The Boiler Room story begins about as humbly as it gets: A group of guys take over an empty boiler room in 2010, plug a webcam in, and film a DJ set for anyone who’s interested to stream online. Fast forward four or five years and you’ve got a categorical musical phenomenon — a music broadcaster with artistic interest at heart, whose raison d’être is to shine a light on underground music scenes and share them with likeminded people around the world — for free. It’s a formula that resonates with anyone dissatisfied with the force-fed musical agenda of corporate broadcasters and money-hungry major labels. By exposing these local movements — often still in their fledgling stages — Boiler Room lets the people decide what they consume, connecting international scenes along the way.
In the same spirit, ‘Stay True Journeys’ is an ongoing series of events and docs — the result of a partnership between Boiler Room and Ballantine’s Scotch whisky. Sharing a like-minded approach to uncovering underground movements and the stories behind them, the pairing has made its way from Mexico City to Santiago, before winding its way to Europe, where the most recent show explored Germany’s unique legacy of classical and electronic music. In an event that blended Germany’s classical roots with its celebrated techno movement, the show — held in Hamburg — featured the likes of Detroit legend Carl Cox, Luxembourg pianist/producer Francesco Tristano, Berlin’s Brandt Brauer Frick, and classically trained composer Gregor Schwellenbach. There’s no denying Boiler Room’s purist vision as a cultural documenter, and the fact they’ve come so far in such a short space of time. We caught up with its founder, Blaise Bellville, to find out how they did it.
Hey Blaise, what exactly is Boiler Room?
Well the tagline is ‘the world’s leading underground music show’, but in practical speak, Boiler Room is a network of curators and broadcast teams that provide keyholes (via live streaming) into music scenes around the world that would otherwise be inaccessible to most. We’re based out of London and have connections around the world. We’re all fairly footloose and can respond to any interest we have. Boiler Room exists to cover niche interests in music, but reach a mass audience in doing so. We believe heavily in the importance of rebuilding what once existed with the MTVs of this world, when there were tens of millions of young people enjoying quality music en masse.
The reason I started Boiler Room in 2010 was we had a fantastic music scene in London, but typical of our whole generation, post-internet, and post-MTV world, it wasn’t getting recognised. Incredible music was being made, but there was a general feeling that if you wanted to broadcast to a wider audience you had to get on mainstream TV or radio, and in order to do that you had to compromise your performance or selection in order to satisfy ratings.
It wasn’t quite as thought out at the time, but Boiler Room — which was actually an old coal-fired boiler room opposite my office at the time — was our most immediate solution to that problem. Bottom line, why we started it, was we were thinking of having our own pirate radio come tv studio, we wanted broadcasting with complete creative freedom. Plugging a webcam into our laptop was the cheapest, most attainable way of documenting what we were doing that Tuesday night in the room opposite our office.
How fast was the Boiler Room trajectory, in terms of finding new viewers?
Well, over the following weeks we realised there was a much bigger audience out there interested in what we’d thought was just a small local, borderline ‘clique’ London scene. Within 3 broadcasts we went from a few hundred to a few thousand, within a month we had thousands of online users congregating around Boiler Room as a way of accessing a micro-movement that would otherwise be unavailable to them, it was really encouraging for us and for all the artists involved to be curating and performing so idealistically and still have people’s attention. And then Ustream featured us on their homepage and all of a sudden we had tens of thousands of people. It was so fast, it was crazy.
What was fascinating to us, within months of starting, was we loved the idea of broadcasting however we wanted and giving our artists complete creative freedom. And the fact that we were using a webcam let us be even more idealistic because we had no costs to justify and could do whatever we want. And that’s the polar opposite of every other media outlet was doing. We had complete freedom. If we like the music, we’ll do it.
What was really rewarding was that we started to see that thousands of people around the world were also interested in this. People who we didn’t know were even aware of the tiny scene that we were part of. And that encouraged us to keep going, because we realised there was an audience for this.
This year’s been a really pivotal year for us because we’ve started introducing new formats. Even tonight, it’s completely insane to be doing neo-classical collaborations. It’s a complete departure from our webcam aesthetic of three years ago, but it’s exciting, because it feels like progress.
Do you think it’s a desire within these different audiences to discover something new? Do you think that’s what brings them to Boiler Room?
Yeah. I think that certain people are trying to commoditise music discovery at the moment. You know, like, press a button and it’ll try and predict what you might want to listen to… and I don’t think that’s ever been what people who really love music want. People conglomerating around a niche interest online — even if they’re scattered all around the world — is in effect the same as a physical scene.
