Rick Dobbis

International Marketing and Strategy, M17

Long time friend and business colleague, Rick Dobbis, has joined the Meteor 17 team as lead international media and marketing consultant.

Rick heads up all international marketing and strategic alignments.

Amongst the multiple enterprises Dobbis is overseeing in the international sphere on behalf of Spencer and M17, Rick is currently serving as a Consulting Producer on our Jimi Hendrix Acoustic Experience enterprise. He is coordinating the international artist relations and multiple foreign language recordings of classic Hendrix titles, to be included on the record, to be mixed by Eddie Kramer. This adds a tremendous amount of momentum to the entire Hendrix project.

Rick is the former President of Sony Music International; President of PolyGram Label Group and President of PolyGram Continental Europe.

He was also Executive VP & GM of RCA Records and SVP of Arista Records, running marketing for Clive Davis.

Dobbis has been at the forefront of the music industry as a leading executive for the past 37 years. And Rick has been an Adjunct Professor at NYU.

Having managed people and organizations of varying sizes, from small teams to a global work force of 4500, serving on ‘both sides of the desk' as both an executive and creator, Rick is certainly a one of a kind unique talent. He has led major, multi-national music organizations; he has run in the worlds of evolving technologies and business models while focusing on the creation of new IP. Rick supervised all his companies from the top. He was engaged in local A+R, international and local marketing, promotion, sales, distribution, finance, real estate, as well as other activities of operating business in all key territories of the world. He oversaw the opening of new markets for both Sony and PolyGram Music in Eastern Europe, Russia and China. He dramatically reorganized operations and headed transitions into the digital frontier. Rick was responsible for growing his respective companies’ market share and profitability in difficult and tumultuous market conditions.

At PolyGram, Rick had the additional responsibility of overseeing PolyGram Filmed Entertainment units in Europe.

Highlights were the breaking of the worldwide careers of superstar artists U2, Bon Jovi, Andrea Bocelli, Bruce Springsteen, Beyonce and many more.