Matoma

APA’s Ferry Rais-Shaghaghi “discovered” Matoma when the Norwegian DJ and producer had fewer than 2,000 followers on SoundCloud and was about to embark on a career as a school music teacher, but the agent knew he was onto something special.

Three-and-a-half years later, the 24-year-old Matoma is wrapping up a summer touring schedule that included diverse festivals spanning Kongsberg Jazzfestival in his native Norway to Bonnaroo, as well as Firefly in Dover, Del.; Electric Forest in Rothbury, Mich.; Panorama at Randall’s Island in New York City; and a slew of European festivals. The trek ends at Life Is Beautiful in Las Vegas Sept. 22. In between fests, Matoma has become popular for multiple-night residencies in Las Vegas.

“The whole concept about Matoma was that he was never going to be put in a specific corner of a genre or festival,” Rais-Shaghaghi told Pollstar. “It was always going to be the act that was going to cross over, where he could play the hard-ticket rooms, the crossover and electronic festivals, and he could play Vegas and become destination entertainment.” 

Martin Litwicki – Matoma

When Matoma first came to the EDM world’s attention, he was primarily performing tropical house music in vogue at the time.

“I knew [tropical house] was going to have a really short-term life so what we did was roll him out during that time and branded him in that kind of theme, because I knew that’s going to bring out people to the show, since that’s what the  hot thing was,” Rais-Shaghaghi said. “Then, step by step, show by show, we started to roll it outside of that realm and more to the pop realms and the kind of mainstream, radio-friendly, electronic world.”

Agent and artist are taking stock of where they’ve been in the past year as Matoma prepares a new album for release in 2018, return to the festival circuit, and bookings in larger rooms.

“Our plan is to go into bigger rooms and also be very strategic about how we roll it out,” Rais-Shaghaghi said. “But we’re going to maintain a very fair ticket price frame so the fans can continue coming to shows … He’s all about love, all about his fans – he knows they made him who he is and he owes them that.”