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By 2017, nightlife venues in Berlin were closing so quickly that the phenomenon had been dubbed clubsterben — “club death.”
As a result, the city — where nightlife is so woven into the social fabric that the local government has its own club commission — began scrambling to save venues, which were shuttering due to increased gentrification. One of the agencies they called for help was VibeLab, an Amsterdam-based consulting and advocacy agency that works to protect nighttime economies and cultures by using the language most city officials know best: data.
In Berlin, the company’s research resulted in the creation of a club cadastre, or a real-time map indicating the value, extent and ownership of nightlife venues in the city as they relate to taxation.
“The city would know where new development was happening, but they wouldn’t have a clue what the neighboring clubs were before giving out [a] new development permit,” says VibeLab co-founder Mirik Milan. “They didn’t have a tool to see if a cultural or independent space need[ed] protection from this development.”
Milan says the cadastre was a significant step in building the influence of the Club Commission and the nightlife industry with local government, helping expand the Commission’s operating budget from three to seven million euros over the last five years. The cadastre has also provided advocacy organizations with time to start campaigns to protect spaces before development permits are signed off on by the city.
Since launching in 2018, VibeLab has also created such tools for cities including Montreal, New York City, Tokyo and Riyadh, along with a forthcoming analysis of Nashville. On November 27, the company will present its report for Sydney to the government of New South Wales, with officials including John Graham – who oversees the territory’s nighttime economy – having already pledged their support to the report’s outcomes.
Reports, which can be completed in as little as five months and typically cost between $75,000 to $160,000, are commissioned by various agencies in each respective city. While specific goals shift from place to place, all reports are ultimately meant to give local officials a better idea of the scope and value of that city’s nightlife culture. (To wit, the VibeLab website proclaims the organization to be “defenders of the dark.”)
Mirik Milan
Once commissioned, members of the 10-person VibeLab team fly to town. Their first step is connecting with locals who can offer intel on what goes on when the sun goes down.
“These are maybe not the highest-ranking operators,” says Milan, “but people that really know what the scene is about: music journalists, small independent promoters, passionate people that go out often.”
The VibeLab team interviews these people while also aggregating data on neighborhood populations, land prices, census statistics, public transportation and more. A report on the size, value and general health of the scene – called a “creative footprint” – is then prepared.
These footprints foster initiatives like the Berlin cadastre, which helped local officials see that “a dot on the map is a business that supports 200 jobs and makes that neighborhood flourishing and Interesting and is probably why the developer wanted to do something there,” says Milan. “It’s very much about creating awareness and education.”
Protecting nightlife ecosystems is a cause Milan has professionally championed since his tenure as the night mayor of Amsterdam, effectively launching the position in both the city and others around the world. Serving from 2014 to 2018, Milan helped create 24-hour venue permits and worked on a crime reduction initiative around the city’s Rembrandtplein plaza. He also assisted officials in New York City, London, Paris and beyond to create similar roles and nighttime governance structures, which are meant to create a dialogue between municipalities, clubs, festivals, event promoters and residents. (Currently, 15 U.S. cities have night mayors.)
The VibeLab team is steeped in this work. Co-founder Lutz Leichsenring has been the spokesperson and executive board member of the Berlin Club Commission since 2009, and Asia Pacific director Jane Slingo is the co-founder of Sydney’s Global Cities After Dark summit, the director of the city’s Electronic Music Conference and a longtime artist manager. Crucially, the entire team is passionate about going out dancing.
“When you’re in an advocacy role [like night mayor],” Milan says of the difference between his former and current positions, “you often jump on every fire: a club that’s under pressure, a festival that has sound issues, or an act of violence. With VibeLab, we wanted to be ahead of the curve, strategizing about how we could ensure cities make the right decision before it goes wrong.”
Jane Slingo
The cultural and economic stakes are real. VibeLab data shows that in bigger cities, one in seven or eight people work in the nightlife industry. When venues close, these workers are out of jobs, artists have fewer options on where to play and nightlife culture, particularly independent and underground music culture, is stifled.
“The business model of cities works against preserving nightlife culture, because the model is to develop the land,” says Milan. “But what they’re forgetting is if they root out the reason why the land got valuable, you push creative communities further to the outskirts or just wipe it out completely. And that is very difficult to build back.”
VibeLab’s creative footprints have found that a few tactics on how to best protect these communities bear out globally.
“We see in our reports that the venue ladder is essential,” says Milan. “It’s very important to have a talent development pipeline. You need spaces [that hold] 150 people where artists can do their first gigs.”
