Q’s With Jonathan Shank: Artist Manager Keeps On Truckin’ With His Own Terrapin Station Entertainment

Jonathan Shank: A lot of the impetus for starting Terrapin came from really wanting to keep our team together and our artists together and continue to empower everybody to find their own path.

I had spent the last 10 years building the family entertainment division with an incredible team around me at Red Light, and amazing diverse artists. It was really important to me to be able to give my team the opportunity to grow and find their own paths and also have the opportunity to become executives in the music industry. Really, to be able to empower all of them to have great opportunities and freedom within our roster and to be able to continue to grow. 

Red Light is an incredible place and has always been supportive of all my projects and clients and I’m super grateful to them for always being so supportive throughout the years.

Our artist management roster includes Scarypoolparty, who is doing incredibly well and about to release an EP and really taking things to new heights during the pandemic. Maddie Poppe is working on new music, Victoria Justice has new music on the horizon, Laura Marano, we’re about to release her new EP, and Sam Tsui. 

He’s been working really hard on a lot of new music and collaboration. Also we’ve been focused on trying to help the music community and the community at large, raising funds via various livestream platforms through Sofar Sounds or BandsinTown and Billboard, raising funds for places like the ACLU and MusiCares and various worthy causes. In addition, he’s always creating. Why we love working with him ties back to what I was saying about all of my team, he’s blazing his own path and I think that’s not just commendable but he’s not afraid to take a chance. Similarly, I think we’re ready to help lift him up to the next level in terms of getting him in front of the right influencers, taste makers and the industry at large. 

He has a very charismatic way about him and when people come into his orbit they’re immediately drawn in. That combined with his versatility on the guitar and piano and his vocal ability really kind of puts him in a category of his own. 

We’re all working as a team on these clients. Everyone has their own strengths and functions. Chaz Hamman who has been with me for 10 years is our EVP of touring and production, and he helps oversee a lot of the physical production builds and a lot of the process in terms of building our shows – whether they’ve livestream events or touring properties. He’s kind of the center point of all things production.  

Emily Frost is our creative director and really helps with a lot of our digital assets and building the treatments for a lot of our content. Steven Lundy is our EVP of business development, and that’s really important for us. Now is the time to be aggressive on building the canon with the right intellectual properties so when the clouds lift and the corona gods allow us to resume touring, we have the right roster of touring properties that are ready to go.

Because of our great experience in family entertainment we do have continuing relationships with a bunch of our partners that are going to continue to tour the artist properties as soon as the landscape allows. 

We’re going to be also reaching into the experiential space and further into producing more concerts and also tours for traditional and non-traditional types of artists. If you look at what I’ve done over the last 10 years, I’m certainly not afraid to take a look at any idea that might be left-of-center as long as there’s a core audience.

Really, that’s what all of these things boil down to. The brand has to be strong enough to have a really, really passionate core fanbase. That’s where the crossover is between management and production – it’s no different for scarypoolparty or any artist we manage. It really is about figuring out how to tap the marketplace and figure out how to bring these artists and these brands into the cultural mainstream and into what we would call larger pop culture.

It’s a great topic to talk about because it’s become a bit of a lifeline not just financially but also just in terms of people who have been quarantining in their apartment or house by themselves for a long time, just to have that connection with an artist is really important. It’s also provided great opportunities to raise money for worthy causes. 

I think we’ve made pretty big advances in terms of what is possible over the last couple of months. The first few months were really rooted in people playing in their living rooms and we’ve certainly seen some incredible platforms emerge and festivals really raise  the bar in terms of production. I think that’s going to continue to work. There’s some spontaneity to that and it does have the feeling of a communal experience. That really is the key to the livestreams – how to make them feel like communal experiences as opposed to existing in a vacuum. Another thing I’ll say is as an industry we all need to be supporting our local venues. Getting our local artists to livestream from our local venues is one of the most important things we can be doing now. That’s something I’m working personally on right now – to try to get some of our artists to do livestream shows – no-audience performances – but inside iconic venues. We need to support these facilities and venue owners and all of the crew and staff that are such an important part of our ecosystem. 

We all know that the longer this pandemic goes on, the more venues are going to be affected. 

If the industry is going to be able to operate the way it has pre-pandemic, that’s a really important thing we can be doing. Hopefully over the next handful of months more and more local venues will be opening their doors to be able  to do – whether paid livestreams or fundraisers for their own facilities.  

I’ll just tell you a small anecdote that I think is the best way to encapsulate the situation. Early on in the pandemic, it must have been April, I got a call from Mickey Hart. Throughout our conversation, one of the things I said to him is, “When are you getting back out on the road?” Things were slightly less uncertain as far as how long this might go on for, and he says, “Well I don’t know but it’s up to the corona gods.”

 We can spend all day talking about the touring landscape, but ultimately  crowd gathering is probably the last thing coming back truly online in our society. I think at this point we all just need to be focused on proactively building our businesses, supporting our communities and supporting our artists, and realizing that no one is unaffected and we’re all in this together. I think that’s the most important part. We can all take this time and reflect and reset and pivot as needed, but my focus is to support as many others as possible, be that through worthy causes and charitable initiatives or through just helping the artist community or through helping our team members and artist clients.

There’s that Grateful Dead song, ‘New Speedway Boogie,” about the Altamont situation. The chorus of the song goes, “One way or another the darkness has got to give.” 

I think that’s very poignant for these times.