The music is more widely heard than that of ‘N Sync, U2 and the Rolling Stones put together — yet the average person may not realize it exists. It percolates from movie ads and soundtracks, colors the atmosphere of countless television commercials for cars, department stores, sporting events and blue jeans, and seeps from the sound systems at restaurants, coffee shops and clubs.
The superstars of this music, which drew 30,000 raucous people to a round-the-clock dance fest/conference here this week, don’t sing or go on tour — or put out CDs that make the charts. Yet some now make millions and draw huge crowds that rival those for the hottest rock performers.
The music is “house” or “dance music” and the stars are deejays — a contemporary incarnation that scarcely fits the image of the anonymous record spinner who pumped up the music for sock hops decades ago. And while the music — a mix of electronics and beat-packed instrumentals — is poised to become among the hottest sounds in the music industry, it hasn’t really reached the radar of the mainstream music economy.
The conference here offered a dramatic vision of this next wave, in which Chicago promoters are playing a major role.
“In rock, it’s set up that bands tour for up to two years promoting 13 songs from an album that was produced for hundreds of thousands of dollars in a big recording studio,” said Todd Kasten, the co-owner of Direction, a marketing and booking arm of Metro rock club in Chicago that works closely with many deejays.
“In electronic music, a deejay can produce a track in a couple of days in his bedroom, and will embrace technology in a way that traditional rock bands and labels avoid like the plague. A deejay will put a song on the Internet, thousands of people will download it, and if they like it, they’ll come see that deejay at a club. It’s like the early days of punk rock when kids were spreading the word about their favorite bands by trading tapes of them.”
The pop culture icon from the early ’80s, Boy George, now makes more money as a deejay than with his recently reunited band, Culture Club.
Fueling the interest in the sound is the intention by MTV to start broadcasting it, an expansion of the club scene nationwide (including a huge new club in Miami named Crobar, run by the Chicagoans who founded the club of the same name on Chicago’s North Side) and the growing familiarity of the marketing industry with the scene.
These deejays are prized for their ability to keep dancefloors filled by spinning the latest beats from a cache of vinyl records, pumped through quarter-million-dollar sound systems. Many function like self-contained record industries — distributing and profiting from songs self-produced or songs by others they’ve remixed in their home studios, and commanding fees of up to $50,000 a night from a lucrative nightclub entertainment network that stretches from Los Angeles to the vacation island of Ibiza off the coast of Spain.
The 16th annual Winter Music Conference, which concluded here Thursday, is where the artists and business people from this thriving economy came to party, schmooze and dance. Though dance music was only recently recognized by the mainstream music industry with its own category at the Grammy Awards, it has been around for decades, and business is booming underneath the radar of the big corporations that dominate the $14 billion-a-year mainstream music goliath.
Crobar makes a splash
No one is making a bigger boom than Crobar, the Chicago hot spot that 14 months ago opened a 19,000-square-foot nightclub in South Beach, the heart of this city’s nightlife district. Owners Callin Fortis and Ken Smith, the braintrust behind such Chicago clubs as Neo, Exit and Crobar, spent $2.3 million to convert a Depression-era movie theater into the two-tiered jewel of south Florida nightlife, and the club instantly galvanized the local scene with its astute deejay bookings and outrageous sense of entertainment.
Crobar has been ground-zero during the conference. On a typical night, deejay Erick Morillo’s deep-house grooves filled a Crobar dancefloor that included dancers flashing Vegas showgirl glamor, New York’s drag-queen humor, and Miami’s ebullient dusk-till-dawn party spirit. Yet the music — and the club — also tapped into a simmering street-punk energy, with bare-chested ravers in floppy jeans chanting a refrain that Morillo blasted over the $250,000 sound system: “I just can’t believe all the things people say/Why must I deal with this . . . “
Crobar has been welcomed to Miami, a city that depends heavily on nightclub business to attract tourist dollars. The city even extended the club’s operating hours to 7 a.m. from 5 a.m. last weekend to accommodate the horde of conference clubgoers. As many as 2,500 patrons pass through the club’s doors on typically busy weekend nights; at a Monday performance featuring Morillo, Fatboy Slim and Armand Van Heldon, hundreds of would-be clubgoers spilled into the street outside the packed club hoping to gain entry at 1 a.m.
