry developments added extra challenges to Runway’s work, starting with people buying tickets quite late, especially for the kind of shows Hanner’s team was working on. They’ve also been faced with the post-pandemic reality of having not quite a generation of people, who missed out on their fundamental first gig-going experience, and therefore maybe don’t hold live music in the same place. “That will right itself as a new set of people in that age range are now going out again and experiencing music for the first time at a formative age, and will go on to love live music and invest in it. But we have had, probably three, four, five years worth of young adults, who haven’t had that formative experience of going out, who have decided to spend their money elsewhere,” Hanner explains.

Add to that a general reduction in the length of headline tours, stagnant ticket prices in the grassroots sector, and continued market consolidation within the industry, which hasn’t helped the independent sector, and it becomes clear why, eventually, the business Runway brought in didn’t suffice to keep the agency running at the level its founder and his team had aspired to.

There’s a lot to be proud of, though, not least bringing young agents like Amy Greig on board, who joined while still at University. “She started finding artists that she was excited about, and she co-represented them with myself and Steve. We’re very proud of the fact that we were able to teach her enough that another company would give her a salary, and very happy to have been a part of that journey,” says Hanner, who chooses to be “reflective of the past five years, and view it as a positive learning experience that will hopefully set me up for the future.”

On of his biggest learnings of the past five years is that “there is next to no margin for error in this industry, no buffer. You can’t do anything without proof of concept.But how can you prove a new model without any backing? So, when people talk about the system being broken, it’s going to take a step into the unknown in order to give people the opportunity to try and reinvent the wheel, as far as the industry is concerned. So many creatives, people with great ideas, need support, maybe a couple of years of bank rolling so they can get something up and running. Yet the majority of the independent sector is full of people that are scrimping and saving and clawing their way from one day to another on a shoestring.”

What gives him hope is seeing other people, who have recognized “that the model is broken, who want to try something different and are in a position to grant individuals or businesses a bit of rope in order to try and get something off the ground. My hope is that initiatives in the UK, like the LIVE Trust, aren’t just propping up the existing model, but that there’s actually scope for long, lasting change. I’m encouraged by some of the conversations I’ve had with other stakeholders within the independent sector, people that are looking at long-term benefits to infrastructure and things like that, which are needed to make touring cheaper. But I would like to think there’s space to support people that maybe have some slightly more radical ideas.”

Hanner launched MakeDamnSure at the start of this year, a freelance and consultancy venture aiming to build on, and share his experience from the past 15-plus years working in this biz. It’s one way of making sure other young professionals are able to avoid some of the pitfalls that sealed the fate of Runway Artists. He thinks consolidation within the independent agency sector is “inevitable to some degree, partly for economies of scale, but also to be able to share expertise, limit overheads, and to bring together strong rosters and opportunities, things of that nature.”

Associations like the Music Venue Trust or the Association of Independent Promoters as well as the Association of Independent Festivals are great examples of organizations that have drummed up support within their respective parts of the economy. “I think there is space for a similar support structure for smaller agencies, the non-transatlantic agencies, especially within the UK. There is an element of strength in numbers. It gives you more sway with brands as well as with politicians. While I don’t know exactly what that looks like in the long term, I would love to see independent agencies come together, and hopefully prevent others from going through what we went through. It was a great team, and people loved working for Runway, so it’s a shame that we weren’t able to keep it going. I hate to think that there are other people that are going to have to step away from companies and roles that they love for similar reasons, and I’d love to be part of making sure that doesn’t happen again.”

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