Matthew Brum ’10

A young accountant sits in a bar, brooding about crunching numbers for the next 50 years. He strikes up a conversation with a stranger over their mutual love of country music. They form a Twitter friendship. Move to Nashville, you’d love the country music industry, she says.

He’s a city boy, Rhode Island born and bred, with a good job. But the promise of a lucrative future pales in comparison to this new dream. So Brum quits his job and couch surfs in Nashville while looking for work. He gets a part-time internship at the local country music station.

“After being in the professional world, there I was, making $10 an hour,” he remembers.

If this were a country song, Brum would end up broke and broken. Turns out, though, this was his Cinderella moment. He’s soon picking up the digital marketing slack for four radiostations, managing websites, email and social media. Then, the big break: the Grand Ole Opry is hiring a social media director. Soon Brum’s running all its social media channels (he brought it onto Snapchat) and “talking” every day to about a million fans. “My childhood dreams came alive. Here’s this little Portuguese kid from East Providence, sharing my excitement about country music in the digital world. The country fan in me was in heaven.”

Brum stayed at the Opry for four years. Now he’s director of digital strategy for the Big Machine Label Group, the record label of Taylor Swift and Rascal Flatts. “My success wasn’t an overnight thing,” he says. “There was hard work involved. If I could tell the 8-year-old version of myself that one day he’d get to interview Dolly Parton or hang out with Carrie Underwood, he wouldn’t believe it. I think, in my own way, I show that anything is possible.”

By MaryBeth Reilly-McGreen