Such a ladder would provide artists with places to play at every phase of their development, from a tiny club to a mid-size room to an arena. While creative footprints don’t differentiate between independent and corporate-owned venues, the smaller and often independent spaces are most likely to close amid real estate developments and economic downturns.
VibeLab reports have also discovered the efficacy of cultural grants that include micro funds, which earmark relatively modest chunks of money – between $5,000 to $20,000 – for artists to get albums mixed, pay for short tours and more. “Really often, cultural funding only ends up at institutions and with already established artists or musicians,” says Milan, but funding “smaller entities that don’t already have a track record is very important for building up a lively scene.”
Lutz Leichsenring
With venues around the world feeling the ongoing squeeze of rising rent and gentrification (the National Independent Venue Association reported that more than 25 U.S. clubs permanently closed in 2022), creative footprints also advocate for venues to become multidisciplinary spaces that can host a variety of functions and which are open daily, rather than the Thursday to Saturday schedules many of these spaces currently operate on.
The diversification of such spaces, VibeLab posits, will likely also create a better connection between venues and the locals who live near them. This relationship is likely to help these locals, who might otherwise register sound complaints and the like, better understand the value of a space and even start going there themselves.
Footprints also advise that more public funding be given to these spaces, so they’re not so reliant on alcohol sales. Reports have also found positive correlations between good public transportation, a large population of young people and a high density of music venues.
“A report is always a vehicle for a bigger process,” says Milan. He says a report’s direct effect is how it illustrate gaps, opportunities and policy incentives to officials, while also revealing blind spots or preconceptions city governments might have about nightlife.
Ultimately, VibeLab’s work is meant to protect an industry that, Milan says, is “still very much demonized” due to misconceptions about what happens in nightlife spaces and about how much nightlife culture contributes to any given city’s economy and quality of life.
“We are very passionate about the transformative power that nighttime culture and [artistic] communities have on cities,” says Milan. “We see ourselves as translators, connecting creatives, businesses, governments and institutions to boost creativity in local communities.”
This week in dance music: we talked to the legend Green Velvet (who assured us he doesn’t actually feel legendary) and rounded up the best new dance projects out this week.
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Joy (Anonymous), “JOY (Up The Street)”
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The Label: Astralwerks
The Spiel: Joy (Anonymous) emerged out of London in the wake of the pandemic with a brightly energetic hybrid of electronic music that’s as emotive as it is effective in getting crowds moving. (And if that sounds like someone else you know, bear in mind that the duo is friends and collaborators with fellow parenthesis enthusiast Fred again..) The sophomore Joy (Anonymous) album, Cult Classics, demonstrates the pair’s efficacy with music that’s tightly produced, extremely warm and as deep as it is playful. Made over the last year, the album’s foundations were forged at Imogen Heap’s house in east London, where the guys — Henry Counsell and Louis Curran — invited a fleet of collaborators over, with the fun and humanity of those sessions evident throughout the no-skips LP.
The Artists Say: “This has been a journey sonically and emotionally over the last two years,” the pair wrote on Instagram. “you are the reason this record got finished, it was your reactions and feedback in the Joy meetings that made realize it was done, so thank you! this is just another journal entry in our tide based journey so keep an eye on it for more things to come.”
deadmau5, “Ghosts ‘N’ Stuff” (Jauz Remix)
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The Label: mau5trap
The Spiel: In the 14 years since its release, deadmau5 and Rob Swire’s “Ghosts ‘n’ Stuff” has become an all-time classic, a simultaneously of-the-era and totally timeless song that some producers have cited as the reason they started making electronic music. A remix thus seems like an impossible and/or superfluous task, but Jauz’s new edit (only the third official remix in the track’s history) demonstrates an inventive freshness, with the Bay Area producer keeping the bones of the original — including the entirety of Swire’s call-to-arms vocals — but paring down portions, extending segments and adding a kind of wavy mechanical touch that altogether really works. The track drops ahead of deadmau5’s headlining shows this weekend at Red Rocks Amphitheater, with Jauz, Good Times Ahead and Volaris on support act duties.
The Artist Says: “Making a remix for a song as revered and respected as ‘Ghosts n’ Stuff’ is honestly almost an impossible task,” says Jauz. “It was intimidating and humbling, to say the least. But it was also a great exercise to remind myself how to stop putting pressure and expectation on myself, and just make whatever comes out naturally. I made eight different versions of this remix and this is the only one that really felt like ‘me.’ Thanks to Joel and the team for letting me remix one of the greatest electronic records of all time. It was an honor and such a cool experience”
Tiga, Hudson Mohawke & Jesse Boykins III, “Silence of Love”
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The Label: Love Minus Communications
The Spiel: Tiga and Hudson Mohawke continue their LMZ project with “Silence of Love,” on which vocalist Jesse Boykins III uses his almost painfully gorgeous voice to repeatedly request, “Won’t you meet me in the quiet?,” over a track that builds to an immersive lushness that’s anything but.
