Why work together?

I founded Always Look At The Brand Side Of Life because I simply want to fill the world with more great music. To contribute to that, I work as a music entrepreneurship educator, artist branding & career coach, and fundraiser for cultural non-profits, mainly music venues and festivals.

Let's start by explaining, in a nutshell, my career in music thus far. Over the past 15+ years, I have worked across the cultural field—as a drummer (Bodypolitics - The space of a Jump), and drum teacher at first. After teaching and gigging for some years, I started volunteering in the music sector. I became a freelancer in the music sector and started working in festival production, stage management, and other roles from Pinkpop to Into The Great Wide Open.

That led to forming creative collectives and organizing DIY festivals like Woot!Woot!Woolf and A Day In The Forest around the city of Utrecht. From there, I moved to working as the director of Jazz Maastricht, and Pop, Jazz & Beyond music programmer at De Doelen Rotterdam.

Besides working in the music industry, I also care deeply about preparing musicians to build sustainable music careers. A preparation I never received myself in my conservatory days... To that end, I founded Your Art as a Business at Conservatorium Maastricht (2016-19), and currently teach Music Entrepreneurship at Codarts Rotterdam (2021-now). To date, I’ve taught over 1,000 emerging artists how to turn their passion into a profession.

Being an eternally curious person, my wife would say "obsessed", I have degrees in Music (jazz drums), Business Administration, and Cultural Economics & Entrepreneurship (Erasmus University). Furthermore, I followed entrepreneurship courses like Seth Godin's altMBA, and branding courses by the University of Michigan and others. Besides that, I'm currently learning classical piano, love working on my house, and continue to read ferociously.