Clubs

As a canny line from the myspace page of monthly club night All You Can Eat puts it: ‘Clubbing just got kicked in the arse by 2006.’ This will be remembered as the year that myspace.com exploded – and there’s a good chance it will reshape London’s nightlife in the process.

‘I’m a complete myspace junkie,’ says AYCE promoter Warboy. ‘It’s the perfect tool for getting your information out there.’ Widely unnoticed by the mainstream press (though frequently covered in Time Out), AYCE has proved a phenomenal success since its launch in January. myspace has proved a dynamic and creative tool for the AYCE promoters: their profile has 700 online ‘friends’ and has received more than 5,000 page hits. ‘It’s so instant and so visual,’ says co-promoter K. ‘It gives people a flavour of things, making it clear straight away what kind of people you want to contact, so there’s no groping in the dark handing out thousands of flyers. Feature continues

’AYCE delivers a cut-and-paste mix of old-school rave, grime, dancehall and hardcore. They’re typical of many club promoters on myspace who use the site to find new acts and DJs, but they also source new tracks via the site too. ‘At the club we set an iPod to shuffle, playing tracks we’ve downloaded from unsigned artists via myspace,’ says Warboy. ‘We’re not too judgemental with the music; we just see what comes out.’

Similarly, the visuals and art installations at AYCE come both from Londoners who live around the corner, and myspace friends across the world. AYCE certainly seems to have the punk-rave-experimental ethic that narcissistic club kids in search of something new grab with both hands, so it’s no surprise that they turn away over 150 ravers each month.

But all kinds of club promoters (and DJs, bands and producers), from start-ups to established nights like Bugged Out, use myspace, as it’s an effective way for them to get an impressive web page without spending a fortune. Some venues, like the so-hot-right-now Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, don’t bother with an independent website at all. But it’s the online community aspect that makes it so essential now, particularly when clubbers (and consumers in general) don’t want to be sold their nightlife options, they want to be told about them by like-minded friends.

‘The difference between myspace and those awful spam emails is that people on myspace actually want to be on there,’ enthuses Charlotte Hotham, booker at Bugged Out, one of many clubs who have a long-established website but reach a new audience through their myspace page. ‘You can get a feel for the club or the DJ by looking at the pictures, videos, releases or mixes, and you're not forcing anything down anyone’s throat, because the people that you send messages and invitations to are listed as your friends.’
YoYo, Thursday’s weekly hip hop-led night at the Notting Hill Arts Club, has been progressing steadily for over four years, but experienced a dramatic change when they launched a myspace page.

‘We kind of followed the trend and put more live music on at the club,’ says Leo Greenslade, resident DJ and YoYo promoter. ‘Now we constantly have artists contacting us through myspace wanting to come down and play.’
YoYo, like others using myspace, reaches a global audience by forming relationships and alliances with other nights and artists. ‘Mark Ronson from New York is in our top eight, and we’ve managed to use his influence to reach people over in the States; and with that, suddenly it’s not just a little night in west London anymore,’ says Greenslade. ‘We definitely got a huge boost from myspace.’

Erol Alkan’s Trash also has its own website, as does Alkan himself. So he was amazed when his bookings recently doubled after he created a page on myspace. It seems he and Trash are a victim of their own success though. ‘We will not be accepting friend requests from bands,’ reads the polite but seemingly frustrated blurb on the Trash page. ‘We’ve had so many we can’t deal with any more.’

Even in-house club promoters are ditching their traditional methods in favour of myspace. ‘We’re using myspace to promote our next night, Emerge in Water,’ says Tava O’Halloran, promotions manager at the 333, a club that has struggled, at least until the recent success of nights like Troubled Minds, to retain its Shoreditch cool. All the acts and DJs for the new night have all been booked through myspace.

So it works for promoter and clubbers alike. Promoters are tailoring their message to their audience; clubbers can subscribe to their social aspirations at the click of a button. As the eerily hypnotic ‘sermon’ on the AYCE pages says: ‘We are just like you; living in a personalised bubble world; asking if we can have all this, can it get any better?’