blogging

Notes from the forest #5

The Boiler Room Youth Report, 25 ideas to keep your music scene alive and the historical background of Over/Shadow.

DJ Booga

12 Jan 2025 — 3 min read

Störmthaler See / Photo: Robert Handrow

Boiler Room 2025 Audience Report

The report is called The New Rules of Youth Culture and says: "For our community, music isn’t just entertainment. It’s a tool for connection, a catalyst for well-being, and a platform for cultural exchange." In their study they focused on people aged 18-34 from all over the world.

I was hoping the audience report would tell me something new about how young people relate to the moving parts of the music life – like artists, producers, DJs, performers, labels and their platforms. Do they prefer to buy or stream music? How do they support their favourite artists? Do they know what problems independent artists and labels have to deal with when it comes to mood machines like Spotify and monopolistic gatekeepers like Apple? Do they want to get involved, like by making music, organising nights or becoming a DJ, and what's their motivation? What's stopping them from getting involved?

Despite the summaries in the picture above the report does not provide answers to my questions as a label owner. On the other hand the target group for the report may not be those active in the independent music sector, but potential investors interested in customer data provided by Boiler Room's parent company DICE, a ticketing enterprise. Here's the call to action at the end of the report:

This report outlines the major themes and key findings from our audience research. Get in touch with us to explore deeper insights about the Boiler Room community – from detailed behavioral analysis to market-specific data across attitudes, beliefs and cultural trends: partnerships@boilerroom.tv.

Did the people in the study knowingly agree to their data being processed by third parties? As 'pragmatic technologists', they may have.

25 Ideas to Keep Your Music Scene Alive

Drowned In Sound, the weekly newsletter about the future of music + music recommendations offers a good list of tips on how to support your local venue, record labels, acts and independent music media. The list is the result of a community effort to gather these ideas. Of course this one resonated well with me:

Labels invest in the music you love, so show them some love back.

I like the thoughtful Why it matters sections a lot.

Moving Shadow - Partisan - Over/Shadow

For the jungle drum and bass people interested in past and present of the wider shadow universe spanning three different labels I recommend these insightful profiles.

In The Strange World Of… Moving Shadow Joe Muggs looks at the beginnings of the label and the context of how hardcore, jungle and drum and bass music became popular, which artists influenced the sound and how they pushed each other to new limits creatively.

Budding producer Rob Playford started in classic rave style selling his own white labels out of the back of a BMW – he borrowed a book on starting a label out of the library, following it step by step. – Joe Muggs

The short-lived but highly influential label Partisan Recordings (1997-1999) was profiled 2012 on the God Is No Longer A DJ blog: In the late summer of 1997 and after legal wrangling with Moving Shadow’s head honcho Rob Playford the entire staff of five people resigned from their posts and founded Partisan Recordings, hence the five-pointed red star featuring as the label’s logo.

“The label was born out of distinguishing between right and wrong in an attempt to operate in an ethical manner.” – Caroline Butler (label manager)

Ben Hindle tells the story of the late successor to Moving Shadow in The Sound of: Over/Shadow.

Sean explains how they always felt they had “unfinished business” with Moving Shadow, however, and almost two decades later, they decided to do something about it. Having stayed in touch with many of the label’s artists over the years, in 2018 they invited over 30 members of the extended crew to a pub in King’s Cross, London, and floated the idea of a new outlet.

It was a rather good idea that spawned cutting edge drum and bass music from long standing artists like Paradox, 2 Bad Mice but also new talents like Sully and Arcane.