Merlijn Poolman
Night Mayor of Groningen
Merlijn Poolman started his career with organising metal shows and tours, but after founding a nightclub in 2011 he gradually got more involved into dance music. Since 2018 he became the Night Mayor of the Dutch city of Groningen and in that role forms a link between the government, the club venue owners and (most important) the party people themselves.
As the leader of the Groningen Popcouncil, member of the Dutch Popcoalitie (advisory board to the government) and former European Music Council fellow-member Merlijn loves to balance between the formal policymaking and the raw underground music culture that formed his career.
After his first visit to China in 2014, he went there 10 times in total with cultural exchanges in music business as the main goal. In 2018 he started collaborating with the music database platform Bookya to set up a service called Gateway to China, that offers Chinese social media accounts and content creation to Western artists.