Typesetting

 What is typesetting?

Arranging the composition of type - traditionally, this meant arranging physical letters for printing

Nowadays, type is mostly set digitally.

typesetting can be divided into 3 elements:

-the letter

-the word

-the line

why is typesetting important?

typesetting has a huge effect on how a viewer reads text - text which is set badly is much more difficult to read.

Typesetting may not seem very exciting but is an important skill to master as doing it correctly makes a piece of design look proffessional.

"Typography is not an art form, or an exact science, but rather a craft."

Terminology/ principles:

Typesetting

 BALLLLLALALAAGGHH!!!!!!!

interactive website study

'Spotify Offers Personalized Artificial Intelligence Experience With The Weeknd' 

https://hypebeast.com/2020/8/spotify-the-weeknd-personalized-artificial-intelligence-experience

With the help of new artificial intelligence technology, Spotify is providing fans with a highly-personalized way to experience The Weeknd’s critically acclaimed After Hours album. The microsite experience features a life-like version of The Weeknd, who will have a one-on-one chat with fans.

Upon entering the site, The Weeknd’s alter ego will appear on the screen. He’ll start out by addressing each fan by name, and, based on listening data, share how they’ve streamed his music over the years. The AI experience then turns into an intimate listening session of After Hours, one that is just between the individual and The Weeknd. Spotify’s new “Alone With Me” experience comes after the streaming platform gave fans an exclusive remote listening party and Q&A to celebrate the release of The Weeknd’s new album back in March. The “Alone With Me” session gives the title of the album a whole new meaning.

The landing page of the experience features responsive type, which ripples as the user moves their mouse over it. I think it's clever to start the experience like this, as it immediately engages the user.

berghaintrainer.com - 

this website is a simulation of trying to get into the German nightclub Berghain, notoriously exclusive and difficult to gain entry to. the site is a point-of-view style video of the user walking up to the bouncer, who then asks you 3 questions. The site uses webcam and microphone to listen to the users answers and analyse their facial expressions. The bouncer then makes a decision wether or not to let you in - I was not allowed in.

https://jacksonpollock.org/

this website simulates the dripping/ splattering of paint in the style of painter Jackson Pollock. The user directs the paint using the mouse and clicks to change colour.

The toilet - site map

Why do I want to include a 'toilet' page on my website?

- give users something interactive to do - writing

- users are likely to return to something they have left their mark on

- freedom of expression is an important part of the brand I am building 

- spending time in the toilet is a key part of any clubbing experience - i love reading graffiti in club toilets, its often funny or clever - many people have fond memories of being in club toilets with their friends (just checked with Sims and apparently guys don't do this - guess it's just girls)

- the anonymity of being a part of something bigger is appealing

"bathroom graffiti is a forum for anonymous, often-inappropriate expression, not unlike an Internet comments section,

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/11/behind-the-writing-on-the-stalls/383016/

users can write using mouse/ touch screen

users can upload an image onto a sticker??

toilet wall becomes a forum of self promotion for musicians, political messages

From The Atlantic:

“Well sung of Yore, a Bard of Wit/That some Folks read, but all Folks shit/But now the Case is alter’d quite/Since all who come to Boghouse write.”

So was written on a boghouse sometime in the early 18th century—a boghouse being a public toilet. An Englishman going by the pseudonym “Hurlo Thrumbo” collected this and other such vintage graffiti in his book The Merry Thought: Or, The Glass Window and the Bog-House, published in 1731.

This is far from the first recorded instance of someone scrawling a bit of mid-poo poetry—for example, the Roman poet Martial, who lived in the first century AD, totally zinged a rival writer with the suggestion that if he wanted to get published, he should go find a bathroom wall.

“If you aim at getting your name into verse, seek, I advise you, some sot of a poet from some dark den, who writes, with coarse charcoal and crumbling chalk, verses which people read as they ease themselves.”

An oft-cited 1983 study defines three categories of graffiti: Tourist graffiti (“John wuz here”), inner-city graffiti (like tagging and street art), and toilet graffiti (or “latrinalia” as it’s sometimes called in academic literature).

