Published
Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 17:15
- We catch up with cofounder Cisco Ferreira, AKA The Advent.
Virtual venue Techno Club, AKA techno-club.net, has launched a new subscription model.
Since opening in September, Techno Club has been streaming weekly from Friday through Sunday, getting regular views from all over the world. Organisers Dave Bate and Cisco Ferreira, AKA The Advent, are looking to build on the initial support with a new subscription option, which will phase out the current pay-per-minute (PPM) model.
"We've got the DJs, we've got the rooms, we've got great lineups and we're open every weekend," Ferreira tells Resident Advisor. "We've kept it consistent."
PPM was devised as a way to meet US copyright law requirements, allowing the club to pay all music licensing fees on a monthly basis. The new model changes things slightly, with attendees purchasing minutes on the first weekend of the month in order to gain access to the site for the next four weeks. This allows attendees time to roam the club's archive, which has clocked up hundreds of hours since opening, as well as access to subsequent weekends in the calendar month.
"People can use up all their minutes in the first week or they can say, 'you know what, I'm going to just watch one video this week and I'm going to wait because Ben Sims is on in the second week," says Ferreira.
Current streaming options are vast, but Ferreira and Bate are trying to recapture the DIY culture that first drew them to the scene three decades ago. It takes work to build a core audience, avoid compromising advertising relationships and make sure everyone gets paid, but they're up for the task.
"If you look at the scene, how it started, it was very small and we were competing with pop culture," says Ferreira. "Now we were competing with a different type of dance scene. We want to grow the same way we grew 30 years ago, and the only way to do that is come up with something that's not like everyone else."
Techno Club's two main pulls are its curation and consistency. The site has hosted weekly sets by house legend Tony Humphries and regular contributions from turntablist crew Detroit Techno Militia. But in the face of multiple streaming alternatives, many of them free, Ferreira admits Techno Club is facing an uphill battle.
"It's very hard to get people to put to part with their money," he says. "The idea is wonderful, the model works great, but you still have to convince the punters to come in and pay and it takes time to build."
DJs and music platforms seemed to adapt with relative ease in the first Covid-19 lockdown, but in the midst of the initial streaming whirlwind, it wasn't clear who, if anyone, was reaping the rewards. By April, Mixcloud had launched Mixcloud LIVE, a fully licensed subscription platform designed for DJs, while others began migrating to gaming platform Twitch, which in September launched "Soundtrack," a feature that allowed users to dip into the back catalogues of select labels and distributors. Twitch also teamed up with Beatport for monthly curated events.
These platforms offer DJs viable online earnings, but Ferreira feels they lack quality control. "Twitch and Mixcloud are great but they've saturated the market. It's a sea of so much stuff, it's really hard to pinpoint something there. We really wanted to be the complete opposite of what all these other platforms are doing."
But there's no denying their pull. Mixcloud LIVE allows artists to set their own subscription rates and has hosted over 100,000 streams since launching. Twitch, which has an established tipping culture, attracts around three million viewers a day. It also has additional monetization options for users with larger followings. These facts don't seem to phase Ferreira.
"We ain't going nowhere," he says. "I think we're basically way ahead of our time, because the scene was never prepared for this. It's definitely the future, we just have to be patient, we have to be consistent."
Read our review of Techno Club's debut transmission last October.