Matt Schwarz

IMPACT INTERNATIONAL: UK/EURO HONORS

Matt Schwarz

CEO, DreamHaus

Mind Over Matter

If you’re willing to skip your high school graduation ceremony to promote your first bigger show, you probably know where your path in life lies. In Matt Schwarz’s case, the year of the missed graduation was 2001, the show was Weezer and Iggy Pop. Looking back, he says this episode “paved a way to my professional future.”

It’s a future Schwarz is currently shaping as CEO of DreamHaus, a brand-new Berlin-based concert agency acquired by CTS Eventim in 2021. “The beauty of being a startup during COVID times,” he says, “is that we didn’t have to deal with any aftermath of cancelled or repeatedly postponed events. We were able to focus on our flagship events Rock am Ring and Rock im Park and had enough lead time to set these up.” For an epic return, one might add. After the forced two-year break, both events had sold out. Rock am Ring even celebrated an attendance record with 90,000 visitors, and a full live/live broadcast of the entire event being made available for the first time in its 37-year history. “The Rocks,” as Schwarz refers to them, “were the first German major festivals after two years of silence so the attention from media, industry and fans was enormous.”

His team is currently finalizing the program for next year’s editions and has multiple domestic and international arena and stadium tours in the making, including Muse, Måneskin, Sam Smith, Lewis Capaldi, Turnstile, Machine Gun Kelly, and more. And even if 2022 didn’t turn out to be as much of a transition into normalcy as Schwarz had been hoping for, he is “proud of what we have already achieved under these extreme circumstances.” Aside from keeping himself and his team occupied with local community work during times when events were banned, Schwarz also had more than five years’ worth of experience as a TM meditator to fall back on. “My daily meditation routine helped me to grow perspective in general and gave me a solid grounding and additional skills. I also used the time when our industry world stood still to take up hobbies again,” he says.

One of those hobbies is contemporary and post-war art, which is the field he would probably be working in today, had he not followed another calling, which took him from developing acts from club to arena level during his twenties at MLK to working with the biggest artists globally in his thirties as managing director of Live Nation GSA. Now, in his forties, a position to truly shape a business from scratch, Schwarz can count on the support, trust, and loyalty from various stakeholders on and off stage he has built a relationship with over the years, and which is the part of the business he considers the “most fulfilling.”