What makes toilet graffiti special, and worthy of its own entire category, is the uniqueness of the space in which people are writing. Public bathrooms are weird places. There’s a tension to doing private activities in a public space, with only the flimsiest of boundaries hiding some of our culture’s biggest taboos—genitals and bodily functions. Hence all the scatological and sexual prose that latrinalia often consists of: People are just deriving inspiration from their surroundings.

Public bathrooms are also (usually) gender-segregated, creating institutionalized single-gender spaces that you almost never see anywhere else. Perhaps because of this, most research on toilet graffiti has studied the differences between what men and women write in their respective stalls. Alfred Kinsey (yes, that Alfred Kinsey) was the first to do this, in the 1950s. He and his team found that men wrote more, and dirtier, things than women, who were more likely to write about romantic love.

“Kinsey and his colleagues suggested that women’s lesser tendency to produce erotic graffiti was due to their greater regard for moral codes and social conventions,” writes Nick Haslam, a professor of psychology at Melbourne University, in his book Psychology in the Bathroom.

These fairly stereotypical analyses persist in toilet graffiti studies over the years. Though some studies say women write just as much as men, men’s is typically seen as being more aggressive and more sexual, while women’s is more conversational and more likely to be about love. Though most bathroom graffiti research was done in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, a couple studies done in the past few years have found similar things.

Nicholas Matthews, a PhD candidate at Indiana University, was the lead author on a 2012 study that analyzed toilet graffiti in nine bars in a Midwestern town. He and his fellow researchers found that the most common type of graffiti was “presence-identifying” (just scrawling your name, for example), but men were identifying their presence more than women. Women, on the other hand, wrote more insults. Matthews explains this using evolutionary psychology, saying that boosting oneself up is a typical male mating strategy, whereas putting other women down is a classic female gambit.

These are tidy explanations, but if I can stop you from furiously scribbling a book proposal titled Women Draw Hearts, Men Draw Penises for just a moment, the difference between men’s and women’s bathroom graffiti isn’t necessarily indicative of hard-wired differences between the genders. The mere fact of being in a public bathroom could be skewing how people choose to present themselves when they uncap that Sharpie.

When a woman goes into a women’s restroom and finds herself surrounded by only women (in a room full of mirrors, no less), she may very well become hyper-aware of the fact that she is a woman. People might be putting on makeup, performing their gender, and behind closed doors, they’re dropping their pants. Meanwhile, next door in the men’s room, dudes are standing next to each other at the urinal, aggressively not making eye contact, trying to ignore the miasma of testosterone that I assume hangs in the air like a fog.

So it’s very gendery in the bathroom, and at least one researcher has suggested that this could cause people to exaggerate their maleness or femaleness—he found that in the mixed-gender space of study booths, “language style… was broadly in between that of the male and female toilets.”

When you write on a bathroom wall, “you have a staggeringly diverse audience,” Matthews points out. “Many different races, classes, all walks of life, but it’s completely confined to a single gender. So it suddenly lets gender-specific issues emerge.”

Bathroom graffiti artists have a “captive audience,” Haslam notes, for whatever issues may be on their minds. “There’s a space, there’s some time on your hands, and people love to communicate. We’re social creatures. A tradition grew up of people doing this.”

In trying to explain the appeal of this tradition, some researchers have gotten… creative. Folklorist Alan Dundes, in a 1965 study, suggested that the desire to draw on a bathroom wall comes from “a primitive smearing impulse, the desire that infants allegedly have to manipulate their feces… People who carve or write their names are leaving a memento of themselves which may injure and spoil something beautiful.” If we cannot smear our poop itself, then let us smear our poopy words, I guess. Though I’m not sure who’d call a bathroom stall “beautiful” in the first place.

Dundes also suggested that men were more prominent potty poets because they are jealous of women’s childbearing abilities, and a bowel movement is basically just like having a baby. “When a man defecates, he is a creator, a prime mover,” Dundes writes. So male creativity is inextricably linked to shit. Hey, he said it, not me.