This week, the club took its boldest step yet in expanding its dance-music franchise by debuting a record label, Crobar Records, which will include contributions from a bevy of international deejays as well as multimillion-selling R&B producer Dallas Austin, associated with hits by groups such as TLC, Boyz II Men, Madonna and Michael Jackson. Austin threw his reputation and financial muscle behind the label when he saw one of his records create an instant impact on the Crobar dancefloor when it was played by a deejay.
“When we began at clubs like Neo in Chicago, Mark Farina was an unknown deejay making $150 a night,” said Fortis, a fixture in the Chicago nightlife scene since the early ’80s with his partner Smith. “Now deejays make $10,000 and up for spinning records at clubs, and the music I hear when I walk out of a nightclub at 7 in the morning is the same music I hear on a Mercedes commercial during the Oscars telecast. This music has gone mainstream, only the big record industry doesn’t know it yet.”
Crobar’s growth parallels that of the conference itself, which has expanded from a few dozen registrants in the mid-’80s to a 7,000-strong annual institution, with badge holders paying as much as $300 to be part of the action. In addition, dance-music insiders estimated that 30,000 additional deejays, label owners and club executives flocked to the city this week to attend some of the more than 300 parties that clogged the calendar from noon till dawn daily, pouring millions of dollars into the city’s economy.
The conference featured just about every prominent danceclub deejay in the world, from relative up-and-comers such as Chicago’s Lady D to international celebrities such as Paul Oakenfold, the British deejay who was hand-picked by U2 to spin at the post-concert party when the Irish rock band opened its national tour last weekend in nearby Sunrise, Fla.
Though Oakenfold and other first-tier deejays typically receive $10,000 or more per appearance, even a lesser-known deejay such as Chicago native Colette Marino, a.k.a. DJ Colette, makes a good living from spinning records. She packs a microphone, a pair of headphones and a stack of records, including ones she has recorded, and plays up to three out-of-town shows a week, for which she is paid $2,000 each, plus expenses.
And not just deejays and danceclub owners are thriving. One of the key event sponsors at the conference was dance-culture magazine Urb, founded a decade ago in Los Angeles for $3,000 by Raymond Roker. The magazine’s circulation has leaped 50 percent since the mid-’90s to 75,000 and revenue jumped to $2.5 million last year from $1.5 million the year before, Roker said. The magazine helped sponsor a lavish $25,000 boat ride and $10,000 dance party at a mansion to help promote the major-label launch of the Essential series of dance recordings masterminded by British deejay and tastemaker Pete Tong. Among the artists spinning at the mansion was Boy George.
Executive takes notice
One of the 350 people admitted to the Essential party was a top MTV executive who requested anonymity. Though MTV has not played many videos by dance artists, he said that will change soon. “This music is coming,” the executive said. “It’s made hundreds of millions of dollars for people in Europe, and now there is no dominant trend in mainstream music in America.” He also said that the industry has been slow to embrace dance music because the culture doesn’t develop stars in the traditional ways: through commercial radio airplay, videos and extensive touring. But he said that the record industry will have to adapt or risk being left behind.
“I’m here because I’m a music guy and I’m curious and because MTV needs to be here to stay ahead of the curve. It is the perfect time for this music to segue into the mass consciousness.”
In many ways, it already has. The music permeates the advertising and film worlds, with tracks from dance artists such as Moby, St. Germaine and the Basement Jaxx featured on multimillion-dollar car commercials and trailers for big-budget movies.
The new energy behind dance music was in evidence at a 14-hour outdoor dance-music marathon at Bayfront Park, when a series of tents transformed the Miami beachfront into a deejay mecca populated by 25,000 loyalists. Though the danceclub scene continues to have its glamorous, silicon-fed aura of artificial fabulousness, it is now also enjoyed by scruffy street kids in baggy trousers, hooded sweatshirts and woolen caps who live for the music as much as the lifestyle.
One of them goes by the name of Flawless, a 20-year-old who recently moved to Miami from North Carolina. “This is my life,” he said. “I don’t care about drugs and I don’t do drugs. This is about straight, music-loving people. This is about one nation under the sun.”
That nation is taking over, said Alexandra Jade, 30, who designs clothes aimed at the danceclub culture for her Tampa-based Internet company. “We’re the people coming into power,” she said, looking around at the crowd of young people –models, designers, deejays, journalists, record executives — on the Essential boat cruise. “We’re infiltrating the mainstream.”
