My job has a very diverse set of tasks and responsibilities. It’s a lot of meetings, answering emails and keeping overviews in spreadsheets; so far the ordinary part that makes it sound like a regular office job. Every once in a while I get to travel to conferences and (showcase)festivals all around Europe, to speak in panels, scout new artists and make new connections. That is what really makes this job exciting and unique. And to state the obvious, I listen to a lot of music. Like all of the applications we receive for ESNS!

People are often curious about this haha, very understandable of course! There is unfortunately no straightforward answer. For starters, we try to see as many artists live as we can, but we have a lot of ‘eyes and ears’ to help us around Europe. These people give us (the booking team) very valuable input. If we are not sure about an artist, we know whose opinion we can trust. We also look into data, articles and other things that suggest some sort of ‘momentum’ around an artist. From there, we have a lot of discussions before we book the most urgent, most authentic and most promising artists. While also trying to make a good mix. And of course we have our own gut feeling, that remains the mysterious part :^)

Let me try and break it down to what I think are three of the most important ones:

Diversity, in all regards. We aim to book a reflection of what is ‘happening’ in Europe, so we really make an effort to include as many sounds and stories as we possibly can with the amount of slots we have.

Quality shows. We’d rather wait for a band or artist to be really good live, than to book them too early.

It’s important to be really ready as an artist, to be able to get as much out of your showcase as possible.

New discoveries. We are there for new, emerging artists, not for headliners. Of course a big chunk of our visitors are very well informed and up to date, but even they should be able to discover artists they’ve never heard of before. I think that’s what makes the line up interesting!

Well… we are currently working on the line up after receiving a record number of applications, sooo you really have to stay tuned for this one! We will be announcing what’s up in the coming months, both for the conference and festival. In general you can expect: good vibes, amazing venues, a bunch of cool people and needless to say a lot of music!

Tough one! I think it was actually when I was just working for ESNS and I was a part of the Noorderslag booking team. I booked a band who played Eurosonic the following year and I saw them grow even more after that. There are a million stories like that (ok, maybe not a million), but this was the first time I saw it happen with my own eyes after booking an artist for ESNS. Curating the program is fun, but it is extra special to be able to see where playing ESNS brings an artist afterwards. Pursuing a career in music is super challenging, to be able to help kickstart careers and hopefully making this one gig worthwhile for an artist is very rewarding.