“[In] the heyday of latrinalia studies,” Haslam says, “psychoanalysis was something that was taken seriously, and there was the idea that there had to be an unconscious dimension to everything if you were going to be taken seriously.”

“For those who may be skeptical of the theory that the psychological motivation for writing latrinalia is related to an infantile desire to play with feces and to artistically smear it around, I would ask only that they offer an alternative theory,” Dundes challenges at the end of his article. “For those who doubt that the greater interest on the part of males in latrinalia is related to anal creativity stemming from pregnancy envy, I would ask the same.”

Very well.

While it would be impossible to come up with a comprehensive unified theory of why people write poop jokes and names with hearts around them while they’re on the pot (other than the perhaps scientifically unsatisfying “Because it’s fun”), there are several factors that seem to be at play. One is that bathroom graffiti is a forum for anonymous, often-inappropriate expression, not unlike an Internet comments section, except with the added bonus of creating something tangible that exists in the real world. Plus, as Matthews notes, “It’s still illegal. It’s deviant, but it’s a low-cost deviant thing to do.” There’s a low likelihood of getting caught, and it’s usually something that can be washed off, or painted over.

Toilet graffiti also offers an interesting contrast to the way people typically behave in the bathroom. The unspoken rules of keeping to oneself, not making eye contact, and avoiding talking to strangers, all contribute to a sometimes-tense environment with the goal of shifting focus away from what’s actually happening behind stall doors. But the graffiti on the stall doors does not ignore it one bit. It crudely acknowledges and pokes fun at what we all go to the bathroom to do, and flouts the politeness surrounding it as well. “Sorry,” you say when you reach for a paper towel at the same time as someone else. “Go fuck yourself,” says the bathroom graffiti.

Initial ideas + Livestreaming

My research suggests that pirate radio can be divided into 3 distinct 'eras'

1960s:

- Pirate radio stations are set up to meet music demands not being met by BBC radio

- Broadcasting from ships and offshore rigs as a loophole around broadcasting laws

- Mostly played rock n roll and pop music to cater to the demand not being met by BBC

- Audience mostly young people

- Eventually BBC restructured in retaliation, splitting into several radio stations with a broader broadcasting programme

70s-2000s:

- Most pirate stations move on land, broadcasting from inner city tower blocks

- Radio stations become more community based, focusing on specific cities and catering for Britain's black and Asian communities

- Many now popular British music genres have their roots in pirate radio - drum n bass, grime, acid house, jungle, garage

- Many pirate stations are connected closely with the UKs illegal rave scene

Current:

- Although some pirate radio stations are still running, many of the old ones became licensed and commercialised

- Most young people don't listen to radio now - DIY broadcasting has moved to 'streaming'

- Thanks to the internet, streaming can be done for free by anyone with access to facebook, instagram, youtube, twitch

- Podcasting is also a modern form of DIY broadcasting, in which people upload audio of them discussing a wide range of topics online - 

I am going to focus my project on the current era of pirate radio - I feel that, due to advances in technology, there is a lot of untapped potential in DIY broadcasting.

My project aims:

- Introducing the feeling of underground community which pirate radio embodies to a new generation

- Giving musicians and thinkers who are unable to get mainstream radio play space to share their work

- Alleviating loneliness in a generation which, partly due to Covid19, is spending a lot of time isolated for others

Streaming - what is it?

a method of transmitting or receiving data (especially video and audio material) over a computer network as a steady, continuous flow, allowing playback to start while the rest of the data is still being received. (i.e the media can be played without the whole file needing to be downloaded)

live streaming means the content is being broadcast in real time

My website will be live streaming content, much like a traditional radio - users cannot listen to past content and must tune in at specific times to listen to the shows/ DJ sets. I am making this decision because: 

1. It pays homage to the roots of the project

2. Consumers are overwhelmed with choice now - almost every episode of everything ever is available online. Having something stream only once makes it special.

So, I have the purpose of the website decided. Now it is important to consider how it will be presented. 

- how can the experience be made immersive?

- how can the user be made excited/ intrigued/ want to come back to the site?

- there are many places to livestream music - why is this site special?

