Barely 24 hours after playing a sold-out show at New York’s colossal Terminal 5 last October, Flying Lotus stood hunched over the DJ controls in a cramped warehouse tucked deep in the Lower East Side. The air was thick with smoke, and a palpable sense of exclusivity. Those who had been lucky enough to get their names on the list—journalists, PR types, DJ’s friends—swilled free booze from the open bar, and mingled with artists like The xx’s Oliver Sim, and masked U.K. producer SBTRKT.
The space only accommodated a few hundred attendees, but the crowd that night dwarfed the one at the 3000-capacity Terminal 5. The event was hosted by Boiler Room, and the rest of the audience—as many as 1.1 million, or the four-year-old streaming service’s active online subscribers—watched the festivities unfold on their laptops or smartphones via Boilerroom.tv. That voyeuristic activity has become part of what it means to be a fan of underground dance music, even as mainstream EDM culture rages on.
“Especially in the U.K., everyone knows what Boiler Room is,” said founder and CEO Blaise Bellville. “It’s become an absolute essential for any artist to promote—any artist in the credible music world, whether they’re aspiring pop musicians, or whether they want to stay underground. Everyone has to play at Boiler Room because it offers more license than any other live or archive platform there is.”
Hungry for content and organic “tune-in” opportunities, the video gods have taken notice. Boiler Room recently expanded from London to Berlin and the U.S. and closed a deal with Google to make it a YouTube-funded partner channel, which is set to launch around May 1. The partnership opens a stream of advertising revenue that will not only support Boiler Room’s continued activities, but it will also create a mainstream marketing opportunity for underground artists; an unprecedented way for a DJ playing in a basement to be discovered by potential fans all around the world, both during the live streams and via Boiler Room’s extensive archives.
“We created this space in which artists could hang out and not feel like they had a thousand fans standing right in front of them, waving their cameras in their faces,” said Bellville, “and also where they could perform to each other.”
The YouTube deal has been in the works since last May, when the Boiler Room team first met with James Cator and Patrick Walker, representatives from YouTube’s music division, and both fans of the streaming platform. Around the same time, Bellville and his cohorts set up a YouTube channel without promoting or announcing it to fans: It racked up 121,000 subscribers in short order, and continues to grow by 5,000 every week.
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