Pollstar Live! Coverage 2020: SAL&CO’s Artist Manager Dina Sahim Pays It Forward

Black Coffee Productions – Management Maestro
SAL&CO’s Dina Sahim (left) discusses her career in artist management with Variety editor Shirley Halperin (right).

Young people looking to get into the music business should be glad there’s someone like Dina Sahim in the industry.

An artist manager with SAL&CO who handles such clients as French Montana, Harry Fraud and London On Da Track, Sahim says she was mentored by a number of industry notables, including Sara Newkirk Simon, Amy Thompson, Rebeca Leon and her boss, Wassim “Sal” Slaiby. Now she’s determined to do some mentoring of her own.

Sahim kicked off the “Rainmaker: NextGen” series at Pollstar Live! in a one-on-on one interview with Shirley Halperin, executive editor of music at Variety.

She said her job of project manager “is all about strategy” and involves handling artist communication, building their careers “and working with Sal hand in hand to further everything they do.”

“Anything you think a manager does, I’m doing all that,” Sahim said of her work with French Montana. “The financials, the business, the touring, the press, down to the styling, down to anything he does.”

It’s a 24-7 job for Sahim, who said she always wanted to be a music attorney and applied to law school when she saw a position was open in the business affairs department at William Morris Endeavor.

“I applied and they called me in for an interview the next day and hired me,” she said in answer to a question from Halperin about how she got her start in the business. “I thought, ‘OK I can do this for a year and see how I like it and how it shakes out and I fell in love.’”

Sahim was “working with artists to make their dreams come true and expand their brand,” she said, and a year and half later switched her focus to touring and worked with Jonas Schumann, “who at the time booked everything on the West Coast including all the Vegas residencies” for more than 150 clients.

“And then I switched over to Joel Zimmerman’s desk and that was incredible,” she said. “Joel has so many clients and was such a great mentor to me and fostered all my passions and listened to everything I brought him. You know, at the time we had just signed The Weeknd, which is how I met Sal and then I got an offer I couldn’t refuse to work in management that was super exciting and I switched over to the management world and just kind of fell in love. I worked with Jake Udell at Th3rd Brain. I worked with Stephanie LaFera at Little Empire.”

She eventually accepted an offer from Slaiby, who had been calling her from time to time.

“He had just signed French Montana and they were just taking “Unforgettable” to radio and I don’t think anybody except Sal and French really understood and saw the vision and knew what “Unforgettable” was going to be and they took me along for this ride,” Sahim said. “The things we did! I think my first week they were like, we’ve got all these kids in Uganda (who Montana had discovered in a YouTube video), they were all about the age of 15, and we wanted to bring them to L.A. for the BET Awards in two weeks and so that was one of the first things (we) did together.”

She called the BET performance incredible, adding, “It takes my breath away just thinking about it.”

“It’s actually a great story about how French discovered this YouTube video and then Sal had the wherewithal to go and track down these actual kids and created this beautiful video,” Halperin explained. “It really helped catapult the song.”

Asked what she looks for in clients, Sahim said, “It’s all about the music. We can sit here and strategize as much as we can, but it’s really about the music. Is the music good? The second thing is this person serious, are they dedicated to their craft? Are they willing to spend long nights and really put in the work because the work is 50-50 between the manager and the artist in that sense. You have to want it just as bad as I do for you.”

She said friends sometimes ask her if she gets annoyed when she gets a call at the gym at 5 a.m.

“No. I love it. I love that they are just passionate about what they are going to be doing. If they fall out of love with it, if they’re lazy about it, why would I want to work on their project?” Sahim said.

As to challenges facing women in the industry, Sahim said that when she was coming up, she encountered women who would talk about supporting women in the business, but didn’t follow through.

“It didn’t make me mad. It taught me that I never want to be that way. I’m really grateful I have so many mentors, male and female,” she said, naming Newkirk, Thompson and Leon in particular. “I’m really lucky … I can call them when I’m in an issue personally, professionally and ask them how they weathered the storm and they’re willing to give me advice and connect me with the right people and I want to be that person for everyone I encounter.”

When it comes to discovering new talent, Sahim said it starts with Instagram.

“I want to know what their social following is. What their engagement is like. Is it real? Who is checking on these people? Who’s following this person?” she said. “We have an artist … Ali Gatie, I don’t work with him personally but he’s all over the Spotify charts and that’s so meaningful. You see where his fans are and how they are coming in and that’s been incredible to watch. But beyond that, who are they working with, who do they talk to, who are they surrounding themselves with?”

Halperin asked Sahim to share her vision of the next few years in the music industry.

“I hope we’re all open minded. I hope we all respect new artists. I remember when I started in the music industry there was this girl that my sister kept telling me about,” she said, adding that none of her friends knew who she was. 

Sahim checked out one of her shows. 

“There were all these people dressed up in costumes and so accepting of each other and she did all this weird shit on stage and everyone was so into it and at the time I was like, ‘I don’t if this is exactly what I’d be into,’ but as the show went on it was like, ‘OK I’m buying into this.’ That was Lady Gaga. I hope we can continue to let artists be as creative as they want to be … so that every fan has somebody they can connect to, somebody they can relate to, somebody who gets them through the hard times. As cheesy as that sounds, it’s true. It’s the reason we all fell in love with music, right?”