Category: news

Watch: David Swindells shows how Ministry of Sound has gone from being an underground club to a worldwide brand

In 1991, the UK’s thirst for dance music was getting stronger by the day. In the rural areas in the South and in reclaimed industrial sites in the North, illegal raves woke up a generation with fast, repetitive beats.

Inspired by New York’s Paradise Garage, a derelict bus garage in South London was turned into the UK’s first club dedicated to house music.

So how did the Ministry of Sound transform itself from an underground club to a multi-million pound brand?

The Ministry of Sound is now often dismissed as too commercial to be relevant to the dance music scene. But 20 years ago, the Ministry marketed itself as an underground club.

Made out of breeze blocks with very little styling, it was a far cry from the glitzy discos of the 70s and 80s and was the epitome of warehouse cool.

The founding DJ, Justin Berkman said his concept was “100% sound system first, lights second, design third”.

The Ministry’s 20:20 exhibition charts the brand’s growth over the last 20 years

It was the impressive sound system and cutting edge DJs such as Larry Levan that kept the clubbers coming back night after night.

To celebrate its twentieth anniversary, the Ministry has launched a colourful exhibition of previously unseen photographs as well as old flyers and album covers.

An installation shows off the club’s impressive sound and lighting system.

But the exhibition shows how, in the early days, the Ministry did not advertise their presence at all.

David Swindells was nightlife editor at Time Out at the time and remembers asking the owners if they wanted to be listed in the magazine.

“They didn’t want to be. They just relied on plain flyers which they handed out after other club nights. Of course it’s very different now,” he says with a wry smile.

Today, the Ministry of Sound is one of the world’s most recognisable clubbing brands with a turnover approaching £100m.

Driving profits is the Ministry’s own record label which it launched in 1995 with the release of The Annual, a compilation album of dance music tracks.

“There was no plan to dominate the world” say managing directors Duncan Collins and Iain Hagger

It is now the biggest independent record label in the world selling over five million singles and albums a year.

The joint group managing directors of the Ministry, Duncan Collins and Iain Hagger, insist that the record label was not part of a big corporate strategy.

“It was born out of a genuine love of dance music,” explains Duncan Collins. “It was pure and authentic.”

The label began by putting out dance records that were popular in the club next door.

“Everything kind of mushroomed from there, and there was an appetite to do more,” says Mr Collins. “There wasn’t an intention to be as big as we are 20 years on.”

The Ministry now generates its own talent by running a fully-fledged development programme.

New Ministry-backed artists such as Yasmin and Wretch 32 have had some recent chart success – proving that the record label is still growing.

Not content with owning a record label, the Ministry diversified further with the launch of its own radio station in 1996. This was followed two years later by a magazine.

Worldwide club nights publicised the brand across the globe and by New Year’s Eve 2001 it was able to host its biggest ever event – filling the Millennium Dome in London with 55,000 clubbers. “It was one of our greatest achievements,” says Duncan Collins.

In 2006 the Ministry acquired the Hed Kandi record label which also sells fragrances, clothing and owns a chain of bars around the world.

There are Ministry club nights in Sydney, Ibiza and Kuala Lumpur as well as exercise DVDs and even branded vodka. In short, the Ministry now sells an entire lifestyle to a global audience.

Dance music is cyclical by nature and by the beginning of the naughties the original clubbers were getting too old to be on the dance floor until three in the morning every weekend.

Reports of the death of clubbing may have been exaggerated, but they were not without entirely without foundation.

David Swindells believes that by the Millennium eve night, people no longer wanted to pay up to £100 “just to go to a party” and the cult of the superstar DJs such as Sasha and Paul Oakenfold began to decline.

The superclub Gatecrasher downsized its operations in the West Midlands and Cream in Liverpool stopped holding weekly events as a new generation of teenagers flocked to smaller venues with less of a business-minded agenda.

Mike Moneypenny, digital editor at Mixmag magazine says the way dance music is produced means its constantly changing.”It is always pushing forwards,” he says.