The Artist Says: “It’s a song,” Tiga writes, “about finding the essence of life in the quiet space that only love can provide.”
PEEKABOO, Eyes Wide Open
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The Label: Peekaboo Music/Create Music Group
The Spiel: PEEKABOO’s debut album came hot out of the gate, with its lead single “Badders” (featuring Skrillex, Flowdan and G-Rex) racking up seven million streams in the two months since its release. That track was just a preview of the heaviness the Detroit producer serves throughout his debut album Eyes Wide Open, a 13-track collection of thick, sometimes spooky and thoroughly tough-as-nails productions, with collaborators including Zeds Dead, Grabbitz and LYNY.
The Artist Says: “Thank you all so much for supporting me on this journey so far,” the producer writes. “The last 5 years have been the craziest of my life and I’m so grateful to everyone in this community.”
Nicole Moudaber & The London Community Choir, “Rise Up”
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The Label: Nothing Else Matters
The Spiel: We all have those tracks that make us scream “I love this song!” when they come on in the club. For Nicole Moudaber, one of those song’s is Soul Providers’ 2001 single “Rise,” which the techno producer and the London Community Gospel Choir put their own mega-joyful spin on with today’s “Rise Up.” The track is more of a house production than Moudaber’s usual techno output, but the way she pairs the wall of synth with the choir’s exclamations to keep rising conjures a certain dark club toughness that will get dancers reaching for the light.
The Artist Says: “This single has always resonated with me on a deeply personal level, but it is also so relatable on a universal level – considering all that is happening in the world right now,” says Moudaber. “The message ‘Rise, Rise Up, Dust off and do it again’ is such a powerful message: together we can come together and rise up to the next level. We recorded with eight members of the London Community Gospel Choir and let me tell I had goosebumps! I think we made a little piece of magic that day. I am so happy you guys can all finally hear it”
Whether you know him as Green Velvet, as Cajmere, as one half of Get Real or as one of his other aliases, the fact is that Curtis Jones’ productions are as vital now as they was when he started making house music back in the early ’90s.
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The Chicago-born artist scored dance world hits early in his career, with Cajmere’s “Percolator” and “Brighter Days” — both released in 1992 — becoming club staples (and in the former’s case, also a jock jam essential.) Both of those songs were also played during Beyoncé‘s 2023 tour behind Renaissance, an album Green Velvet contributed to the as the co-producer of “COZY.” His hefty catalog includes collaborations with a spectrum-spanning collection of dance artists including Chris Lake, Patrick Topping, Flosstradamus, Walker & Royce and many more.
Jones’ most recent release is “The Greatest Thing Alive,” a characteristically funky collaboration with Mark Knight and James Hurr released via Knight’s longstanding label, Toolroom. The last two months of the year will find him playing gigs in the U.K., Mexico, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Arizona.
But before all that, we found him at home in Chicago. Here, Green Velvet talks about how Beyoncé helped deliver one of the proudest moments of his career, his respect for Prince and why – after so much success — he doesn’t yet feel like a legend.
1. Where are you in the world right now, and what’s the setting like?
Right now I’m home in Chicago working in my studio, and the setting is peaceful and inspiring.
2. What is the first album or piece of music you bought for yourself, and what was the medium?
This is very difficult for me to answer, because with my father being a DJ and working in my aunt’s record store I grew up around music. My favorite album, however, was Parliament’s Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome.
3. What did your parents do for a living when you were a kid, and what do or did they think of what you do for a living now?
My father was an electrical engineer, an entrepreneur and DJ. My mother was a dietitian. My father passed away more than 10 years ago. He was very proud of what I was doing. My mother still wants me to go back to school to get a PhD so we will have a doctor in the family.
4. What’s the first non-gear thing you bought for yourself when you started making money as an artist?
A tacky, used, stick-shift red sports car.
5. If you had to recommend one album for someone looking to get into dance/electronic music, what would you give them?
Prince’s 1999. The man was a genius, and he knew how to bring synthesizers to life.
6. What’s the last song you listened to?
My upcoming release with DJ E-Clyps and Dajae, ”Hot N Spicy.”
7. The word “legend” is associated with your name. Do you feel legendary?
No, I don’t feel legendary, because my best work is yet to come.
