Tiger is a Japanese British artist manager, creative producer and campaign manager based in London. Her artist roster is Rina Sawayama, Yaeji, Lucinda Chua, Bat For Lashes and Tohji. She also co-founded ESEA Music, a community which aims to provide better representation for ESEA (East and Southeast Asian) artists and professionals based in the UK music industry.
shesaid.so: What inspired you to create and to co-found ESEA Music, and what are your goals?
Tiger Projects was more of a necessity at first tbh. My time at XL Recordings was coming to an end. I’d worked for someone else my whole career in music and wanted to go at it alone. It was super daunting at first. I had this negative thought pattern that artists only wanted to work with me because I was part of this cool record label. It was also during the Covid-19 pandemic / recession. In addition to all that, your trad record labels tend to keep their marketing /project management roles in house, even when certain artists could benefit from more specialised and tailored expertise. Labels can justify out of house PR + radio but in my freelance role it's pretty rare. All in all it’s not easy.
My goal for my own business was to build a roster of artists, the way I see PRs do it. I wanted to choose the artists believed in and politically aligned with. I wanted to work with Asian artists, not all, but predominantly. I also wanted to get back to Japan as often as possible and ideally out to Asia too :) After a year out on my own I have no regrets! I’ve got so much more fire for what I do and I love the roster I have built.
As for ESEA Music, we set it up because there was no one collectively repping us in the industry, from the workers to the signed and grassroots artists at all. We’ve now got over 220 members in the group, just teamed up with Spotify for a showcase, added the first ever ESEA representative on the UK Music’s diversity taskforce, and recently been awarded the Community Grant from WeTransfer’s The Supporting Act Foundation.
shesaid.so: What are some of the biggest challenges you've faced while working in the music industry?
Big Q! So many everyday challenges of sexism, lowkey racial discrimination and microagressions. Dealing with the #metoo experiences of the industry esp in the 2000s. More recently becoming a mother, and turning 40. But shout out to those who have faced way more challenges than me.
I’m middle class, my pop is an white academic, and I have had four years of private education under my belt. But my biggest challenge still was at the intersection of a very British classism, whiteness and patriarchy that runs through the British music industry.
This quote from Rosanne Mclaughlin’s book of art criticism, that talks about the notion of double-tracking describes succinctly how the ‘coolest’ gatekeepers of the music industry, with more of an ambivalent relationship to their privilege, function.
“To double-track is to be both: counter-cultural and establishment, rich and poor, a bum with the keys to a country retreat, an exotic addition to the dinner table who still knows how to find their way around the silverware.”
I think I might leave it there…
shesaid.so: What are your thoughts on the current state of the music industry?
I think we’re all experiencing a background and or frontrow burnout, from having to create, commission, request, strategise the roll out of content or assets as we like to call them. I’m trying to unlearn the word asset, when it comes to the art that accompanies the music.
Of course being an artist is not just about making the music, however, the money needed, the experience and time needed, as well as the amount of CONTENT + ASSETS required across the gazillion of platforms that host music related work is exhausting.
There is also an added pressure and sometimes assumption that artist esp women should also be a visual artist and multidisciplinary, and aim to be called words such as creative polymaths.
I won’t even get into the pressure of TikTok.
Rina Sawayama
shesaid.so: Who are some of the artists you've worked with that you're particularly proud of?
Firstly, Rina Sawayama :) To see an Queer Asian popstar in the UK slaying has been so life affirming. Her album ‘Hold The Girl’ released last year, was the highest UK chart position for a Japanese artist ever.
She’s an artist that knows the power of popular culture, in the way that legendary Cultural studies scholar, Stuart Hall frames it! “popular culture is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged: it is the stake to be won or lost in that struggle”
I wrote a long ass essay about Rina’s and Queerness in Japan for my MA. Japan has a lack of any national LGBT laws, ranking second to last in LGBT rights among the 40 wealthiest nations. At summer-sonic in Tokyo last year, I helped write the speech that Rina delivered at her first ever show in Japan! It was an incredible moment, we cried, it trended on twitter, it is part of the movement towards a better and fairer society for all people in Japan.