I guess the live element plays a major part in it as well. Even if you’re sitting at home watching a Boiler Room set on your computer you’re still watching a live experience, in a way.
Yeah, absolutely. I think live music has always felt more thrilling to watch and is more challenging for the artist. With Boiler Room, there’s almost a charm to the cables being plugged in and electricity running everywhere and people pushing into the turntables, or whatever. For us, more than anything, it was just documenting these things and taking it a step beyond radio, so there is actual visual context to what you’re experiencing. Letting people experience other scenes, like, how do people vibe in Berlin, or LA? It’s hard to explain but somehow visual documentation of a band or a dj is a hugely engaging thing and I think is especially interesting for those that aren’t privy to, say, a tiny music scene building in East London in 2010.
So where do brands come in? How do they play into the Boiler Room narrative?
I guess the same as with any modern day music company — if we’re not selling records, then we’re reliant on visionary brand partners – Ballantine’s being one of our biggest and most important – who are willing to take risks and who believe in a new media model; not just plonking a huge artist on a stage at Coachella, like that’s gonna have any real impact on youth culture. We spent the first year of our progress not working with a single brand, completely rejecting any adverts on our site. After year one we started reaching out to people we knew, who had a reputation for being innovative, and believed in what we were saying; like, ‘trust us, don’t go sponsor that huge football tournament; invest slowly in things that actually resonate with fans’. So we absolutely wouldn’t be here without the few key brands that we’ve worked with and who have shared our vision; people who haven’t been completely traditional.
The Ballantine’s Stay True Journey project was a very rare thing because we sat down with them a few couple of years ago, and they wanted to do a bespoke series that travels around the world. Meanwhile, we were doing our own story about our intense belief in different music scenes, in there being millions of music fans online who wanted good music only, the challenge (and opportunity) being in speaking to these nuanced local scenes. It was a perfect fit, given Ballantine’s ‘Stay True’ mantra of authenticity and their altogether global outlook. We don’t want to become a brand graveyard; it’s much more important to us to be working with someone like Ballantine’s in five years to come, and to have created an actual legacy where there is real credibility and value being built. Where artists that we approach are actually going to be excited to take part because of this legacy that Boiler Room and Ballantine’s have created.
So do you see the partnership between Boiler Room and Ballantine’s as being a long term thing?
Absolutely. Provided that we can continue to prove that this strategy yields much, much bigger impact than a traditional sponsorship route, then I think so. As a heritage brand, from the bottom to the top, people [at Ballantine’s] get it. It’s been an experiment for everyone and we’re constantly evolving our thinking together.
Coming back to the Ballantine’s and Boiler Room ‘Stay True Journeys’ project, and Hamburg in particular, how did you land on the neo-classical vs electronic theme?
Well, the first thing with any kind of project like this is we speak to local journalists to get local advice on what is really pioneering in that country. We want to find a ‘Stay True’n angle that hasn’t been covered yet, so rather than do the latest techno showcase we want to find something really different and pioneering. Something with an amazing story behind it.
Before we came to Germany we talked to a few people, and when we sat back down with Ballantine’s we saw that it was something that interested all of us. We’d all been talking about classical music and the coverage of it, and we started to think about what we could be doing with it. It’s a very rare thing, but there is a shared mission between us; that we can experiment with what Boiler Room is, and how Ballantine’s can be represented in these markets. That’s the whole point, I guess, that you have your consisting consumer base, but you’re looking to reach new people, and stay one step ahead.
Do you think this angle can expand and continue?
I think it will. This series jumps from scene to scene, and with that, the sound changes dramatically — next year the stuff we’re doing is absolutely incredible — really, really legit.
We want to continue exploring new scenes, places and artists, uncovering these amazing stories along the way. Whilst with Ballantine’s in hand, we’ll be sure to keep pushing the boundaries of what Boiler Room can do.
These neo-classical collaborations with electronic producers and classical composers are sort of half-in, half-out of the world we know, so with Boiler Room generally, next year I’m excited to go full plunge into classical, proper traditional, grown-up shit! Imagine tens of thousands of young people around the world, glued to their screens, watching intense symphony orchestras! Like, if you like watching DJs, imagine how intense that is! I love the idea of doing that.
To check out all the performances from the Boiler Room x Ballantine’s ‘Stay True Journeys’ series head over to boilerroom.tv/staytrue
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