8. Your latest track is “The Greatest Thing Alive.” What, for you, are the greatest things alive?
Babies, puppies and people with love in their hearts.
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9. The song is also very much about feeling yourself. In what moments do you feel like the greatest thing alive?
When I am helping others.
10. You’ve been doing this for more than three decades. What’s the key to your longevity?
God blessing me with creativity and wisdom to make music that continues to resonate with fans, young and old.
11. And in those 30 years you’ve obviously seen the dance world change a lot. How does this moment compare to 10 or 20 or 30 years ago?
Now it is pop culture, where in the past it was underground.
12. You’ve talked before about your religious conversion after having your drink spiked with GhB roughly 20 years ago. How do your faith and your career intersect?
I have always been religious, and a lot of my music reflects that. After by the grace of God I survived my drink being spiked, it made my faith even stronger.
13. What’s the best city in the world for dance music currently? Why?
The music is really global now and one of the results of the pandemic — especially with the internet and streaming — is people have learned to have a good time no matter where they are in the world.
14. The most exciting thing happening in dance music currently is _____?
The return of oversized clothes.
15. The most annoying thing happening in dance music currently is _____?
People having their cell phones stolen at music events.
16. Do you have guilty pleasure music?
My guilty music pleasure is listening to classical music.
17. What’s been the proudest moment of your career thus far?
There are actually two. Hearing “Percolator” on the radio in 1992 and having Beyoncé play “Percolator” and “Brighter Days” during her Renaissance Tour.
18. What’s the best business decision you’ve ever made?
Leaving graduate school at the UC Berkeley Department of Chemical Engineering for music.
19. Who was your greatest mentor, and what was the best advice they gave you?
My music career has been influenced by many people and experiences, but unfortunately, I didn’t have a mentor.
20. One piece of advice you’d give to your younger self?
Get your own drinks and never leave it unattended!!!
This week in dance music: we ran down ten takeaway points from ADE 2023, St. Martin’s SXM Festival released its phase one lineup, as did Miami’s Ultra Music Festival, Troye Sivan’s Something to Give Each Other debuted at No. 1 on Dance/Electronic Albums, Daft Punk squashed rumors that they’re playing the 2024 Paris Olympics, and we chatted with Marshmello about his new Latin project and checked out the first show of Fred again..’s eight-night residency in Los Angeles.
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And yes, there’s more. These are the best new dance tracks of the week.
NERO, “Truth”
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The Label: 2808 Recordings/Create Music Group
The Spiel: One of the sonically hardest acts in electronic music returns from a five-year hiatus with a track as pummeling the output that made them major stars of the EDM era. “Truth” is pure NERO, with the song’s lyrics — musings on nature and the universe from the Neil Gaiman poem “The Mushroom Hunters” — laid over a walloping, industrial production that sounds at once futuristic and classically NERO. The track is the first single from the trio’s forthcoming album, Into The Unknown, which will function as the final piece of a NERO album trilogy that began with 2011’s Welcome Reality. That LP included a now-classic remix of album track “Promises” by the group and Skrillex that won the 2013 grammy for Best Remixed Recording (Non Classical).
Duck Sauce, “LALALA”
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The Label: D4 D4NCE
The Spiel: Duck Sauce, the longstanding project from A-Trak and Armand Van Helden, has always balanced a playfully goofy brand identity with music you simply can’t argue with. So it goes on their latest, “LALALA,” a thick slice of shimmering Eurodance that marks the Duck Sauce debut on Defected Records’ D4 D4NCE imprint.
The Label Head Says: “It is with great excitement that we welcome Duck Sauce to D4 D4NCE,” says Defected head Wez Saunders. “For as long as I can remember, Alain and Armand have been pushing boundaries with their music both solo and together, and here they are, still on top of their game. Now delivering eight exciting, quirky, and quite different cuts, we are very much looking forward to unleashing these onto the world.”
Red Axes, One More City
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The Label: fabric Records
The Spiel: Israeli indie electronic duo Red Axes have long been a favorite in the underground dance scene for productions that balance funk, blistering guitars, and a sort of spooky, swaggering sex appeal that could be at home at a desert rave or a sweaty underground club in 1983. Standouts on their third album include the deeply cool “High Speed” and the gloriously cacophonous (and very NSFW) “Beast.”
The Artist Says: “We hope you will enjoy the music and it will give you some peace of mind in these extreme times,” the pair wrote on Instagram. “We wish health and good for all innocent people around the world.”