Key words:

-Immersive

-Clandestine

-Community

-DIY

-Subculture

Ideas/  references:

Something to visually represent how many users are online/ on each page/ users can mark their presence

- There is an online game server where every users mouse shows at once and can be seen moving around the screen. We can't remember the name of the site but heres a mockup. The users instinctually make their mouse cursors interact with each other.

- Back in earlier internet days when personal blogging sites like myspace, tumblr and bebo were popular, users could download customisable 'widgets' to add to their blogs. One of these I remember being popular was a little icon which would show how many people were viewing your blog at each time - they came in a variety of designs and could often to be changed to call the page viewers something custom: for example, instead of saying 'there are 8 users online' you could make your blog say 'there are 8 green beans in the room' or whatever you wanted. 

There is something similar now on a lot of subreddits, with the counter being named after something related to the sub.

- Most current live streaming platforms have a chat room alongside the content being streamed, where users can talk to each other and the streamer themselves can read the chat and respond. 

]

- When youtube introduced the ability to live stream, lots of 'radio' style channels popped up, playing music back to back and often with a looping gif as the video. 

- The most well known of these has come to be known as 'lofi girl' and is a channel streaming 'Lofi hip hop mix – Beats to Relax/Study to', alongside of an anime style gif of a girl studying. They have been streaming continuously for over a year. Many people play this stream in the background whilst they work or do other activities. There is a live chat function where users can send messages and emojis. The stream is advert free and relies on donations.

Lofi girl has become somewhat of a 'meme', with fans redrawing study girl stylised to look like she's from their home countries. The redraws became popular on social media with fans all around the world joining in. 

I feel that this stream has become so popular because it's something so many people can relate to - studying alone in their bedroom is something almost all students do worldwide, and they are able to project themselves onto 'lofi girl'. Studying alone can be stressful and isolating, but streaming this radio station in the background can make one feel less alone as they know they are sharing an experience with thousands of others around the globe.

I asked in the chat room why people kept returning to the channel and these were the responses I got:

From the times I've read the chat, it's overall a very positive and supportive place, with users encouraging each other and wishing good luck with studies and exams - this is in stark contrast to a lot of places on the internet where people will hurl abuse at each other for no reason.

This is the kind of online community I am hoping to build with my project.

How Live Streaming Boosted Community During Lockdown

on How Live Streaming Boosted Community During Lockdown 

Between March and April this year, the live-streaming sector grew by 45% as creators kept us entertained and connected during lockdown. Here are the live-streaming trends that created community during lockdown and beyond.

As the Government reopens our high streets and continues to relax social distancing measures, we’re reflecting on the ways we kept entertained, connected, and sane during lockdown, and ask if live streams really were our saviour? 

Since the lockdown was announced, live-streaming views have increased by 45% across multiple platforms such as Twitch, Facebook, and of course Youtube. The average screen time per person has increased by 76% and even audio streaming has grown by 7.1%. Sites like Netflix have seen over 16 million new sign-ups and there has even been a 31% rise of Spotify subscribers. 

The early adopters and big winners 

One of the obvious live streaming big winners of the last 12 weeks has to be Joe Wicks, his morning 9am #PEwithJoe sessions on YouTube have seen him achieve over 700 million views and raise an amazing £500K to donate to NHS Charities. With all gyms and leisure centres remaining closed, fitness influencers, in general, continue to be big winners in the live streaming space, as individuals stay committed to working out at home.

The popularity of at-home workouts has been such that the future of the traditional gym workout will likely have changed forever for many. 

Another group quick to maximise live streaming to stay in touch with their communities were food influencers. Sales in the restaurant industry dropped by 20% between January and March after all were forced to close their doors. A handful were able to operate a delivery service with a limited menu and a small team but with the industry’s sales dropping substantially, many culinary talents are turning to Instagram live to teach the nation how to cook restaurant-quality food. 

Massimo Bottura is a chef and patron for popular Italian restaurant, Osteria Francescana. Since the lockdown was announced, Massimo has taken to Instagram live nearly every day at 3pm to teach his followers how to make delicious, homemade Italian meals through his series ‘KitchenQuarantine’. Each episode gains anywhere between 100-500K views, and his follower count has seen the benefit too.