Some have argued that part of the reason Cream failed was that it simply could not keep up.

‘People will always want to come and listen to the best music,’ says Hagger

By turning itself into a huge commercial entity, the Ministry has also faced accusations from dance music fans that it is no longer cutting edge.

Mike Moneypenny disagrees: “Ministry straddles the boundary between the underground and mainstream dance scenes,” he says.

“Whilst many of Ministry’s Saturday night punters are tourists who flock to the club because they own a couple of the CDs, some of the leading lights of the underground scene play there.”

Managing director Duncan Collins agrees: “We are the granddad of the industry, but we’re not just booking the same old DJ’s, we are making things relevant for young people.”

So how does a 20-year-old big beast of the industry keep up with the cool kids?

Duncan Collins believes its all down to their staff. Indeed, the Ministry offices in South London seem to be entirely staffed by the under 30s.

“The average age is 24,” confirms Collins. “Our staff consume our product and keep us at the cutting edge of dance music.”

Rapper Example has been successful since signing to the Ministry of Sound’s Data Records

The Ministry has proved that by employing people who are passionate about the dance music industry they are able to stay on top of new trends and up-and-coming DJs.

It is this pioneering attitude which Mike Moneypenny believes has kept the Ministry of Sound relevant – and therefore still commercially viable.

“It’s not setting any trends but Ministry is still pivotal to the music industry,” he says.

By introducing people to dance music, Mike Moneypenny believes the Ministry helps to bring money into the rest of the industry – be it smaller clubs or up-and-coming artists.

The money and backing that the Ministry brand can give an artist can catapult them to fame.

Take, for instance, the rapper Example. He had modest success with singles like Vile and What We Made, signed to Mike Skinner’s label Beat.

But, it was not until 2008 when he signed to the Ministry’s Data Records that he made his breakthrough into the mainstream charts.

The Ministry of Sound was launched as the UK entered a long period of recession.

Twenty years on, as the country is still suffering from the effects of another downturn, will young people struggling to find jobs, still be willing to pay about £15 to get into the club.

‘The club is the beating heart of our operation,’ says Duncan Collins

Managing director Iain Hagger stresses that the club is just as popular now as it has ever been.

“People still want to escape a pretty tough time and we are fortunate that we are a business that does well both in a recession and outside a recession.”

Hagger believes people keep coming back to the club and the brand because the Ministry has ”invested in the experience” by upgrading the soundsystem several times and booking the best acts.

Both he and Duncan Collins say the club is the ”beating heart” of the entire Ministry of Sound operation and hope it will continue to be the figurehead of the brand for the next 20 years.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Scvngr’s Seth Priebatsch on how the “game layer” could help society

You can almost feel a buzz on the fingertips of attendees shaking hands at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive festival in Austin, Texas – one of the world’s biggest networking opportunities for the web community.

A little micro-blogging site called Twitter launched here as a start-up in 2007 – and there are plenty of people attending this year who want emulate their success.

The technology enthusiasts behind a myriad start-up companies have flocked to Texas this week for one reason: to get their applications onto the mobile phones of trend-setting early adopters.

Dennis Crowley is the co-founder of Foursquare, a mobile application allowing users to “check-in” at locations, from cafes to concerts to office buildings, and send that information to friends also using the app.

Foursquare launched here in 2009, picked up 5,000 users in four days and is now a sizeable social media player, boasting of some seven million users. Mr Crowley says there are few other events where start-ups can “push the gas to the floor”, accelerating both excitement about their companies and growth.

“It’s a great little laboratory for developers,” Mr Crowley says.

“[For us] it’s one of these things where it spread really quickly in four days of the conference. It has turned into a really good launchpad for start-ups because you have just the right amount of people that are in this early adopter community, and they’re down there specifically not so much to go to the conference, but to go to the parties, hang out and socialise.

“And a lot of the tools that people are really interested in building are tools that allow people to go out and socialise.”

So what are some of the hottest applications in town this year – and who are the people behind them?