Sofia Kourtesis, Madres
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The Label: Ninja Tune
The Spiel: The depth and meaning embedded in the Peru-born, Berlin-based producer’s gorgeous debut LP is best translated through the two people Kourtesis dedicated it to, her mother and renowned neurosurgeon Peter Vajkoczy. As Kourtesis toured the world, her mom had been diagnosed with cancer and saw her health rapidly declining. A press release recounts that “Kourtesis had spoken to every doctor she could get hold of and all of them told her chances were low, operation was too risky. Having read about Vajkoczy but knowing he was in incredibly high demand, in desperation she posted a music snippet on social media, promising to dedicate the track to Vajkoczy for just a few minutes of his time. Unbelievably he responded and agreed to meet. Vajkoczy agreed to operate. The operation was a success and Kourtesis’s mother’s life is extended further than anyone could have possibly hoped.”
The Artist Says: “Life goes by quickly. Life is fragile,” Kourtesis wrote on Instagram. “I have very hard years behind me. I lost my father. My mother got very sick. But I learned not to give up. Every minute I spent with my mother is a holy present.”
DJ Shadow, Action Adventure
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The Label: Mass Appeal/Liquid Records
The Spiel: The master producer and turntablist returns with his 8th studio album, Action Adventure, a largely instrumental 14-track body of work that evokes the same cerebral, deeply cool sensibilities and precise craftsmanship that defines the artist’s entire catalog.
The Artist Says: “The album has no guests, no collaborations, and no features,” Shadow wrote on Instagram. “As such, it represents a wholly personal artistic statement, albeit one indebted to countless sources of inspiration: the samples I use, the artists I respect, the genres I admire, and those close to me, past and present, who have encouraged me and supported my journey. If there are to be more albums in the future, I’ll be grateful. But if this is to be the last…because indeed, one never knows…it would be a fitting end to a charmed life in music.”
Machinedrum, 4#TRAX’
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The Label: Ninja Tune
The Spiel: A lot of the magic of electronic lies in the fact that artists can use machines to make sounds that evoke such human feelings. Machinedrum again demonstrates his mastery of that ability again with his latest, the four-track (and thus aptly titled) EP 4#TRAX. An homage to the artist’s formative years passing productions back and forth on web 1.0 channels, these songs hit your ears like a warm bath, with stuttering drum ‘n’ bass, waves of synth, long builds and right-turn releases and very delicate vocals (from KUČKA, on “Violet”) keeping your attention throughout.
The Artist Says: “4#TRAX is a tribute to #trax, a channel on IRC [Internet Relay Chat – a text-based chat system for instant messaging] that I spent much of my teens in,” the artist says. “#trax was a community of tracker musicians that would share their tracks, throw competitions, start labels, trade samples and give feedback and I figured there was no better way to pay respect to #trax than to make new songs using a tracker. On this EP, I decided to make songs that were created using a hybrid of Impulse Tracker and Ableton Live. This gave the songs a nostalgic feel while at the same time keeping it firmly in the present by utilizing my current strengths in production, composition, sound design, editing and mixing in Ableton Live as well as using newer plugins to modernize the sound a bit.”
The end of 2023 is on the horizon, which means that the start of 2024 festival season is too. On Thursday (Oct. 25), Ultra Music Festival — one of the first major events of the next year — announced its phase one lineup. The Miami fest will have Calvin Harris playing his first Ultra Miami […]
On Tuesday in Los Angeles, Fred again.. played the first of his eight nights at The Shrine, a run that, when complete, will be the most consecutive shows a single artist has ever performed at the venue during its nearly 100-year history.
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Roughly 40,000 tickets have been sold for this residency, and a sign posted outside the box office on Tuesday night firmly stated “tonight’s show is sold out,” a disappointment to the blindly hopeful few that rolled up to the window a few minutes before he went onstage with the hopes of getting inside.
But unless you’re willing to brave the secondary market, where tickets are currently going for $200-plus, you’re probably not getting into these shows. The rest of the L.A. residency is sold out, as were the three nights at New York City’s Forest Hills Stadium that the London-based producer played earlier this month.
It’s a lot of hype, and the 30-year-old artist at the center of it turned up onstage around 9:45 p.m. in his standard uniform of a baggy T-shirt and those kind of cargo pants that unzip at the knees and convert into shorts when need be. The T-shirt was black and a had a small Nike swoosh over the word “again.” The cargo pants were orange and remained zipped as pants throughout.
And the crowd — composed mostly of people who appeared to be in their 20s, not surprising given Fred’s core demographic and the fact that The Shrine is on the USC campus — roared with the first notes of 2021’s “Kyle (i found you).” This production is one of many bright, enthusiastic, sort of poignant songs the artist born Fred Gibson has delivered to the zeitgeist since emerging from the strange haze of the late pandemic and then, with the return of live events, quickly becoming the first real post-EDM dance music superstar.
