Q&A with Charlene Bryant (Founder of Riveter Management, Past Manager to Trippie Redd)

Name: Charlene Bryant

Location: From Canton, OH; Currently based in Nashville, TN

Company: Riveter Management, a full service Management Company that caters to any artist, any genre and when I say any artist I don’t mean just musical, we are now dabbling into TV and Film as well.

What is your educational background, did you study music business? I am a Belmont University alum. Belmont University is one of the few schools that had a music business program, and what's unique about Belmont is that USC and Berklee required you to be a music major, so you had to audition. I went back to school later on, and I had not touched my clarinet since high school, I was not at the level to audition and get into a music school. Belmont is actually a Bachelors in Business Administration with a concentration in Music. And what I loved about Belmont was that every professor, like the copyright class was taught by currently practicing Entertainment Lawyers, every professor that I had was currently working in the industry. It wasn’t that we were being taught out of a textbook, we were getting real time what’s happening in the industry right now and that’s what makes that school so special and unique. And I didn’t have to dust off my clarinet

You mentioned that you took a break before going to college, why did you go back later and what was that experience like? I initially planned to go to school to be a doctor, I wanted to be a pediatrician since I was 5. When I was in high school, my mother had an amazing female medical doctor who offered to let me shadow her and ask her questions because she knew I wanted to go medical school. The more I asked and was hanging around, the more I realized that wasn’t sure I wanted to be a doctor. So I took a break, I realized that I definitely didn’t want to be a doctor and I was like maybe I’ll be a lawyer, people were always telling me I was great at arguing and I was like maybe being a lawyer was for me. I just really wanted to take a break and live life and not put the pressure, because I really believe [I don’t have any kids, so I don’t want kids to be like “Charlene said I don’t have to go to school”], but I think it’s really hard to try to figure out what you want to be for the…