Data Transmission At ADE

Sin City under the microscope

Finkel’s comments about Las Vegas are a common refrain that has rung out regularly since last year’s ADE, when ID&T’s Stutterheim complained that his festivals were now competing with Las Vegas casinos for DJ talent, who were basically in a position to offer DJs a blank cheque.

“What’s happening now is that the agents are being total pricks. They are coming to us and saying, our DJs are being paid paying $250,000 for a night. This is the kind of money they are asking for, and then at the same time, we have events like Mysteryland and Tomorrowland, where we’re also looking to book these acts. So we’re competing now with casinos.”

Las Vegas ended up being a key talking point at another of the conference’s biggest panels, Global Club Culture: State of the Club Nation Debate on Wednesday afternoon that saw some of the industry’s biggest players assembled to talk the future of dance culture.

Some of the muscle assembled on stage included Beatport CEO Matthew Adell and ID&T’s other head honcho Irfan van Ewijk, as well as two club promoters on the opposite ends of the American dance music spectrum – Nicolas Matar who’s recently opened the widely-discussed Output in NYC, which he modeled on Berlin’s Berghain, as well as James Algate, one of the names behind the Global Gathering festivals worldwide who this year moved to Vegas to promote the recently opened Hakkasan club for the MGM Grand Casino.

Matar maintains there is a “strictly no bottle service” policy at Output, and at times looked less than impressed with the fact that a Las Vegas promoter was sitting right across from him, sharing his distaste for the commercial dance that’s swept the US in recent years.

“I don’t think I’m distancing myself from it,” he said, “because I was never a part of it to begin with. I look at EDM as a different type of pop music. I’ve been championing underground house and techno for almost 25 years. So for me, it’s just a passing fad that I’m not really a part of.”

However, Hakkasan’s Algate was more than willing to concede that a gulf the size of the Grand Canyon exists between what the two are doing.

“I think Nicholas and me are polar opposites. A DJ that plays at Output, he’d get booed off stage and drinks thrown at him if he played at Hakkasan. That crowd needs the high energy, they come to Las Vegas because they want to have a good time and be entertained. They don’t want to have to listen to half an hour of deep house. We’ve tried. It doesn’t work”.

Algate fought back against the claims coming from the likes of claims that Las Vegas is solely responsible for skyrocketing DJ fees. “It’s supply and demand… If you don’t pay the money, you’re not going to get them. It’s not that Las Vegas skews things. All of the press about Las Vegas fees should be taken with a pinch of salt. Half of it isn’t true, and the other half was written before the club was even opened”.

While Algate emphasised the importance of VIP and bottle service, particularly for a club that represents a $130 million investment for the MGM Grand Casino (“one of the most expensive clubs ever built”), he reinforced his love for the paying punters who just come to dance.

“Everything in Hakkasan was built around the dancefloor. It’s the biggest in Vegas; you can fit 1,000 people on it. Of course we ultimately need to ring the till… but we also need to make sure the dancefloor is filled. They’re just as important, because without them you don’t create the right environment. We will not put extra tables on the dancefloor.”

Tiga talks numbers. So many numbers…

Anybody growing tired of all the big business going down at ADE found their salvation on Thursday when Turbo Records frontman Tiga hosted his very own panel, The World According to… Tiga, flanked by a formidable posse of fellow speakers that included Seth Troxler and Canada’s Matthew Dear AKA Audion. Remaining speaker Dubfire never showed, presumably after partying too hard at his SCI+TEC label showcase the night before. However, in his absence he was flatteringly referred to by the panel as “that old guy”.

“Everyone is so fucking serious in dance music.” Those hilarious words rolled right off Troxler’s tongue, and they summed up the vibe of then panel perfectly. The broader topic of discussion was the increasing commercialisation of dance music, and what was spotlighted as the inbuilt obsession within DJ culture over “the numbers” – starting with booking fees and air miles, though stretching to DJ rankings, Facebook followers and BPMs even.

“When numbers come up, I tend to space out a little bit,” Troxler said. “Up until some point I did care about charts and rankings… Now I look at Facebook and I can’t really care anymore about the stupid shit they’ve got going on. But my management still checks it, probably.”

Tiga presented the notion that DJ culture was overly eager to plug into the binary code of the digital era. “Electronic music was the first to get onboard with digital files, Facebook followers… Even the absurdity of the DJs willingly allowing themselves to be classified and ranked, and the acceptance of these numbers as concepts. It’s partly depressing, and partly obsessive… As an artist, how are you meant to switch from counting your air miles and checking your sales, to at the same time being creative and free? Because they’re very different ways of thinking.”

“Why is it so uptight? It’s ‘biz-world’,” Troxler continued. “From the stage it’s all hedonism and everyone having a good time. Behind the scenes though, it’s a bunch of old CEOs playing records.”

Largely though, things were never allowed to get too serious; the trio’s sense of humor was never too far away. “Is dance music the most commercial scene in the world, period?” Tiga posed early on. Or phrasing it differently; “Is this the first time in music history where we’re seeing 10,000 kids in North America screaming, T-shirts off, for a 46 year old?”

Otherwise on the panel, Tiga argued the concept of “selling out” no longer exists; though the act of pandering openly for votes in a DJ poll being the one exception that gets you a red card.

Continued on page 3