At the beginning of 2020 Massimo had around 1 million people following his Instagram account since he launched his KitchenQuarantine series, he has seen half a million more accounts join his community in a matter of weeks. 

Brands were quick to catch on to the success that influencers were having with their live streams too. Bobbi Brown started to list a daily schedule of self-care live streams featuring their talented make-up artists.

Their ‘Relaxing Skincare’ live stream secured its place as the “highest performing IG Live to date” with over 17,000 views. But why was it so popular? Before launching this initiative, the brand had its followers complete a survey to find out what it was that their fanbase wanted to see whilst stuck at home. By communicating with their followers and delivering as promised, their community has only gotten bigger and more dedicated. 

Platforms that facilitated the trend 

Streaming platform giant Youtube amassed 300 billion views in the first quarter of 2020, a 13% increase compared to the end of 2019. Additionally, the audience usage of the platform has surged by 15.3%. With 39 billion more people to entertain, the pressure was on for streamers to continue to deliver high-quality, positive content. 

On the 30 April through the ‘Youtube Originals’ channel, the site launched a four-hour live stream titled, ‘Stream #With Me’, a live-stream cast with some of the platform’s most popular stars. Viewers were encouraged to donate to the NHS ‘Charities Together’ campaign throughout the livestream. 

Donations have obviously been essential throughout the pandemic, in response Instagram has made it’s donation stickers available for inclusion in live streams hosted by content creators. The Instagram donation stickers were first made available for UK charities in July of last year, but this recent change allows followers to donate in real-time while watching live streams from their favourite influencer. 

During Stream #WithMe, the creators shared their own lockdown stories, as well as tips on how to keep entertained, active and positive throughout the pandemic, whilst still creating a positive atmosphere for the audience to escape to for four hours of the day. While these creators had the guidance of a billion-dollar company behind them, this is something that should definitely be commended. 

Are live-streamed events the future? 

June is here. It is the month of Pride and a month that is usually celebrated globally with parades, street parties and speaking events. And most importantly, used to raise awareness for current political issues facing the LGBTQ+ community. 

Since March, organisers around the world have been cancelling their Pride events in the wake of COVID-19. Sadly over 500 events worldwide have been cancelled so far.

However, Pride month is not a force to be reckoned with. The LGBTQ+ community needs a platform, and many media brands and LGBTQ+ brand allies are stepping up to the plate and giving these people the voice they need. 

Condé Nast’s LGBTQ+ platform, Them, has moved their Pride events online, by launching their ‘Out Now Live’ programme. A live stream celebration that is not only raising money for the Ali Forney Center but will feature Elton John, Cara Delevingne, Whoopi Goldberg and an array of stars from the LGBTQ+ community. The month is filled with performances, speeches, and stories from their lives, all live-streamed via Condé Nast’s Instagram platform. 

The class of 2020 are also feeling a whole lot of disappointment this year. What was supposed to be the best year of their lives turned into the very harsh reality of exhibitions, showcases, and graduate events all cancelled, and students studying the arts have to bear most of the brunt.

TikTok has partnered with the Graduate Fashion Foundation who are moving their Graduate Fashion Week onto the app. The platform is giving final year fashion students a chance to showcase their work via live streams on the app and is even giving them the chance to design fashionable, ethical merchandise for TikTok. 

The transition of the bi-annual London Fashion Week from the catwalk to online could have been a devastating announcement for the fashion and beauty industries. But the British Fashion Council has taken the event onto the LFW website and has a full schedule of live stream discussions, digital showrooms and runways that are all open to the public.

The chief executive of the British Fashion Council said: “by creating a cultural fashion week platform, we are adapting digital innovation to best fit our needs today and enacting something to build on as a global showcase for the future. The other side of this crisis, we hope, will be about sustainability, creativity and product that you value, respect and cherish”. 

Even Premier League football is going virtual. CEO Richard Masters is looking for ways to improve the live experience for football fans whilst games have to be played behind closed doors, such as sound effects of supporters in the stadium or the use of large screens streaming the reactions of fans. 

