When club culture sells out to private equity
Grassroots campaigns against big finance highlight the moral maze in which dance music has lost itself.
KKR, one of the world’s largest private equity (PE) firms, is headquartered at 30 Hudson Yards, a skyscraper with a Family Guy underbite. The glass jaw that protrudes from the tower has hosted some less-than-knockout music—Edge, as the observation platform is called, has borne the weight of a packed Martinez Brothers party and Tiesto’s singular ego. But PE and club culture are far cosier than a few naff gigs on a skydeck. And when KKR describes its mission as “unlocking potential, securing futures, [and] delivering outcomes,” this corporate language also resembles how dance music talks about itself.
Last year, KKR paid another PE firm $1.3 billion for Superstruct Entertainment, which owns more than 80 festivals—a roster that includes Sónar, Brunch Elektronik, Field Day, Sziget and Awakenings. Then, in January, Superstruct acquired Boiler Room from the event ticketing business Dice for an undisclosed sum. For the past few months, these facts have surfaced, disappeared, then surfaced again on Instagram’s 24-hour doom carousel as part of a boycott campaign against KKR investments alleged to enable illegal Israeli settlements and Canadian fossil fuel projects on First Nations land.
A digital network of nightlife activists—the Instagram account Ravers For Palestine is the most high-profile, with nearly 24,000 followers—argue that DJs who perform at festivals or platforms linked to KKR are complicit in the genocide of Palestinians, more than 52,000 of whom have died since October 7th. A number of artists, including 8ULENTINA, Animistic Beliefs, Beatrice M., Ikonika, Juliana Huxtable, Midland and Rosa Terenzi have followed this guidance and dropped Superstruct gigs. The few artists and collectives who have publicly dissented argue that working with Boiler Room does not contradict BDS and PACBI guidance.
One aspect of this story that is little discussed is the extent to which PE has established a controlling interest in our lives. In the UK alone, it is becoming a cradle-to-grave service, reaping profit from nurseries and nursing homes alike. Private equity has a stake in gas supplies, prescriptions, office lunches, many shit chain pubs, half the Premier League, and every David Bowie record ever. KKR was recently announced as the preferred bidder for Thames Water, itself a particularly disastrous example of private stewardship; how do I distance myself from my tap water?
The latest IMS Business Report points out that the global electronic music industry is worth nearly $13 billion. Clubs and festivals continue to make most of that money, though PE investment also spans artist agencies, audio equipment and music production software. That figure, however, is not nearly as impressive as it sounds. Within the ruthless logic of “value creation,” the cumulative joy of every extant dance floor experience is only about as important as Grammarly, the glorified spellchecker. PE’s presence in dance music is, in a real sense, marginal to its own interests.
There should be less doubt around PE’s impact on club culture. If, following the typical model of a leveraged buyout, a purchased business is loaded with debt as part of the financing for the deal, then the bottom line is that a party that is Russian dolled into that ownership structure will get more expensive. More insidious still, as Resident Advisor’s Nyshka Chandran describes it, is the prospect of “decreased cultural diversity,” which could mean more lineup overlaps between festivals owned by the same group, or that an upstart rival is bought out, then given a pair of concrete shoes and tossed in the river.
As Ed Gillett points out in Party Lines, hedge fund money also breeds desperation. In 2019, a Boiler Room executive had emailed Aaron Clark, the Pittsburgh-based cofounder of the queer party collectives Honcho and Hot Mass, proposing that he organise a branded party—nothing unusual, except that Boiler Room wouldn’t film it, and Clark would have to pay a “brand fee” for using their logo. At this point, the company was struggling to turn a profit; reading between the lines, a scheme this stupid could only have emerged either from an especially dim bulb or an ultimatum from corporate: our investors want to see a return, or else.
If, in the 2010s, there was a manageable tension between club music and big business—Red Bull Music Academy, for which I wrote, emulated a kind of Medici patronage of young artists until, suddenly, it didn’t—the relationship now feels far less equitable. We’d grown to believe, perhaps, that the taboo of selling out was archaic. But in the digital activism that has coalesced around KKR, a new kind of anti-commercial sentiment is emerging. While the onus has been placed on artists to accept or decline the call to boycott, another, less visible group has escaped censure: talent agencies.
In a recent Instagram story, an independent label owner I know well said, “When there’s no small promoters or clubs left, please let’s not forget just how responsible some of these booking agents are.” This echoes a criticism espoused by the New York nightlife entrepreneur Nicolas Matar about the downstream effects of soaring artist fees. If unscrupulous agents bear some responsibility for pumping the system with enough cash to attract the gaze of PE, it’s not clear to me that this largely invisible layer of the DJ business infrastructure is being scrutinised sufficiently.
