SPEAKER

KOAST

Artist, Producer, Creative Strategist

Self-Employed

Dillon Jaymes is an artist, producer and creative strategist with over 15 years of experience across artist development, music production and publishing. Having worked within major-label structures and the independent sector, he has developed artists across a broad range of commercial genres.

As KOAST, he is the architect of AFRO-RAVE, a fusion of rave culture and the rhythmic DNA of African music. Shaped by experiences growing up across Germany, the UK and Ghana, his sound reflects the growing influence of global sounds on contemporary club culture.

His industry experience includes building and operating a music publishing joint venture with Peermusic, overseeing writer development and catalogue strategy. His work has shaped his understanding of how the industry determines which sounds gain visibility, investment and recognition.

Through his personal projects KOAST explores how the industry defines relevance and why global sounds and the audiences shaping them are too often overlooked by the mainstream.

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Session

Global Sounds, Local Blindspots: Who Defines Relevance in Global Music Culture

Amapiano, Afrobeats, Baile Funk and K-Pop are not “future trends”. They are already part of how people enjoy music and build communities. Still, in many European industry contexts, these sounds are treated as niche, external or separate from what is considered mainstream.
This session asks what happens when audiences are already moving differently, but parts of the industry are still using old categories. Who decides what is relevant? Who gets booked, marketed and written about? And what do we miss when we treat global sounds as something ‘other’?
Four invited contributors open the conversation with short inputs. A moderator then guides a fishbowl with one open seat for audience members to join in. The aim is not to explain these scenes from the outside, but to listen to the people shaping them and ask how the industry can catch up.

Fishbowl

🇬🇧 English

SCENE

Global Connections

Convention

Speakers

KOAST
Nanja Oedi
Rafush

Moderators

Shari Who

Music Hall 2+3 – nhow Berlin

Nov 5, 2026,

14:20 –

15:10