Meet the Team:
our chemistry is the strategy

Three generations.
Youth and Experience.
We know how the industry works, and what rules to break.

That became a formidable moment in his belief system — freedom of thought, critical thinking, standing up for what is right rather than what is standard practice. There can always be an alternative to the current arrangement. The case has never stopped following him — NPR and multiple book authors documenting the history of book banning in America have sought him out as a first-person source. As book banning returns to national headlines, that chapter of his story has never been more relevant.

He spent four decades acting on that belief. As VP & GM at London Records, Russ launched the label and its electronic imprint FFRR in the U.S., building campaigns for Portishead, Salt-N-Pepa, Paul Weller, Orbital, Meat Puppets, and Shakespears Sister. After being recruited to join Maverick Records as GM and still at London Records, he flew to London to close the US signing of The Prodigy despite multiple labels vying for the band — rebuilding the entire campaign from scratch, convincing the band to alter their album cover to meet major retail requirements — resulting in a #1 album, 8 million copies sold, and a Rolling Stone cover. He secured the rights to The Matrix soundtrack after Warner Bros., Elektra, and Atlantic all passed, negotiated franchise rights for the entire film series, and received a Grammy nomination. At Maverick Records — Madonna's label — he scaled the company from a skeletal team inside Warner Bros. into a fully independent label with 130+ employees, earning multi-platinum and gold records with The Prodigy, Alanis Morissette, Muse, the Deftones, Erasure, and Richard Butler, Love Spit Love, of The Psychedelic Furs. He created the first music and short film integration for Tony Hawk's Pro Skater before gaming was recognized as a music distribution channel. Before the labels, he managed The Replacements, Cyndi Lauper, Juluka — the groundbreaking South African interracial band led by Johnny Clegg and Sipho Mchunu, during the height of apartheid — and The Del Fuegos.

Curation is the thread that runs through everything Russ has built — not as aesthetic preference, but as strategy. Knowing what's next before the market does. Building the structures that let it matter. Every artist he signed, every brand campaign he built, every partnership he structured was a curatorial decision: what deserves attention, what story needs to be told, what does this moment actually call for. That instinct — developed across four decades at every seat at the table in music, media, branding, and investment — is what brands, media companies, and creative voices come to him for now. Not to be told what's popular. To be shown what's possible.

He's been told "no, that's not how it's done" since he was a teenager. His view has always been: "Why not? There are multiple ways past a wall. And the more of us working on it together, the faster they come down.”

After Maverick, Russ headed the Media & Entertainment division of a New York family office, co-founded Pipeline — a branding and marketing agency whose clients included The Gap, Anheuser-Busch, and Omnicom — and spent over a decade advising startups, VCs, and family offices at the intersection of media, tech, and entertainment. At The Gap, he developed Thursday Night Live — a live concert and in-store merch signing series — and a national artist tour partnership program with Goo Goo Dolls, John Fogerty, and Dave Matthews Band, pioneering internet concert broadcasting before it had a name. He has spoken at CMJ Music Marathon, the Digital Music Forum, and Family Office Insights — and taught at NYU's Clive Davis Institute.

The music industry keeps changing. So do the obstacles. The belief that there's always a way past them — that never does.

Frank Turner, one of Russ Rieger's favorite artists, has a song called "Get Better" with the lyric: "We can get better because we're not dead yet." He immediately knew Not Dead Yet would be the name of this company. That probably tells you more about how he thinks than anything else in this bio.

Today Russ is the CEO of Not Dead Yet Media — a New York-based cultural infrastructure company for independent artists encompassing artist management (HDAxKerosene MGT), Notes From the Underground Records (distributed by The Orchard, a Label and Artist Strategic Consultancy. He’s a partner in Drive All Night Productions, a production company covering Broadway, TV, and film with iconic producer Frederick Zollo, and the creator, executive producer, and co-host of The Indie Music Network podcast network. He is also the founder of RWorld RFuture, an impact media company transforming the attention economy for the impact economy.
The longer version starts in 1976. Russ was a plaintiff in the ACLU lawsuit against the Island Trees, New York school board after it removed books from the school library in the middle of the night — after attending a meeting of the John Birch Society. That case, Board of Education v. Pico, went all the way to the Supreme Court, with the plaintiffs winning by a small margin.

Russ Rieger, CEO & Founder