Combined Manners Faber aims to be 'one of the industry's leading independent music talent agencies' (2025)

The team at Faber Music and Manners McDade have relaunched their composer agencies, combining them into one roster and company as Manners Faber.

The announcement follows Faber Music’s 2023 acquisition of the Manners McDade music publishing company and composer agency. The Manners McDade brand name continued under the new deal.

The Manners Faber launch is officially taking place today at the Barbican in London during Piano Day 2025.

Manners Faber is a music talent agency representing music and sound creatives working in all media including film, TV, games and advertising.

With a collective history of 80 years across the two brands, the agency is led by Jenna Fentimen (head of Agency) and Harriet Moss (commercial rights director), former MD of Manners McDade.

2025 marks the 60th year of Faber Music with celebrations taking place throughout the year.

The combined agency aims to represent the “very best in creative, innovative and diverse artists & composers, with an emphasis on nurturing our talent holistically, providing the support and dynamism for authentic creative genius to flourish”, said a statement.

Richard King, CEO, Faber Music, said: “While preserving the distinction of both Manners and Faber Music, the newly-combined agency harnesses the extraordinary talent of the composers and creative staff across both teams, into one company. We look forward to seeing it grow into one of the industry’s leading independent music talent agencies.”

Jenna Fentimen added: “Our composers are everything – we’re all so proud to represent such extraordinary talent.”

It’s also just been confirmed that Faber Music will team with Latitude Festival this year on a specially curated stage.

Composer projects in 2025 include Netflix TV series Black Mirror (co-score by Matthew Herbert & Lucinda Chua, Tom Jenkins on sound); films Hot Milk and April (Matthew Herbert), Heldin aka The Late Shift (Emilie LF), The Thing With Feathers (new signing Zebedee Budworth), Only On Earth (Roger Goula), The Assessment (Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch), and Mr Burton (John Hardy); video game The Casting Of Frank Stone (Boxed Ape); and the theatre production A Streetcar Named Desire (Angus MacRae).

It follows composer projects last year on One Day, True Detective, The Agency, Renegade Nell, Bad Sisters, All Of Us Strangers and Apollo 13: Survival. Composer Simon Russell won a BAFTA Television Craft Award for Original Music: Factual on Once Upon A Time In Northern Ireland.

Manners Faber’s BAFTA Television Craft Award nominees for the 2025 ceremony this month include Jessica Jones for American Nightmare (Netflix) in the Original Score: Factual category and Tim Phillips (nominated with PJ Harvey) for Bad Sisters (Apple+) Original Score: Fiction.

Sound designer Tom Jenkins is nominated in Sound: Fiction for True Detective (Sky Atlantic/HBO) and Baby Reindeer (Netflix).

Manners Faber has now started representing music editors, including Dave Rodger who worked on The Substance and The Outrun.

The Faber Alt publishing division has recently signed Antony Szmierek, Oli Rockburger, and Tawiah, who is also on Manners Faber.

Lucy Holliday, creative director, Faber Music, said: “It’s been so exciting working with Antony over the past year – his debut album Service Station At The End of the Universe was released at the end of February with amazing reviews and radio support.”

Faber Alt is publishing Roadmap, Antony Szmierek’s limited edition lyrics book, which will be launched at the Hay Festival in May.

Manners McDade recent publishing signings include Ganavya, Madison Willing, Zebedee Budworth, while Faber Music has signed Patrick Neil Doyle and Segun Akinola.

Here, Jenna Fentimen and Harriet Moss share their plans for the combined Manners Faber agency and opportunities for cross-collaboration…

With this big announcement, how substantial is the team and roster now at Manners Faber?

Harriet Moss: “The team's actually been bolstered because we've hired a new sync person last year. We have Laura Harrison [creative manager] working across the composer agency and the commercial rights publishing catalogues too. So we've got a really fantastically strong team. The composers, we've merged them together, and it's quite a big roster now at 54 composers.”

Jenna Fentimen: “So we're still not the biggest in the UK by any stretch, but we're up there. I think what everyone's really excited about is that the roster acts as an ecosystem, and there's a lot of flow through and people working with each other and collaborating with each other. So bringing everyone together and it all being on one website, on one roster, it just allows for those cross-collaborations and that flow through of work, which everyone really benefits from.”

Jenna Fentimen and Harriet Moss

Are there any examples of that lately or coming up?

JF: “Last year we signed Lucinda Chua, and she just recently co-scored with the absolute legend that is Matthew Herbert. Matthew has been on our roster for a long time. He was very kind, and wanted to co-score with Lucinda. So this is her first TV series, it's one episode of Black Mirror and that's coming out on April 10. So it's been a really lovely new signing, getting her right in there getting a first TV job and it being a collaboration across the roster.”

