Dino Merlin

After a 6-year hiatus, Dino returned to the stage with his eleventh album Hotel Nacional. It was released in June 2014 and was featured in the top 10 on the Billboard World Albums list immediately upon release due to unprecedented online sales in the region. This is the only album from the Slavic-speaking Europe ever to be charted on the prestigious Billboard list. The album featured a star-studded line up of Yoad Nevo, Richard Niles, Husnu Senlendirici and many other producers that have worked for globally renown music acts such as Sugababes, Morcheeba, Lisa Ekdahl, Sophie Ellis-Bextor and many others. The Hotel Nacional World Tour has had a box office success of 700,000 people that have attended concerts across 4 continents. It is the largest tour ever to have been produced by an artist from Southeast Europe.

Dino worked for 5 years pro bono as the honorary and de facto president of the assembly of AMUS - the main association of music artists of Bosnia. He has been one of the founding members of this organisation in 2013. In early 2018 he resigned from his position as president due to the lack of available time at his disposal to run the association.

In 2013 he has been given the International Humanitarian Award in Urfa, Turkey.

Although Dino likes to keep his humanitarian activities private and out of public sight, it is known that he is an active donor of scholarships to underprivileged children in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He is a long-time member of the Hastor Foundation, biggest organisation of its kind devoted to distributing scholarships to primary and high-school students in the country. Dino acts as a sponsor to over dozen students every year and has been a member of this programme since 2008.

In 2000, aged 38, Dino wrote his most successful album to date - the famous "Sredinom" (engl. Middle). The album was the top-selling album in Bosnia and Herzegovina and was sold in all of the former Yugoslav republics.

The subsequent tour promoting his Sredinom album, which was released in 2000, included over 200 concerts, with a spectacular record-breaking performance at the Koševo Olympic Stadium in Sarajevo, in front of an audience of about 80,000. This was the largest crowd ever to assemble on the national stadium in Bosnia's history. Dino subsequently played 3 more times at this stadium and is the only artist ever to have filled to capacity this venue 4 times.

In 1993 he wrote the song and eventually participated in Bosnia's first Eurovision Song Contests, in Millstreet in 1993. Dino authored the song "Sva bol svijeta" (translated to English means "all the grief in the world"). The song was about the hardships the people in his home country were enduring during the war and called for peace. He again participated in the Eurovision Song Contests in Jerusalem in 1999 (singing Putnici with Béatrice, a French singer) and in 2011 with Love in Rewind. Dino Merlin has also taken part in other big European festivals, such as Copenhagen in 1996 and Turkovision in 1997.

Dervišhalidović began his solo career under the name Dino Merlin in 1991, and recorded six studio albums: Moja bogda sna in 1993, Fotografija in 1995, Sredinom in 2000, Burek in 2004, Ispočetka in 2008, Hotel Nacional.

As Dino was the sole songwriter for the band, and produced most of their work, at one point it was no surprise that he went on a solo career. Not long after the band dissolved, Merlin was invited by the state government of Bosnia to write its first ever national anthem "Jedna si jedina". The song acted as the state's national anthem until the late 1990s.

With the band, he has recorded 5 studio albums: Kokuzna vremena in 1985, Teško meni sa tobom in 1986, Merlin in 1987, Nešto lijepo treba da se desi in 1989, and Peta strana svijeta in 1990.

In 1984 Dino entered a local studio in Sarajevo owned by producer Brano Likić. All of the songs recorded were written by Dino while the fees of the recording were paid from Dino's personal funds. During this time, Dino was rejected by every major record label in Sarajevo. At the same time, Dino's private funds were only enough for about 6 songs with the norm of the day being 10 songs for a proper album. During the recording session of the final song, a local A&R agent Muradif Brkić entered the studio where Dino and Brano were mixing the song which later turned out be Kokuzna Vremena. After listening to the track a couple of times, Muradif offered Dino a contract with his record label "Sarajevodisk" on the spot and agreed to finance the remainder of the song recordings. Eventually, Merlin was able to release its first album in 1985 with the leading single Kokuzna vremena - the same song which gave Dino and his band a lifeline into the music industry.

Edin Dervišhalidović (born 12 September 1962), better known by his stage name Dino Merlin is a prominent Bosnian singer-songwriter, musician and record producer.

Edin Dervišhalidović was born on 12 September 1962 in the historic neighbourhood of Alifakovac in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was a republic of Yugoslavia at the time. The Dervišhalidović family traces its origins to Novi Pazar in Serbia. Dino's father Abid was a carpenter and came to Sarajevo as a teenager. His mother Fatima, born and raised in Sarajevo, was a Muslim cleric. His parents divorced when he was 7 years old and he was subsequently raised by his mother.