Groovian is heading to Amsterdam Dance Event with The Chorus

Groovian has been accepted into The Chorus at Amsterdam Dance Event.

We’re one of eight music-tech startups in the 2026 cohort. ADE runs from 21 to 25 October, and the Class of ‘26 showcase is on Thursday 22 October at Felix Meritis. I posted the news on LinkedIn this morning. This is the slightly longer version.

What The Chorus is

The Chorus sits inside ADE Startups, the founder and investor strand of ADE Pro. Each year ADE picks eight early-stage music-tech companies from around the world.

What you get is a platform during the week, a mentor, curated introductions, and five days in a city where the people who actually ship music are already walking around. Closed roundtables rather than another panel. A desk in one of the busy networking hubs. A peer group that is supposed to keep going after everyone flies home.

ADE is thirty this year. The conference side pulls more than 11,000 music professionals into Amsterdam: labels, distributors, DSPs, publishers, promoters, investors. That puts Groovian in the same building as the people we need to meet.

Last year’s Chorus companies mostly made tools for creating, discovering, or performing music. Groovian works further down the chain. Christopher Edmonds and I built it to share fraud intelligence between distributors and DSPs, so a bad actor banned at one door does not walk into the next one looking new.

Why this room

The fraud we deal with is familiar: stolen masters, fake streams, impersonation, and accounts that hop distributor after a takedown. ADE brings together the distributors, DSPs, labels, and platforms dealing with these fraud problems. It is also where the people who still treat fraud as someone else’s ops problem sit next to the people who are tired of paying for it.

One of ADE Pro’s themes this year is collective action. Shared screening is the intake version of that. Distributors and DSPs already catch the same rings. They just catch them alone. That is the problem Groovian is built to close.

The Chorus mentors for 2026

ADE has named eight mentors for this year’s cohort. Between them, they have worked across music distribution, intelligence, rights, ticketing, investment, and growth. Christopher and I want their honest take on Groovian.

• Scott Cohen: co-founded The Orchard, later chief innovation officer at Warner Music Group
• Hazel Savage: founded Musiio, later VP of music intelligence at SoundCloud
• Amanda Schupf: founded MAX, previously Epidemic Sound, Songtradr, and INgrooves. She already advises Groovian.
• Linnea Sundberg: VP of corporate development at UnitedMasters, previously Splice and Spotify
• Jan Willem van der Meer: founded Paylogic and started The Chorus at ADE
• Rishi Patel: co-founder of Plus Eight Equity Partners
• John Bonten: commercial and growth lead at Moat in Amsterdam
• Roberta Lucca (Beta Lucca): co-founded Bossa Games, later a venture partner at Octopus Ventures

If you are at ADE

We will be talking about how fraud moves through distribution: the same email, the same ISRC, and the same payout details showing up at three companies that do not talk to each other.

If you run a distributor, a DSP, or a label that keeps paying to rediscover the same bad actors, we want that conversation. Get in touch if you want to set something up before the week, or just shout when you see us.

Coffee or a beer. Neither of us is fussy.

See you in Amsterdam.