Talent agencies can present other ethical dilemmas. The CEO of Wasserman, for example, is a donor to right-wing Israeli causes—in 2019, Casey Wasserman gave $525,000 to the Friends of the Israeli Defence Force (FIDF) towards an “outdoor athletic centre.” Across 2022 and 2023, he donated $50,000 to the Israeli Emergency Alliance, an advocacy group that has stifled pro-Palestine sentiment and promoted an expansive and disputed definition of antisemitism. I mention this not because I want the eye of Sauron to swivel onto Wasserman artists. But it illustrates how entangled DJs are in other people’s financial decisions.
Earlier on I mentioned complicity. In a UK legal sense, proof of complicity requires the active participation in the planning, if not execution, of an offence. By this measure, it’s unclear how Superstruct organisations, once removed from KKR ownership, could be said to have supported, much less had a say, in KKR’s investment portfolio. But the fact remains that they are now, as the Latin etymology of the word describes, “folded together.” Boiler Room, to their credit, has made clear that they’re unhappy passengers. Statements from Field Day and Sónar resemble, by contrast, the creepily opaque argot of B2B marketing.
What makes Boiler Room’s case especially tricky to untangle is that PACBI recently “welcomed” their public statement, thereby creating a narrow pathway through which Superstruct businesses could exculpate themselves. Campaigners including Ravers For Palestine and London Creatives Corporate Watchdog, on the other hand, regard this as a form of incrementalism that allows compromised organisations to engage in “BDS-washing.” Disagreements among activist groups pushing for radical change aren’t necessarily untoward. But I get the sense that this line of thinking is driven not so much by political principle as personal disdain.
There’s a school of thought which says that Boiler Room has been under disproportionate scrutiny among the Superstruct stable. I buy that. But, other than the sheer number of rakes that Boiler Room has stepped onto, it has become hopelessly dislikable for reasons that only the literary theorist Raymond Williams could explain: “the structure of feeling” around Boiler Room is of a faceless corporation that erects drilling rigs over culture. The truth, of course, is far more complicated—but in the amoral void of private equity, good intentions are immaterial to profitable returns or the lives that stand in the way.
The Microplastics Digest [special apology edition]
What I’ve been paying attention to—and doing—this past few months.
Before I get into the recommendations, a mea culpa: my absence between posts have grown ever larger this year (first post in 2025 and we’re nearly halfway—awful). But I have been busy. Let me count the ways…
Take No Prisoners by Keith Robinson [Velocity Press]
I wrote the epilogue for the late, great Keith Robinson’s extraordinary life story, which took him across the illegal rave scene in Glasgow, driving a sound system to Croatia and Bosnia during the Balkan War, the European free party circuit, and multiple tours of Afghanistan as a TA soldier. It also contains a long, never-before-published Q&A with him that formed the basis of a profile I wrote ten years ago for RBMA, which likely remains the best piece I’ll ever write. Take No Prisoners is out next month on Velocity Press, and is available to pre-order now.Sandwell District - End Beginnings [Pitchfork]
) and, bro, the intro about expensive rocks and fake bathrooms, c'mon bro, please clap, OK.
For Pitchfork, I reviewed Sandwell District’s new album, which I was expecting to like but, well—look, bro, just read the review, OK, bro, because I agonised for days, bro, over getting the Ajax analogy right (thanks again,AOB #1
I’ve got this piece for Pioneer about listening bars and why they’re suddenly everywhere. I’m late to the game, but one reason the piece is strong enough to mention is because I spoke to Nick Dwyer about the longer-than-you’d-think history of ongaku kissa; he’s released an excellent documentary, A Century In Sound, that gets to the heart of it all.
AOB #2
You’ll find a story of mine in the next issue of The Fence; the reporting entailed spending a day in South Wales looking at knives and crossbows, and either side of that I hung out a lot in an especially conspiratorial corner of YouTube. From the research I undertook, I’d recommend Bradley Garrett’s Bunker, an invaluable book.
LISTENING
House Of God - Tony Morris [Optimo Music]
Edison Machado & Boa Nova - Edison Machado [Far Out Recordings]
Junk - Bryon Gysin [WeWantSounds]
A.I.É - Le Compagnie Créole [Pardonnez-nous]
Sirius Syntons - Lindstrøm [Smalltown Supersound]
READING
Art In The After-Culture - Ben Davies [Haymarket Books]
Hotel Britannica - Anonymous [The Fence] (this alone is worth subscribing for)
The Gen X Career Meltdown - Steven Kurutz [The New York Times]
The Invention Of Mood - Peter Saville (in conversation with Jack Self) [Real Review]
Is Jeff Bezos Selling Out The Washington Post? - Claire Malone [The New Yorker]
DONATING
gofundme (search “Palestine”)