Pop music exports: 36 million

There are far more success stories than only Tiësto, Armin van Buuren and Within Temptation. Treading in their footsteps, Sander Kleinenberg, Fedde LeGrand and Ferry Corsten are also doing well. Junkie XL (Tom Holkenborg) had a global hit with his remix of Elvis Presley’s A Little Less Conversation, and for years has been a successful supplier of music for films and computer games, working from his base in Los Angeles.

Dutch pop music is a valuable export product. The Buma Cultuur foundation researched the export value of this cultural heritage and arrived at the very respectable sum of EUR 35.9 million for the year 2006. More recent figures are not yet available.

Years ago father and daughter Hans and Candy Dulfer were successful in the Japanese market and this is now also proving very receptive to the light, jazzy pop of Room Eleven. ‘Gothic’ groups such as After Forever, Epica and The Gathering are also proving successful, treading in the footsteps of Within Temptation; while alternative rock groups such as Voicst and Peter Pan Speedrock are also hard at work. The Nits and The Ex have been active in countries such as France, Finland and even Ethiopia for many years. And then there are the groups that concentrate on playing abroad rather than in the Netherlands, which means they are less famous or even unheard of in the Netherlands itself. Examples of groups in this category are Kasba, a Moroccan-Dutch band, and Zuco 103, reasonably well-known in the Netherlands, but far more active abroad.