Scvngr

Scvngr is a location-based mobile app similar to Foursquare that asks individuals checking in to a location to complete challenges created by businesses, institutions or fans of the application.

When a Scvngr user checks in to a location, like a gym or restaurant, the application presents a list of real-world challenges – asking the individual to answer a question or riddle or to accept a dare to earn points and seek a reward. Discounts on products or free goods are then sometimes given to those that accomplish the tasks.

Scvngr chief executive Seth Priebatsch, a 22-year-old who refers to himself as the company’s “chief ninja”, gave the keynote speech this year at SXSW Interactive in front of 2,500 attendees and some 3,500 others who watched from screens in 11 other rooms at the convention centre.

He says that although the application was officially unveiled to consumers nine months ago, “the reason we’re at South by Southwest, and the reason everyone else is here, is that it’s the most concentrated influx of exciting, fun, early adopter, tech people who are willing to try out anything at least once.

“They are going to try it out at least once, and it’s our job to try to win them over and try it out again and again.”

Like Mr Crowley, Mr Priebatsch is interested in pushing characteristics typically associated with video games into a physical space through the company’s app, which already claims 1.2m users.

Mr Priebatsch says social media companies, like Facebook, have been built a “social layer” around the world that work successfully.

He now expects the next 10 years to be devoted to creating “the game layer” on top of society, which he thinks could fundamentally change how people interact with their environments.

Hashable

The networking service Hashable, launched in October 2010, is attempting to do away with physical business cards and to work as a platform to facilitate business introductions, prompting people to leave their comfort zones and meet others.

Hashable CEO Mike Yavonditte on how his app could help change business networking

The service was built from the organisational functionality of Twitter hashtags and uses these tags, like #lunch, #businessdrinks or #SXSW, to remind users where real world connections took place.

When a Hashable user meets a potential business connection, the e-mail address or Twitter username of that person is noted along with the location of the meeting, and that information is then sent to other friends and business colleagues using the application.

Users are also prompted to introduce people within their network whom they think would benefit from knowing each other. Making a connection earns the user credits known as “hash cred” and rankings based on the the amount of credits are viewable by those in your network.

Hashable chief executive Michael Yavonditte, who has spent much of his time at SXSW Interactive speaking to other tech heads about the new service, says the New York-based team is adding close to 1,000 users a day and has already signed up tens of thousands of business-minded individuals.

“We kept looking at number of gestures that normal white collar professionals perform on a regular basis: meetings, breakfast, lunch, dinner, coffee, drinks. All of those things are incredibly important events, none of which make it to the internet,” Mr Yavonditte says.

“And so we decided to create Hashable in order to structure that information and share it with friends.”

Instagram

The start-up Instagram, has developed a photo-sharing application for the iPhone which enables people to take photographs and immediately share them with friends through a Twitter-style feed.

Instagram’s Michael Krieger: ‘We wanted to liberate photographs from mobile phones’

The San Francisco-based firm debuted only five months ago and already claims an astounding 2.5m users.

Co-founder Michael Krieger says the company is helping to explore the future of the digital photograph by allowing individuals to instantaneously post and receive feedback on each of their photos.

“We thought back to the 1950s and 60s when instant cameras started coming out, and even earlier with the Polaroid camera,” Mr Krieger says, adding that people were excited because the cameras offered immediate ways to share photos with friends and family.

But, he says, the problem with digital photographs has been that many people upload them infrequently, so they can be left sitting on devices for a long time and not be seen.

The application is already in widespread use among the tech elite and has been used by many during the past four days as a way to catalogue SXSW Interactive.

Mr Krieger says part of the reason he is attending SXSW is because “it has the potential to launch you into a pretty awesome spot”.

“This is our first SXSW, so there are people we wanted to correspond with and users with wanted to meet up with,” he told the BBC over the phone, while attending a photography meet-up in downtown Austin to see how people are using the app.

“We wanted to get in front of people who have not seen us yet.”

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.