Creating innovative opportunities

The Coronavirus outbreak halted almost all traditional forms of production, events and human interaction, forcing everyone to explore new ways to stay connected and entertained.

In what was being called, “the new normal”, the public desperately looked for ways to connect with the outside world whilst wanting to stay safe. Of course, social media was their saving grace and streaming in particular provided a sense of shared experience and community.

It also opened up a range of innovative opportunities for brands, platforms and event hosts and, in doing so, will likely have changed the future for many as they realise the possibilities and power of streaming. 

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/coronavirus-lockdown-stream-concerts-online-b480824.html

Why live-streamed gigs and moshing from home should stay

Thanks to Covid-19, there hasn’t been a proper gig in the UK since Stereophonics ignored public safety and played at Cardiff’s Motorpoint Arena on Lockdown Eve. Instead, we’ve seen artists embrace the live-stream to stay connected to their fans, raise money for charity, and keep everyone away from baking yet another loaf of sourdough. 

From the early days of going live on Instagram armed with nothing but an acoustic guitar to the full production, empty venue takeovers of Biffy Clyro and Nick Cave, live-stream’s ability to provide a fleeting moment of near-normality has become a vital part in being a music fan right now. I hope they stick around forever.

I agree with Izzy B. Phillips from art punks Black Honey that “a live-streamed gig will never compare with the connection and the intimacy you can have with somebody in the same room. There's something about sharing a space and looking someone in the eye that's really important,” but what if you could have the choice. 

If you can’t afford the ticket, have no way of getting to the city the band are playing in, or just don’t feel like leaving the house, a live-streamed gig could make it feel like you weren’t missing out. “You’d get an opportunity to show your fans in Mexico what's going on at your hometown show in Brighton, which they normally wouldn’t get,” Izzy adds, remembering the “play South America" messages written under every one of their YouTube videos and tour announcements.

The likes of singer-songwriter Declan McKenna and progressive metallers Code Orange have taken over empty venues for their lockdown album launch gigs, while indie songsmith Phoebe Bridgers celebrated the release of her second record Punisher with a tour of her house, performing from the kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom.

Fans from around the world tuned in when socially-conscious punks Idles took over Abbey Road for a trio of time-zone-aware gigs. “We’ve tried to cultivate fans from all over the world and create a shared community,” the band’s guitarist Mark Bowen tells me. “It was an important thing for those shows to be for all our fans rather than just focusing on the UK ‘cos that’s the only place we can be right now.”

He agrees that live-streams will never replace the excitement of a proper live gig but, “what they can do is give you a new perspective on the music you already have. The context is really important. With our shows, you felt the energy of the band rather than the exchange or energy between the audience and the band.”

Like so many musicians, both Izzy and Bowen miss playing live and are eagerly awaiting the return of proper gigs (assuming the government eventually provides enough funding to stop them all closing down). They want live-streams to continue alongside them though. “In the future, I’d like to take it somewhere new or different though. Watching bands from places where you wouldn’t usually be able to see them is an interesting thing to play with. Live-streams will always have a place though.” They’re not the only ones who want them to become part of a new normal.

While this explosion of digital events is being heralded as a victory for accessibility, there’s still work that needs to be done so everyone is included. The forced move online has opened up opportunities for people to access things in a way they haven’t been able to previously, but “the risk is that in the rush to innovate, access gets forgotten about,” Jacob Adams from music access company Attitude Is Everything tells me, acknowledging that a lot of streams aren’t taking everyone into consideration. 

Adams’s charity, which works to improve deaf and disabled’s people’s exposure to live music, has just released an access guide for online events and after the surge of digital gigs and looking to the future, he’s excited about the potential. “If we get to a point where it’s the norm for physical events to also have streaming options, that opens up some interesting choices for people with access requirements. Consumer choice is king though, when physical events return live-streaming can never be seen as a replacement for physical accessibility.”