Secondly, Lucinda Chua. I am constantly in awe of Lucinda for her ability to channel her vulnerability into her work. Esp when I find my own vulnerability so difficult to share. But what I really appreciate is working with someone who mirrors back the feeling of in-betweenness that many mixed heritage folks experience. It's a feeling of not being whole that I've felt for so long.
shesaid.so: What are the biggest challenges East and Southeast Asian artists face in the music industry today?
I would say the biggest challenge facing East and Southeast Asian artists in the UK is representation and visibility of our creativity. We need more mainstream British ESEA artists. How many can you name? We have a handful of the mainstream UK ESEA artists right now, Rina Sawayama, Beebadoobee, Griff and Jax Jones. However, from what I see through ESEA Music, there is this huge gulf between the artists I just mentioned and all the new artists and grassroot artists coming through. So the biggest challenge is a lack of representation of us in British music culture. As Beabadoobee told Music Week, “Filipina girls telling me I’ve inspired them to pick up a guitar or that this music can be for them really means a lot to me, I didn’t have that sort of representation growing up and so I very much want them to have it.”
Secondly we’re not seen as the creative ones. In a nutshell, the experience of ESEA folks in the UK (especially the middle class) can be described by the phenomenon of the 'model minority myth', where we are seen as palatable to the white majority only insofar as we are hardworking, studious and quiet. As Dr Diana Yeh, a Chinese British academic, describes ESEA cultural practices as '"visible but unseen", present in the social and cultural fabric but rendered invisible within the social and cultural imagination.' It's about including ESEA people in the cultural imagination. I love the way Lucinda Chua put it in her gal-dem piece, “Representation isn’t just about diversity, it’s the ability to see yourself outside of yourself, the encouragement to dream and desire.”
shesaid.so: What can be done to improve the representation of East and Southeast Asian artists?
At ESEA Music we are attempting to improve this by uplifting the whole community through the work we do. To give two examples, we run an internal mentorship scheme called Sesame, which provides mentorship between more established artists and emerging artists, as well as between music industry professionals and artists. We’re developing this scheme to run publicly this year.
Secondly, we run ESEA Writing & Recording Camps, which is the brainchild of artist Lucy Tun, British/Burmese musician and in-house engineer at Urchin Studios. The intention with the writing camp is to bring together the many talented artists within ESEA Music and provide the experience of session work, writing together, being creative, trying new genres. We’re got a whole series going out in the summer this year and I’m so so so excited for them!
My own personal hot take too is that if you are Asian or ESEA and work in the industry at a mid - high level, that if you just pivoted even as little as 5% of your workload to work with an ESEA Artist or volunteer your time to ESEA music, that stark lack of representation would start to look at whole lot better.
shesaid.so: What is the most important aspect of effective artist marketing and management?
Artists are the best at marketing their own music. I learnt that at XL Recordings and especially from Sian Rowe.
All you have to do ask the right questions and listen to them. First of all it’s often all in the music or in their lyrics. If not it's in the everyday conversations you have with an artist. Not the ones where they are under pressure to sell what they do. It’s in those moments of quotidian work. Sometimes it’s just telling them that you found their idea, positioning or thought interesting. I think any of us artists or not are just looking for our internal worlds to be validated. To have someone believe in us.
shesaid.so: What is the most important thing for artists to keep in mind when trying to break into the industry?
The most important thing is to keep on going, it's a marathon not a sprint. keep on creating and making and putting it out there. Also to add that finding a good team is vital. That doesn't have to be an strictly industry person, like a lawyer or booking agent. But it’s about building your community around you, from your band mates, creative collaborators, music making team. The folks that really help you create the art. Even when you ‘break’ in you still need your people around you.