Season 1 · Episode 5
Founder and MD of Easy Life Entertainment, home to Easy Life Records, Real Life Management and Turn The Page. Manager of Deaf Havana and Bury Tomorrow. Host of They Think It's All Sober. Ambassador for Alcohol Change UK. In 2025, completed a strategic partnership with ATC Group valued at over £1 million. Started by taking over charity gigs in Chesham at seventeen after a promoter friend died. Has not had a drink since June 2022.
Jamie Osman is the Managing Director of Easy Life Entertainment - a music company comprising Easy Life Records, Real Life Management and Turn The Page - and one of the most strategically minded artist managers working in UK rock and alternative music today. He has spent 20 years building sustainable music careers across genre-diverse talent, from global touring acts like Bury Tomorrow and Deaf Havana to breakthrough artists including SOTA, Lexie Carroll and Anaïs, while historically working with charting acts including Sigma and The Cribs.
Over the past decade he has built and scaled multiple seven-figure businesses for artists, specialising in turning creative ambition into scalable commercial operations across touring, streaming, merchandise, physical product and sync. In 2025 he completed a strategic partnership with ATC Group, selling a majority stake in Easy Life Entertainment in a deal valued at over £1 million - designed to unlock global infrastructure and international reach for the artists he represents.
He is the host of the podcast They Think It's All Sober and an Ambassador for Alcohol Change UK, having quit alcohol and drugs in June 2022. He began his career at seventeen, taking over a charity gig series in Chesham after a local promoter died.
Duration: 91 minutes 25 Seconds
Season: 1 · Episode 5
Also available: Audio only on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Acast
Seventeen years old, charity gigs and the beginning
Jamie Osman's entry into the music industry came through grief. A local promoter named Rafe died in 2005 and the community of young rock and emo fans he had built around gigs in Chesham suddenly had nowhere to go. Jamie was seventeen. He took over the charity gig series, booking Architects, Bring Me The Horizon and You Me At Six from MySpace, running shows in youth centres and village halls with no ticketing system and no rulebook. "All I really cared about," he says, "was making sure these kids still had somewhere to go." That instinct — to build something useful rather than wait to be invited in, has defined everything he has done since. He later found out that the same Chesham scene had also shaped Lauren Reading-Gloversmith, who features in an earlier episode of this podcast, she was going to gigs run by the same band whose member's death prompted Jamie to take over.
University, management and the Shepherd's Bush Empire moment
Jamie went on to study music management at Buckinghamshire University and began managing bands during his second year - moving in with Matt Russell, who managed Lower Than Atlantis, and learning the business in real time alongside someone further along the same road. He built his career through Deaf Havana, and was there for their first Shepherd's Bush Empire sellout in 2012, looking around at 2,000 people and struggling to believe he was part of it. He talks candidly about the mistakes of those early years, being too protective of the artists, fixing problems before telling the band they existed, spending his own money on label campaigns without fully understanding the risk. "Showmanship and naivety," he calls it. The honesty about what went wrong is as useful as anything about what went right.
Easy Life Records, the Sony JV and running a label with your own money
Easy Life Records ran a joint venture with Sony before Jamie took it fully independent and signed a new deal through The Orchard. Artists have included Tonight Alive, Lower Than Atlantis, Waterparks, Lonely The Brave and Softcult. He talks in detail about what running a label with your own money teaches you, specifically, the discipline of treating every decision as if it costs you directly, because it does. He also talks about CRM, direct-to-fan technology and platforms like Openstage, which he describes as among the most exciting developments in the music industry, the ability for artists to own their fan data and communicate directly, without platform intermediaries extracting margin at every point.
Quitting drinking in June 2022 and what it revealed
The most personally significant part of this conversation is Jamie's account of quitting alcohol and drugs in June 2022 and what followed. He describes what he calls habitual addiction, not daily dependency but the cumulative effect of an industry that uses drink and drugs as social currency, where promoters offer forty beers and a bottle of vodka as a performance fee because they cannot afford to pay the band, and where nobody ever directly asks if you are actually okay. The first month of sobriety was one of the best experiences of his life. He co-created a podcast to produce the content he felt did not exist: honest, non-judgemental conversations about wellbeing that felt like sitting with your mates rather than attending a recovery programme. The mental health advice he gives to every artist he works with now: put the phone down. Comparison is natural. But giving yourself permission to step away is not weakness, it is necessary.
"Put the phone down. Comparison is completely natural. But artists need to give themselves permission to step away."
Jamie Osman - MD of Easy Life Entertainment, on the most important mental health advice for artists
"I'd remove visible streaming numbers altogether."
Jamie Osman - on what the music industry gets fundamentally wrong about measuring success
"I stood at Shepherd's Bush Empire looking around at 2,000 people thinking I cannot believe I am part of this. Then immediately started panicking about how we were going to sell out Alexandra Palace."
Jamie Osman - on the trap of never feeling enough
The Blinding Talent Music Industry Podcast is hosted by Mark Adams - founder of Blinding Talent and former Director of Music Programming at Channel 4, where he launched the Official YouTube Chart (2015) and Spotify's first ever Streaming Chart (2016). Each episode is an in-depth conversation with a senior music industry figure - equal parts campfire stories and practical insight.
If this episode resonated, Blinding Talent works with independent artists across the UK and internationally - helping them build the kind of profile, audience and momentum that makes conversations with managers like Jamie Osman possible.
From artist management with Mark Adams to digital marketing campaigns across Spotify, Meta and TikTok, everything we do is built around getting artists closer to the music industry.
Jamie Osman is the Managing Director of Easy Life Entertainment, comprising Easy Life Records, Real Life Management and Turn The Page, and one of the most experienced artist managers working in UK rock and alternative music. He manages Deaf Havana and Bury Tomorrow, among others, and has historically worked with Kids In Glass Houses, Sigma and The Cribs. He built and scaled multiple seven-figure businesses for artists over 20 years before completing a strategic partnership with ATC Group in 2025, selling a majority stake in Easy Life Entertainment in a deal valued at over £1 million. He is also the host of the podcast They Think It's All Sober and an Ambassador for Alcohol Change UK.
Easy Life Entertainment is a music company founded by Jamie Osman, comprising Easy Life Records, Real Life Management and Turn The Page. It manages and releases music for genre-diverse artists across rock and alternative music. In 2025, Jamie completed a strategic partnership with ATC Group, selling a majority stake in Easy Life Entertainment in a deal valued at over £1 million, a move designed to unlock global infrastructure and international reach for the artists it represents, including Deaf Havana and Bury Tomorrow.
Jamie Osman quit alcohol and drugs in June 2022 after what he describes as years of habitual addiction, not daily dependency, but the cumulative effect of an industry where drink and drugs function as social currency. Promoters offer alcohol in place of proper fees. Nobody asks if you are actually okay. The first month of sobriety was one of the best experiences of his life. He subsequently created a podcast, They Think It's All Sober, to produce the kind of honest, non-judgemental conversations about wellbeing in music that he felt did not previously exist. He is now an Ambassador for Alcohol Change UK.
The Blinding Talent Music Industry Podcast is hosted by Mark Adams - founder of Blinding Talent and former Director of Music Programming at Channel 4. Guests include Jamie Osman, Colin Barlow, Sol Parker, Judd Lander and many others from across the music industry.
