Dan Cortazio

Dan Cortazio is Director at Melody Makers Music & Fine Arts Centre and co-founder of LTV, a portfolio of online businesses.

Music has been part of Dan's life since he was seven. He started on the flute and learned music theory, then picked up drums and guitar. He played in several bands as a teenager, recorded an EP, and was at one point seriously considering a music degree at an Australian university.

His path took a different turn when he started learning to code, also as a teenager. Within a few years he was making a living building websites for clients. Shortly after that he started building his own websites: content properties that grew in traffic and earned revenue from advertising. That foundation is what eventually took him to New Zealand for a job at a web development company. He went out on his own again soon after. Over the last 20 years he has built and acquired a wider group of online businesses across content, ad-tech and other categories, today employing a team of over 100 people across the portfolio. Along the way he has travelled to more than 60 countries while running everything remotely.

He took over leadership of Melody Makers in 2026, alongside Mike Mammone, with a clear vision: keep doing what the school already does brilliantly, and lean into the new programmes Dubai's families are asking for next, including entrepreneurship, coding, and the broader set of future skills the next generation needs as much as music. The plan is to use software, online delivery and operational scale to let far more children, in Dubai, across the UAE, and around the world, learn from this faculty.