Right now live-streamed gigs are a necessity, but when proper gigs return I hope they’ll remain a vital part of the scene as long as everything is done to make them as open as possible. As Jacob explains: “Access is in every artist’s interest because it helps you reach as wide an audience as possible.” Live music is at its best when it’s a shared experience and live-streams make it open to as many people as possible. It’s a very anti-2020 sentiment but the more, the merrier.

https://boilerroom.tv/playlist/streaming-from-isolation

Boiler room is "an online music broadcasting platform based in London... commissioning and streaming live music sessions around the world."

"Connecting club culture to the wider world, on screen and through parties, film and video."

"Boiler Room started with a webcam taped to a wall, opening a keyhole into London’s underground. Since 2010, we’ve built a unique archive spanning over 8000 performances by more than 5000 artists across 200 cities. Today, we remain true to that history. We support emerging artists. We tell stories from the fringes. We connect local dance floors to the wider world."

They are known for throwing often invite only parties showcasing popular underground DJs. These parties are live-streamed online, and can be watched back in an archive.

Boiler room continued to broadcast over lock-down, with artists live streaming from home.

The web design is modern and clean cut, leaving all focus on the live stream visuals.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/nov/30/boiler-room-blaise-bellville

Stream team: how Boiler Room changed the face of live music

They went from a webcam DJ session in east London to a global streaming sensation. And now any music, however niche, can find a crowd. But where does this upstart company go next?

Boiler Room.

Ian McQuaid

Mon 30 Nov 2015 09.00 GMT

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It’s 9pm, Thursday night. The queue snakes from the door of the north London club Electrowerkz, down the street and out on to the main road. There are around 800 twentysomethings waiting to get in, shuffling feet and thumbing smartphones. It’s an impressive crowd for a weeknight, but the horde here is only a fraction of the audience for tonight’s show.

This is the fifth birthday party for Boiler Room, internet-based documenter of club culture and self-proclaimed online home of the underground. As the DJs inside play records covering the spectrum of dance music, their every motion will be videoed and broadcast live on YouTube to hundreds of thousands of people around the world as they eat their dinners or sit at their office desks. It’s an event spanning three continents: four similar anniversary parties are being broadcast from Berlin, Tokyo, Los Angeles and New York.

Fear of missing out? Ustream and Boiler Room bring clubbing to your sofa

Read more

While Boiler Room can’t definitively claim to have invented the format of live-streaming music, the last half-decade has seen it comprehensively dominate. It cites stats that can make you dizzy, claiming to have streamed over 3.5bn minutes of music since starting out, with audiences of up to 400,000 tuning in to watch any of up to 100 live sets (and a record 10.6m watching Carl Cox in Ibiza on YouTube). From its early days of broadcasting DJs, it’s ballooned into a media upstart clambering rapidly to the top, buoyed by idealism and naked ambition. Not everyone in the industry likes it but no one can ignore it.

Inside the club, Boiler Room founder Blaise Bellville is jittery, fidgeting his lofty frame (he’s a cloud-bursting 6ft 7in). “I hate this part of the night,” he says, as he rushes back and forth, trying to find a missing guestlist. All Received Pronunciation and wheeler-dealer hustle, like a public school Arthur Daley, Bellville has a background that reads like a Dickens plot: born with aristocratic links, his family went bankrupt when he was four years old. “It’s not a rags-to-riches story by any means,” he insists. “I was very fortunate. I got all the confidence that privileged education brings. But I didn’t have any money.”

It’s quite possible that proximity to wealth, without having too much of it, explains Bellville’s restless search for the next big scheme. Back in 2010, he was splitting his time between running a magazine-style website called Platform and persuading an investor to convert a derelict east London warehouse into artists’ studios. “One night I was wandering around the building and found this old boiler room, it was fucking cool,” he says. “I moved my turntables in there, bought a shitty little CDJ [CD turntable], and the plan was to record mixes each week. I realised we could record on a cheap camera and broadcast it live. It was like a teenage hangout in a bedroom.” They pulled the sign off the wall to use as a logo, and Boiler Room was born.

