OOB Records Interview
Netherlands based Independent label celebrates a milestone anniversary
Story by Matthew Murray
11/02/2026
Out Of The Box records is a record company based in Rotterdam, Netherlands. They are celebrating 10 years in business. We spoke to founder Kat Keller who was able to give us the lowdown.
The story starts in spring 2015 when Kat founded a management company ‘My Music matters’ which specialised in managing and promoting bands. This eventually morphed into Friendly Folk records.
“I realised that it was easy enough to find an independent label that was looking for prog artists, but for folk, there were no folk labels, and that's why I started Friendly Folk.”
Kat explained the changes to the original company:
“Everything I was doing at My Music Matters was basically, what a label would do, except I didn't do music distribution and production. I was doing a promotion company, but I was almost packaging it as a label anyway.
Following a good few years of success Kat morphed things again.
“When I created out of the box records, that was because somebody that I had managed back in 2015 from Portugal wanted to release a heavy metal album.”
Releasing that this wouldn’t fit with the Friendly Folk aesthetic but not wanting to pass on the opportunity to put out a really good record it seemed the best option was to start a new, less genre specific label.
“I thought, I know how to do this now. I'll just start another label. And I did. I mostly started it as a one off just for that band. Before I knew it OOB just started to take off and fly and it ended up surpassing Friendly Folk. Folk is wonderful and fun and I still love folk music. But the thing of the folk acts signed to Friendly Folk, they fit just find on a label where all genres were welcome, so we decided to merge into one label.”
Asking about the 2 separate record labels Kat said:-
“It merged into one label as of 2026 because I thought, well you know it's been 10 years. It's been 5 solid years for Out Of The Box. 10 solid years for the combination of My Music Matters, and Friendly Folk, and running 3 different websites and 3 different socials.”
“I just thought why am I doing that when everything really can fit on Out Of The Box? That's why I decided to move everything to Out Of The Box.”
Kat is originally from a tiny Colorado (USA) town. So small in fact that they updated the population section on the town sign to 81 when she was born. Raised on a farm surrounded by animals up until the age of 10 when she moved to Phoenix Arizona. She eventually moved to the Netherlands in 1999 with her Dutch partner. At first she was immersing herself into learning the language. She subsequently studied journalism, wrote and published three novels, and became a high school English teacher.
It was through teaching that she got into music journalism. The students had an assignment that involved doing an interview. One of her students was in a band and he asked her if she could interview them. She found she actually really enjoyed doing it and started interviewing other bands.
“I was doing a blog called Music Muse. I started doing radio interviews as well, I began with Prog Core Radio in Canada. I started Kats Korner-Pinch of Prog, a radio show, and was on air for nearly 5 years. It was wonderful. I loved it. Every year I toy with the idea of returning to the radio.”
One of the bands that she interviewed unexpectedly asked her to be their manager. She agreed, learned how and what to do on the job and things have snowballed since then.
“It was a folk punk band here in the Netherlands, they were called the Royal Spuds. I began with managing and booking them. When I realised I had all the skills to be a manager and continued from there adding a few more folk acts, and then providing management and promotion for prog rock bands from Netherlands, Germany, Portugal and USA.”
For somebody so involved in music for so long I thought I would ask Kat about her musical guilty musical pleasure. The unequivocal response was -
“Scream singing along to Led Zeppelin."
Thanks for talking to us Kat. Here's to the next 10 years!