Meanwhile, you continue placing syncs in film, TV and advertising projects…

HM: “Yeah, that’s what's so nice about having our commercial rights team working across both – Laura is a perfect example of that. She works with all the catalogue as well so we can offer both. We can offer tracks for sync, but composers can either edit tracks, treat tracks, give them an additional touch for a project, or they can completely score them as new.”

JF: “We've also actually just signed our first music editor. This is a role that's getting to be more popular in the UK, but it was originally mostly in the US. We’ve just signed Dave Rodger, and he did The Substance and The Outrun – really amazing films. He draws from his encyclopedic knowledge of all music to place temp music on an edit to then help everyone find the sound for a show or a film. He's got all of our catalogues, he's got all of our composers’ scores, and he can work with that material. It's been a really lovely thing to diversify and work with music editors, and we also have sound designers that we represent as well.”

Our composers are everything – we’re all so proud to represent such extraordinary talent

Jenna Fentimen

Do you have to work with other music publishers on some of these projects as well?

HM: “The vast majority of them are published by us as well. Because even though we're merging and changing the branding to Manners Faber for the agency on the publishing side, the catalogues are very clear cut and still retain their original identity as publishing companies. So you've got Faber Music, which obviously has a huge amount of classical repertoire – it's got a lot of film and TV scores in there. And then we've got Faber Alt, which is more alternative, it's really quite a broad spread of genres. In the last year, we signed Antony Szmierek, who's doing amazingly well at the moment – he's just come back from five shows at South By Southwest and his album got to No.1 on the official dance music albums chart, which was really exciting for us. We’ve still got Manners McDade as its own publishing roster too – people like Nils Frahm, Max Cooper, Poppy Ackcroyd.

“So it's really nice to still have those as their distinct, unique publishing rosters. And if they're people who are interested in scoring, we represent them on the agency side too. People like Matthew Herbert, he's published by Bucks Music, and we work with them on all of his contracts as well as his collaborating. So it's nice as an agency to have a broad spectrum of composers.”

JF: “For example, we signed Tawiah to the agency about five years ago, and then we signed her to Faber Alt recently as that was a really good fit for her. So it's been really lovely to have multiple offerings for composers where we can work with them holistically.”

How is Antony Szmierek doing in terms of airplay and other activity?

HM: “Oh, he's had fantastic support on radio and streaming and all sorts. lt's been a really exciting campaign, and he is just incredible live. It's a really nice moment in a campaign like this, when you see someone who, when you listen to the album, is absolutely brilliant, but he's just an absolute rock star on stage. So it makes a big impact when people see him live.”

Is he interested in composing for screen?

HM: “It's something we talked about a lot when we were signing him. That’s one of the reasons a lot of people do sign to us, it’s that we have this capacity to represent them in that way too. But it always balances with touring –people like Antony Szmierek, Max Cooper, Nils Frahm are consistently on these brilliant tours. We just hope that one day they'll have plenty of time to do some scoring for us.”

Finally, how would you summarise the benefits of bringing the agencies together?

JF: “For the composers, I think the strongest thing is being part of this ecosystem. So they're all part of the Manners Faber family. We really strongly believe that composers, collaborating with each other, meeting each other, being a part of a community, means that they are all stronger together as composers. It can be quite an isolating existence working in a studio all the time; the composers who aren’t on tour, they're at home, or they're in their studios, and that can be a lot of time alone. So it's really important that we can get people working together and having a community and feeling really supported by us. I think having this beautiful website, this beautiful logo, elevates the way that they all look as one roster and the way that they can promote themselves, and we can promote them.”

HM: “It's been one of the major things for us, moving as a team from Manners McDade to Faber Music – the support mechanism within that fantastic company at Faber music. So from the copyright to royalties to administration and business affairs and finance, it's a really fantastic support network, and it's lovely to have that and to therefore allow the creative teams to be as really as creative as possible. What we love to do as agents is to push composers and put them forward. We've talked about the multifaceted projects that we do, and that's a real strength of ours to be able to keep representing them in all of those different media. So being able to have that support from the company across the board is really wonderful, it gives us a wonderful infrastructure.”

JF: “And really for us, the composers are everything, they're people working at the very height of their abilities, of their craft, and they're all so exciting to work with. So we just want to make sure that they have everything that they possibly need to be able to succeed. And so it's all about building that infrastructure and support around them.”

PHOTOS: Louise Haywood-Schiefer