About Ivo Adelaar
01 / The beginning
I’m Ivo Adelaar, a music industry founder and label director based in Amsterdam. I founded Disruptive Records and Andante Piano, and co-founded MasterPiano.
A recording in 2018
In 2018 my father, Ron, played me one of his piano recordings. He heard the hobby he had kept beside a career in HR. I heard an artist and an audience waiting for that music.
At the end of 2019 I started releasing his piano works myself. There was no label yet, and no plan beyond getting the music to the people who would want it. For about a year I handled the releases and built the playlists on my own.
In the beginning I built the playlists myself, and put his pieces where people already went to listen. That earned us a little reach. Then Spotify added one of his tracks to one of the most popular international piano playlists, and it went fast. Ron went from ten monthly listeners to a thousand, then fifty thousand, then a hundred thousand. That is the work I have done ever since.
A year later I founded Disruptive Records, and launched Andante Piano with him as its first artist. Within two years he left a thirty-year career in HR to play piano full time, in his early sixties.
That first release still shapes the company. A label’s job is not simply to put more tracks into the world. It is to recognise work worth hearing, build the conditions for it to travel, and keep the person behind it visible.
The orderThe company came after the music, not before it.
02 / Artist to A&R
I spent my first years trying to be heard.
I was drawn to the emotional side of electronic music: melody, long builds, and the moment a record changes the feeling in a room. As an artist I saw the front of the house. At Revealed I learned the machinery behind it. Those two views still shape how I run a label: stay close to the person making the record, then build a structure strong enough to carry the work further.
The year-by-year record, on the front page
03 / The work now
The strategy starts with the listener’s day.
Today the company strategy sits with me. I decide where we are going, which gaps are worth pursuing, and how the labels, education, events, studio and technology connect.
The system around it
Releases remain at the centre. Everything around them should make the music, the artist relationship, or the listener relationship stronger. MasterPiano carries the same logic into education, while the studio and events bring the relationships into the room.
I put technology on the operations, never on the art. It reads the data underneath the catalogue, it takes the repetitive administration off people, and I used it to build the software the label runs on, which the whole team works in every day. I am not interested in being for or against a tool. The question is whether it gives artists a stronger system, the team more room to think, or the work a better outcome.
How the companies connect, on the work page