While the stars of that aforementioned dance music era became famous on maximalist, adrenaline rush songs that typically celebrated partying and vague notions of fun and romance, most of Gibson’s work is a lot more earnest, with his music and general aesthetic demonstrating a familiar and very modern kind of intimacy forged through Facetimes and video clips and the digital bric-a-brac we share with each other on our phones to make distances feel shorter.
It’s unsurprising then that it only took Gibson about 10 minutes to announce “I want to say, before we play anything else, I just want to say thank you so much for being here. Thank you. I appreciate you so much.”
Fred again.. at The Shrine on Oct. 24, 2024.
Julian Bajsel
The producer and his frequent stage companion — a muscular, extremely enthusiastic co-performer who Gibson always only introduces as Tony — then rolled into “Dermot (See Yourself In My Eyes),” one of many tracks of the night that demonstrated Gibson’s efficacy on the piano, and that he really does have a lovely voice. The crowd came alive for the Swedish House Mafia collab “Turn On the Lights again” which featured the song’s vocalist, Future, projected onto the massive three-screen stage setup Fred has been using on tour for a few years, with each screen meant to emulate a phone screen.
For the Shrine shows, this stage production has been expanded to include four gargantuan LED panels hanging from the ceiling. These ceiling panels gave the space a glowing, immersive feel as they displayed images of airplanes in flight and blue sky with clouds and slow pans of the crowd staring back at itself.
Gibson demonstrated a fair amount of trust in this crowd, when, about 30 minutes into the show, he jumped offstage and — with the help of two security guards — made his way through the horde to a satellite stage in the center of the room. Here, one of the light panels lowered from the ceiling to create a sort of club effect, and Gibson used this time to play some harder hitting stuff — including, much to the crowd’s thrill, his skittering, undeniable Skrillex collab “Rumble” and a bunch of hectic drum ‘n’ bass that got much of the heaving crowd to lower their phones down and just dance along for a few minutes. This seemed a likely moment for Gibson’s other more club-oriented hits, 2022’s “Jungle” and his 2023 Skrillex and Four Tet collab “Baby Again” although neither of those tracks were heard last night.
Fred again.. at The Shrine on Oct. 24, 2024.
Julian Bajsel
Upon Fred’s return to the mainstage, the show returned to it’s more softer-edged programming, with Gibson — who performed a bunch of the set while sitting down — taking a few minutes to tell the story of the birth of his niece, who was born the morning after his massive Glastonbury performance this past June. Happily, he showed us a few seconds of baby niece footage, then aptly played his latest, “adore u.”
Some may find Fred’s infants and gratitude vibes as overly earnest bordering on saccharine, but there’s also something refreshing about the straightforward celebration of happiness, togetherness, adoration and love that characterizes the bulk of his output, particularly in a genre where the cooler than thou vibes can often feel not only dull but alienating.
The show ultimately lasted about an hour and a half, closing with The Blessed Madonna collab “Marea (we’ve lost dancing)” and a singalong of “Billie (loving arms)” (Shout out to the woman in front of us in the crowd holding up an actual lighter in this moment.)
Towards the end of the night, Gibson told the story of his first ever set in L.A., when he played for “like, 50 people” at The Roxy in December of 2021, having landed in town 90 minutes before this show began due to a lag in he and his team getting their visas. A few months later, his euphoric sets at Coachella 2022 made him a star, a few months after that he played three packed shows at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, and this past spring he headlined Coachella alongside Skrillex and Four Tet.
Southern California has always been a very strong market for dance and is clearly an increasingly strong market for Gibson — something he’ll demonstrate again (and again, and again) tonight (Oct. 25) over the next week’s remaining shows. With the screen panels offering a friendly goodbye — “get home safe everyone, thank you” — to the crowd making its way out last night, it feels okay to assume that he really was so glad to be there, that he appreciates so much.
While the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics often bring out the biggest musical stars of the Games’ host country, Daft Punk will not be among the French artists performing at the 2024 Paris Olympics. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news Yesterday, French outlet Le Parisien […]
Defunct dance duo LMFAO hit a hard-partying high mark this week when the video for their 2011 electropop anthem “Sexy and I Know It” hit the one billion views mark on YouTube. The song that ran up to the No. 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks in January 2012 is the […]
Last week, the the 28th edition of the annual Amsterdam Dance Event brought thousands of dance industry professionals and nearly 3,000 artists to the city. Over four days (Oct. 18-21), they attended hundreds of panels and more than a thousand after-dark events in more than 200 locations around the city.
