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Boiler Room partners with Topman on a US music tour
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Live music streaming pioneer Boiler Room has partnered with British fashion retailer Topman for four-stop tour in the US, including shows in New York, Atlanta, Chicago and Los Angeles. This tour should generate substantial North American buzz for both brands, elevate Topman's hip and edgy credibility among youths, while providing Boiler Room with a hefty chunk of sponsorship money to continue its global expansion.
In many respects, Boiler Room's rise to fame follows a similar 'rags to riches, passion project to bona fide business' trajectory as other successful digital media upstarts. A potent idea grown from the ground up with basic equipment, a group of friends, and barely any semblance of a business case, until flourishing into a bona fide empire by virtue of the connective power of the internet. Boiler Room's first parties and live streams seem more incidental than intentional, and the project launched not as a company but as a playful experiment by its founder, Blaise Bellville.
In a decrepit building in East London, Bellville stumbled upon a small room that was once home to the edifice's head-generating equipment. The disused space struck Bellville a well-suited for intimate DJ sessions, which he could broadcast on the internet. With budget turntables, a pair of speakers, support from like minded friends, a Ustream channel, a webcam stuck on the wall with adhesive tape, and, of course, an old corrugated sign on the door that spelled out the room's past and present purpose, "Boiler Room" was born.
Since launching in 2010, Boiler Room has grown into a revered event organizer and live music streamer, carving out an iconic place for itself in music subculture. The company hosts invite-only parties in secret locations around the world, include Chile, Mexico, and Tel Aviv, and most frequently in its hometown of London, as well as in New York, Berlin, and LA. In April, Boiler Room broke into China for the first time, broadcasting live through YouTube, as well as Chinese video company LeEco (formerly LeTV) to overcome the country's internal ban against Google.
As of last year, Boiler Room had streamed over 3.5 billion minutes in live video, with average audiences in the hundreds of thousands tuning into its many hundred shows, and with a record audience of 10.6 million tuning into Carl Cox's set in Ibiza on YouTube, according to stats cited in a Guardian profile for the organization's five-year anniversary. To earn money, the company relies purely on branded sponsorships, such as the aforementioned partnership with Topman, and aims to add 6 to 7 partners year on year to collaborate and develop platforms mutually. Some of Boiler Room's noted collaborators are Red Bull, a long-standing partner, Ray-Ban, which sponsors Boiler Room's SXSW events, and Red Stripe.
Several strategic factors have paved Boiler Room's road to success:
Leveraging social platforms for live. Boiler Room began streaming on Ustream, the live video platform that IBM acquired in June, and then rose to prominence with YouTube broadcasts embedded on its main site. Each event stream is typically made up of three to four hours of DJ sets, and online viewers are able to submit comments on the video. The bulk of these comments are usually "Track ID" requests for artist and song name in play. Occasionally, however, there is substantive feedback that Boiler Room takes to heart, such as the slack it received over an unpopular Diplo set back in 2011, which proved to be a turning point in solidifying the company's ethos. Boiler Room has since amassed over a million subscribers on YouTube, but has been more active in recent months on Facebook Live, where it has a larger fan base of over 1.5 million people. The company doesn't appear to be a part of the Facebook program to pay live content creators directly, however.
Diversified programming across genres. Boiler Room aims to showcase niche, up-and-coming or otherwise underserved music scenes that tend to be overlooked in the mainstream media. Artists across the spectrum – from the emerging crop of bedroom producers to established icons with cult-followings – appear in Boiler Room shows. Early on, the company's budget-conscious production methods gave it the leeway to book about a thousand artists each year, produce all the events and broadcasts to match. In a similar vein, Boiler Room is committed to spotlighted all genres of music, no matter how obscure or eclectic, and the company has even forayed classical music, a genre generally unpopular with millennials. Last week, the platform announced that it would divvy all of its content into four new channels focusing on a different categories of music, further cementing the diversity of its programming. All of this enables Boiler Room to cater to a vast range of interests, and reach audiences far and wide.
Giving local talent a global platform. Since its launch, Boiler Room has helped to emphasize local talent and music culture. From its roots in London, the music event streaming project gave exposure to the country's burgeoning electronic scene at the turn of the decade. The platform signaled its influence early on in 2010 when it booked Theo Parrish, the legendary Detroit-based producer and DJ, in a set showcasing the renown London label Young Turks, also featuring the then up-and-comers SBTRKT and Mount Kimbie. Boiler Room's first expansion out of London came in the following year, when it set sail to Berlin to host shows around the city's famed house and techno scene. The Berlin broadcasts catapulted Boiler Room onto the international stage, with enthusiasts of Berlin's music culture tuning in from around the world. To celebrate its fifth birthday in November 2015, Boiler Room launched four parties across three continents, in Berlin, Tokyo, Los Angele and New York, each broadcasting at a different time during the day. Providing a lens into music scenes worldwide plays into the modern spirit of globalism and people's inherent fascination with foreign culture. In business parlance, Boiler Room serves as a marketing vehicle for miscellaneous, underground art movements across the world.
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