Global music company Redeye reconnects with local roots

Redeye Worldwide, an international music company founded in Carrboro, will move from Haw River, N.C., to a warehouse at 505 Eno St. in Hillsborough this May. 

Tor Hansen and Glenn Dicker founded the company 20 years ago in a spare room in Hansen’s house. In 1997 they founded the Yep Roc record label. 

While Redeye has offices in New York, California, London, Berlin and other areas around the world, Dicker said they find that being based in North Carolina offers Redeye a unique opportunity they wouldn’t have had in other places.

“It was a very easy place to have a business. For us to have a large warehouse space in New York or L.A. would have been impossible,” Dicker said. “It enabled us to have an extensive space and hire good people and more people.”

Dicker said Carrboro has a thriving and accessible music scene.

He said in the beginning, Redeye focused primarily on connecting artists from the southeast to retail in the southeast.

“These artists may only be big in certain markets like Chapel Hill, Raleigh or Atlanta,” Dicker said. “The only way they could get their records into fans' hands was to sell them off the stage at their shows or consign them to local record shops.”

Dicker said Redeye took big bands and smaller bands that played every kind of music and marketed them where they were popular.

Some artists got commercial radio play that exploded their popularity in certain markets and enabled them to get picked up by stations in other markets, he said.

“We expanded by calling different markets where airplay was happening,” Dicker said.

Redeye has now expanded internationally, representing foreign artists as well as U.S. artists in other countries. Nick Lowe is a popular artist Yep Roc represents from the U.K. 

“We did John Mayer’s first record — another big success story,” Dicker said.

Although Yep Roc Records is located in Hillsborough already, Redeye is just now moving there.

“The reason why we moved out of what was ultimately Chapel Hill and Carrboro was because we needed more space," Dicker said. "To try to find inexpensive space we had to move out of town."

Redeye Distribution is looking forward to further connecting with the community in Hillsborough, Dicker said.

“Hillsborough is a wonderful, vibrant, creative community with a number of cool parts to it,” said Billy Maupin, chief marketing officer of Redeye. 

Redeye worked with Steve Brantley, the director of economic development in Orange County, to purchase the warehouse where Redeye will be located. The warehouse used to belong to A Southern Season. 

The warehouse is 90,000 square feet and part of an old textile mill, Brantley said.

“It’s about four times as big as the warehouse in Haw River,” Maupin said.

The warehouse will act as the office for 51 of the company’s 67 employees, according to a press release from Redeye. It will also serve as space for hundreds of record labels including Barsuk, Ninja Tune and Warp. 

“Redeye hopes to have a ribbon cutting in May, maybe with some music there,” Maupin said.

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