Anyone working in music industry here?

A friend of mine worked at Universal on Oberwallstrasse for a few years. The major label offices here are pretty closed off, you're right that cold emails go straight to spam. What worked for her was going to the smaller showcase nights like the ones at Gretchen or about:blank where label scouts actually pay attention, not the big tourist spots.

If you're specifically chasing the German scene, the A&R people I've crossed paths with at Sony were all at the Pop-Kultur festival or hanging around the canteen at Funkhaus. That building on Nalepastrasse has a few smaller labels renting rooms, and people are more approachable there than at the corporate towers.

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yeah tons of people in berlin are in music, but it's less the major label world and more the independent scene tbh. if you're specifically after the big three (sony/warner/universal), they're all here but they're not exactly hanging out at the usual spots. the a&r people i've met tend to be at things like the reeperbahn festival or the berlin music week panels, not so much random club nights.

fwiw, if you want to network without a connection, try the "music incubator" coworking spaces like die musikwirtschaft or the ones in kreuzberg near u-bahn kottbusser tor. a lot of mid-level label folks work from there. also, bryan adams used to have a studio on köpenicker strasse, but that's not helpful. just don't expect to cold-email a&rs at warner and get a reply, they're buried. good luck with the search.

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You should check out the monthly meetups at Monster Ronson's Ichiban Karaoke. Lots of indie label people and session musicians hang there.

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Worth noting that Berlin street names have official umlaut and ß rules that trip people up, so a sign showing "Strasse" versus "Straße" is not actually a spelling error, just an older transcription. Same with "ue" versus "ü" (e.g. "Kantstrasse" vs "Kantstraße"), both are considered valid renderings and you'll see the ß version on the blue Schilder and the ss version on older plaques or in databases that predate Unicode. If the difference you're seeing is between those two forms, there's nothing to fix and both are technically correct.

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if the signs u mean are the old enamel ones on the house facades those are often protected as Baudenkmal so nobody's allowed to correct them even if the spelling is outdated. the binding version is whatever is in the Berliner Strassenverzeichnis plus the entry in the Liegenschaftskataster, so if u tell me the street i can point u to the right Bezirksamt Mitte or Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf page. tbh the merged district thing is real but the facade signs are a separate story, theyre basically museum pieces at this point

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honestly thats super common in Charlottenburg, the district offices were merged from older Bezirke and nobody ever fixed all the Schilder. if its a real street you can check the official strassenverzeichnis on berlin.de, that list is what the Burgeramt actually goes by. which street is it? some of the Kaiserdamm / Kantstrasse signs are notorious for this.

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