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There was much fun and many parties. Of course, a lot of knowledge about the dance music ecosystem was also dropped amidst it all. The conference is “inspiring and gets everyone together,” ADE co-organizer Meindert Kennis told Billboard ahead of the event, but, “we also focus on hands-on information … In the end, that’s what a lot of professionals are coming for, and they need to take home value for themselves or their organization. We try to implement that in all the different elements of ADE to really help the industry push itself forward.”
Here are ten such takeaway points from ADE 2023.
Greater sustainability in the industry can be achieved by more strategic tour routing.
A presentation by Claire O’Neill, the CEO and co-founder of sustainability nonprofit A Greener Future, explored the many ways dance music and the wider industry can mitigate carbon emissions, from limiting meat consumption to avoiding private jets to routing tours more efficiently.
“When we have high-speed tours that are happening and you throw on an extra gig and have to go from one place to another … it’s costing a lot of extra expense, people’s time, trucks on the road, flights,” said O’Neill. “Slower tours and better planning are something we’ve been working on with agents and promoters for some time. It’s a slow burner, because these are very entrenched cultures … in order for us to change some of these systems, we’re going to need to actually change the deal structures … If we have to do dartboard tours and fly people all over the place in order to achieve [a show or tour], it’s never going to be sustainable.”
Labels can help break an artist from emerging markets by focusing on listeners from that market who live elsewhere.
During a discussion on how artists from big, foreign markets can gain global traction, Selina Chowdhury, the Head of Marketing for Emerging Markets at Warner Music Group, noted that “something that’s been key and a focus for our artists is marketing to diaspora markets. For example, [for] India, we’re looking at Canada, Australia, the U.S., the U.A.E. and more. There’s probably well over 30 million people.”
She added this this marketing can be achieved by collaborations with artists in these diaspora markets, through touring in these places or through “custom short form content” that can travel and resonate with potential fans thousands of miles away.
Punjabi music is about to be huge.
“I think something that we’ve been starting to hear a lot about in the international music scene, and we’ll hear a lot more about, is Punjabi music — which is really exciting,” Chowdhury added during this presentation, referring to the style of music that originated in India’s Punjab region. “We have a lot of artists that are using traditional rhythms of melodies and are fusing them with more contemporary styles like R&B and hip-hop, especially out of Toronto.”
She specifically name checked Canadian artists Ikky, AP Dillon and Indian artist Diljit Dosanjhdoji, who this year became the first ever Punjabi artist to perform at Coachella.
There’s a method artists can use to get their music noticed by Beatport curators.
Roughly 30,000 tracks are submitted to digital download store Beatport every week. “We’re still one of the only platforms that really puts a lot emphasis on human curation, but obviously we have limits,” the platform’s SVP of Creator Services Helen Sartory said during a panel on essential info to know about the brand. “We can’t listen to and put judgments on 30,000 tracks a week.”
Sartory said that the most crucial thing artists can do to stand out is to have a great relationship with their distributors. “It’s the distributors that send us their list of priorities every week and say, ‘Out of all of the tracks we’re sending this week, these are the ones that we really want your curation team to spend some time on,’ and we do listen to everything on that priority list,” she noted. She added that despite some misconceptions, the platform does not require that artists have a certain social following or level of revenue attached to their music to get placement on the platform.
“It really just is about, ‘Do our curators vibe with the music, and do they think there’s a place for it in their genre?’” Sartory said.
Track tags and IDs are essential to help curators understand what’s working “in the wild.”
“If you’re a DJ and you’re posting clips of an amazing moment in your set, please credit the track and credit the artist, because we’re looking at all that stuff,” Sartory said during this same Beatport presentation. She referenced a statistic that 90% of DJs are not ID-ing their tracks in their social media clips, making, she says, “a real problem for the industry, because we want to be able to track that data.”
She also encouraged managers to push for music recognition technology to in clubs and at festival and for artists to register all their music with CMOs, so everyone gets paid when music is played in a set. Such registration also ensures that “when the music performed in the wild, we know about it,” says Sartory. “All of these data points are super important. It sounds boring, but through this [data] we can really spot exciting things happening, and that’s what we can get behind as a platform.”
Some artists had totally different careers before making it in music — just ask HoneyLuv.
During the conversation, Black Dance Music – A Conversation Across Multiple Generation, Detroit legend DJ Minx, BBC Radio 1 presenter Tiffany Calver, and house producer HoneyLuv, this latter artist referred to herself as “someone who likes to live multiple lives.” Indeed. Before rising through the dance scene, she played college basketball, which was “literally my life until I was 21. But then I suffered my second ACL tear in my knee and was like ‘yeah I can’t keep doing this, or I’m not going to be able to walk.’”
