36 GENIUS INTERVIEW Stephen Mai
documentaries to tell different stories about the cultures we encounter when we do our live events. Most recently, we introduced 4:3 which is like our Netflix for the underground, to service the cultural appetite that our audience have. We want to redefine the traditional media brand by going hyper- curation rather than driving mass content. FEED: Live events seem to have been a big part of Boiler Room’s DNA. How are you using live events and live streaming? SM: It’s been our USP in a way. I think we’re one of the very few brands that connects with our audience in real life on such a regular basis. Last year we did over 600 events globally. We’re seeing our audience every single week and that has created kind of a unique relationship with them. That’s also in the nature of where we started, broadcasting live music to this global community of people who like to consume content as it happens. The live experience is a way of viewing which is more interactive and less isolated than other kinds of content watching. Through the evolution of that and of developing different channels where we can communicate with our audiences, we then have explored things like VOD. Obviously, once the live experience is over, we have hundreds and hundreds of hours of archive of the biggest DJ sets, but we also have documentaries and now a massive collection of underground films and music videos. As much as live is important to the experience and very much part of the ethos of what we do, VOD is something we’ve been building a library around and something we’re pushing as well.
SM: I think both audiences overlap heavily. How people interact with each of those viewing experiences depends upon what they’re doing. Maybe they’re just going out, or maybe they happen to be on their phone on the bus and a live stream pops up. You see people engaging and exploring and watching things they might not have necessarily been looking for. The person who engages with our live content may also go home and say ‘I want to engage with content that isn’t on mainstream channels’ and go to 4:3 and have a very lean-back experience. I think it’s essentially the same audience that’s interested in culture, that’s passionate about music and looking for an alternative narrative, something that is counter to what is being served up on other media platforms. The whole concept around 4:3 originally was that we wanted to subvert the experience of going to a cultural institution. For instance, going to the Barbican, you might go to an installation where you see different types of video and different types of archive, but you’ve gone there knowing what you’re going to experience. But imagine if you could leverage the way the social ecosystem works , using algorithms and so forth, to push out lost archive footage, underground documentaries from the past, or really interesting films that people aren’t searching for but you know that your audience is connected to. That’s how
FEED: Are you also focusing on creating real world events and then building content around those events? SM: Definitely. Our business runs across different strands that all focus around the same overriding ethos which is championing the underground scene and supporting underground artists and celebrating music and culture globally. The live element is really interesting because we have an opportunity not just to broadcast culture, but to also really engage with it in real life. Inherently, through our connection with local scenes and collectives, we’re allowed to create something quite authentic that we broadcast as it happens. The other strand of the way we communicate with our audience is through creating long-form series and documentaries which have the same ethos of leveraging and exploring the things we’ve seen on our travels. Whereas the live experience is about being in the moment and hype and creating an environment where you see young people all over the world enjoying themselves and interacting, our other piece is around telling stories of the cultures that surround those live experiences that we create. FEED: Is it the same audience watching your live event content and on-demand content on 4:3? Or are you reaching separate groups with those?
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