FIRST MONDAY: Dick Huey - A Life in Independent Music
For our October meetup, Dick Huey will share some of this history, but more importantly talk about reading the tea leaves of "inflection points" that suggest the need for *your* business transition (or a career move).
How to "lasso" a new (or first) job direction in music when you're known for something else
How to not make junior mistakes that will cost you money and maybe worse (reputation)
Creating a product mix that is undeniable by picking a lane
Building and leveraging a network through music community…from scratch
Making remote work "work" and building a story to contextualize your non-traditional career path
About Dick Huey
Dick Huey is a recent transplant to the Columbia River Gorge after 25 years in music in the NYC area. He started his career in artist management, signing several artists to Beggars Banquet in the early 90's. His first management client in 1989 was actually from Portland - Cheralee Dillon, a singer/writer who recorded two albums for Glitterhouse Records in Germany and toured internationally. During that time Huey's frequent visits to the Portland area planted a seed that has now grown.
Huey transitioned from management to become Beggars Group's first head of digital in NYC in 1997. He represented Matador Records on the SoundExchange board from 2003-2012. During that time he transitioned to being a consultant to Beggars Group, and built one of the first independent label/artist focused digital marketing companies (Toolshed Inc.). Toolshed was *the* primary digital agency in the 00's, working seminal records from Sufjan Stevens, Arcade Fire, Sharon van Etten, Amy Ray/Indigo Girls, AA Bondy, and many, many others. Exclusive label clients included Touch and Go, Merge Records, PIAS, Asthmatic Kitty, Righteous Babe, spinART, and Kill Rock Stars for starters.
After transitioning Toolshed into a music technology and music licensing acquisition firm in 2010, Huey's agency Toolshed was retained by Spotify pre-US launch to handle their US label content acquisition and digital strategy, as well as by many other early music tech startups including Jaxsta, 8tracks, Digital Rights Agency, Red Bull, TuneCore, and The Orchard. During this time, he became a board member of the Future of Music Coalition in Washington DC, and remotely ran the organization as Executive Director through 2019.
As a side gig, Huey became a founding teaching assistant to NYU Professor/serial entrepreneur Scott Galloway's startup Section School, where he taught Brand, Product, Platform, Data Analytics, Growth Innovation, and other business topics to aggregate class cohorts totalling nearly 10k students.
He's now building an artist income optimization startup, as well as continuing to work with music tech companies at the intersection of web3 community and Fintech. Huey has participated/spoken worldwide at music conferences, including Music Matters (Singapore), ABMI (Brazil), Midem (Cannes), SxSW, New Music Seminar, and many others.