Having seen members of her family serve in law enforcement and the CIA, she then decided she also wanted to be in the CIA. To help get herself there, she enrolled in the navy, “but after the second year I was like’ this is not for me.’ I felt like I wasn’t challenged, and I like to be challenged in life.” During this “depressing time,” her friends suggested she do something in music, so she’d practice DJing in her barracks until 1a.m., then be back on duty at 4.am. That was just three years ago. “Never in a million years,” she said, “did I think I’d be in this position.”
Beyoncé‘s Renaissance “shined the light” on Black house artists.
“I did not appreciate them saying that Beyoncé brought back house music — because girl, where did it go, it’s always been right here,” DJ Minx observed during this same conversation. “That was the one thing that got to me. But I also have to say that we have to think about it from the other perspective, as well. Hundreds of thousands of people saw the Renaissance tour. Those people are now onto us that weren’t before… Let [Beyoncé] shine the light where it wasn’t before, because a lot of people do not know that we’re over here killing it. They didn’t, but they do now.”
The White Lotus theme song is meant to give you anxiety.
In a conversation with The White Lotus theme song composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer, he said the song’s “chaos somehow resonated with [the show’s] characters. This music is not really about Hawaii or anything like that, it’s really more about the chaos these stories are creating and the way the characters behave. They’re like savages. They’re abusive. It’s pretty wild, so the wild side of the music is representing that, and somehow mocking them too.”
He added that all the screaming in the song, by design, contributes to the show’s tension. “That’s something we talked about with [series creator Mike White],” added Tapia de Veer. “He wanted it to feel like something terrible was going to happen by the end of an episode…and even though the music is groovy, it made people anxious in some weird way.”
There are straightforward steps artists can take to gain traction on Spotify.
A panel discussion with several Spotify employees noted that the platform currently has 551 million monthly active users, including 222 million paid subscribers in 184 markets. The team said that artists can help connect with fans on the platform by keeping their artist pages current, citing a 77% traffic bump on these pages when an artist releases new music. But given that 50% of artists customize their artist pages after a release, audiences are often missing key info.
Spotify’s Canvas feature, with which artists can pair an eight-second visual loop to a song, also impacts consumption. The presentation noted that listeners who see a Canvas are 5% more likely keep streaming the song, 145% more likely to share it, 20% more likely to add it to playlists, 1.4% more likely to save the track and 9% more likely to visit an artist’s profile page.
A redesigned events feature is also helping artists make more money through Spotify.
A repositioning of the upcoming events of an artist’s Spotify page has, according to the presentation, given these events sections 70% more views, generating 15% more ticket sales.
Troye Sivan is red-hot on Billboard’s various dance/electronic charts upon the arrival of his third studio LP, Something To Give Each Other. The set debuts at No. 1 on Top Dance/Electronic Albums (dated Oct. 28) amid a flurry of activity for its individual songs.
Something To Give Each Other enters with 31,000 equivalent album units earned in the U.S. Oct. 13-19, according to Luminate. Of that total, 16,000 are from album sales, with 15,000 from streaming-equivalent album units, equating to 20.3 million official U.S. streams for its songs in the tracking week. It lands as his fifth top 20 album, at No. 20, on the all-genre Billboard 200.
Something To Give Each Other marks Sivan’s first chart-topper on Top Dance/Electronic Albums. He previously hit No. 8 in 2016 with Blue Neighborhood: The Remixes. It’s Sivan’s first time reigning over Top Dance/Electronic Albums, while Bloom led Top Internet Albums for a week in 2018.
On Hot Dance/Electronic Songs, Sivan spreads the wealth among recent singles. “Rush” is the chart’s top Sales Gainer, with its 178% surge in weekly sales powering a 6-4 bump. Meanwhile, “Got Me Started” is the top Streaming Gainer, up 58% as it bounds 13-5. He follows David Guetta, Elton John and Rihanna to become the fourth artist to double up in the top five this year.
Elsewhere, Sivan scores three debuts, as “What’s the Time Where You Are?,” “Silly” and “Honey” bow at Nos. 18, 28 and 29, respectively.
Something To Give Each Other achieves international success, as the album’s “One of Your Girls” debuts on the Billboard Global 200 and Billboard Global Excl. U.S. tallies, at Nos. 60 and 64, respectively. Having entered in July, “Rush” surges on both lists, notably flying 193-126 on Global Excl. U.S. Plus, the former track is a new entry on Norway Songs at No. 15 and Ireland Songs at No. 23.