These shows were repeated weekly, with various local DJs dropping in to play sets that were as much about showing off the records they loved as they were about making people dance. Its format – shaky web camera fixed in front of the DJ decks, a small invite-only group of clubbers milling around behind them – soon became a trademark, and an audience uncatered for by mainstream radio or TV began to tune in every week. It wasn’t just a chance to hear fresh dance music without setting foot in a club, it was also a chance to hear music that would rarely get played in a club at all.

“Around 2010, the underground had disappeared,” says Bellville. “The charts were full of terrible music. People gathered around the show, they could talk in the forums and find a voice.” As a result, the Boiler Room forum became notorious, a place where the crowd featured on the feed – studiously bored hipsters mooching like recalcitrant teenagers at an adults’ party – were mercilessly mocked. This crowd was as far as you could get from the nutty ravers of 90s dance TV shows such as Dance Energy, but they provided the aesthetic that helped Boiler Room to spread.

Blaise Bellville.

By the start of 2011, the live shows were pulling in viewers in the tens of thousands. Rolling Stone put Bellville in its list of the 50 Most Important People In EDM. At this point, the small team sensed an opportunity to go global. But their first attempt at putting on a superstar DJ, Diplo, was a disaster. “Diplo played the most awful set ever,” says Bellville. “He totally misjudged it, it was like bad dubstep. He’s a great DJ, but he thought he was in Vegas. But things like that provoked the reaction online that helped us find our voice. It allowed people to rally together and be like: ‘We all think this is shit.’ It was a turning point because we’d been wondering how to get bigger, and we realised that going more commercial wasn’t the way. Our fan base liked underground music and so did we.”

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It was then that they started to refocus on localised scenes. They booked easyJet flights to Berlin in order to showcase a trainspotter’s dream of little-known techno DJs. The debut Berlin session was spiky, non-commercial fare, and the shows were instantly popular. Boiler Room had unlocked the web’s potential for collectivism. On a local level, the DJs playing on the Berlin show might just about have the fans to fill a decent-sized nightclub; on a global level, they had enough to fill stadiums. They repeated the trick further and further afield, filming DJs spinning abstract hip-hop in Los Angeles, or favela funk from São Paulo. Whole swaths of previously inaccessible music were being made easily available, and DJs started seeing playing on Boiler Room as a way of tripling their fan base in the space of an hour-long set.

Inevitably, there were criticisms: how can a culture centred around dancing be reduced to watching a DJ on a screen? Other than the occasional wild card (memorably, German techno producer Anklepants performed in clown pantaloons and a rotating prosthetic cock nose), watching most DJs command the decks isn’t thrilling viewing. But in spite of that, Raj Chaudhuri, Boiler Room’s head of music, says its audience digests content in a number of ways. “The way that people consume Boiler Room varies massively,” he says. “In Russia, there are places where bar owners are running the stream through a big soundsystem and charging for people to come in and dance. The beautiful thing about Boiler Room is that you have a choice in how engaged you want to be.”

In this context, Boiler Room becomes less of a TV broadcast and more like a vast and carefully curated Spotify playlist. Still, there’s one crucial difference: this playlist is created live, with no indication of what might come. The unpredictable trappings of live performance, the possibility that at any moment you might hear something sublime or disastrous, is uniquely enticing.

These days, however, Boiler Room is branching out. It covers a nebulous range of genres – as likely to film Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood conducting the London Contemporary Orchestra as it is to record Ghostface Killah spitting bars from a New York back room – and, far from the previously static setup, it’s now from multiple camera angles. In doing so, it’s actually moving closer to traditional music television, and the talk is of the next Boiler Room extension being into making music documentaries. It seems like its greatest innovation was realised early on; when you’re broadcasting to the world, everything, no matter how niche, can find an audience, in some cases far bigger than anyone would have expected.

After the anniversary party, Gabriel Szatan, Boiler Room’s music editor, emails me to describe it, with a certain wry self-awareness: “Within the music world, Boiler Room is Uber,” he writes. “Rapid expansion, considerable disruption, and no small amount of backlash generated.” Perhaps realising that brand jargon misses the crucial point of the channel, he finishes with a caveat: “Oh, plus it’s fun. It’s absurdly fun.”