The Boiler Room reckoning: Why scapegoating won’t fix live music’s funding problem

There has been a lot of scrutiny recently about how dance music is funded. Two cases in point illustrate why. Boiler Room, the influential livestreaming platform, was acquired by DICE in 2021, then sold to Superstruct, a private equity-backed entity, in January 2025. Though Boiler Room had no control over the latter sale, it was the company that paid the price in fan outrage. Boiler Room has long positioned itself as true to its roots, describing itself as opening "a keyhole to London’s underground". In that statement alone, it holds itself accountable to anything that comes after: if you claim to be scene adjacent, you must act like it. The fallout culminated in founder and CEO Blaise Bellville leaving at the start of the year.

This was then captured in a headline at the height of the backlash: ‘No One is Going to Defend Boiler Room’. In the heat of the moment, Boiler Room became the focus of a wider reckoning.

Yet by placing so much weight on a single entity, the wider ecosystem avoids a far more uncomfortable conversation. How do we fund culture while preserving the authenticity that makes it valuable? What are the trade-offs between institutional capital and full independence in music scenes?

Until we face these broader questions, throwing Boiler Room, Field Day, or Sonar under the bus feels like performative catharsis. We’ve cut off one head of the Hydra, but the body – the underlying structure that incentivises consolidation and corporate ownership – remains unchanged.

The ownership map

This is not an issue for Boiler Room alone. Last summer, we saw a wave of artists and fans boycotting music festivals over their ties to private equity, notably Field Day in London and Sonar in Barcelona. As nothing has changed in the year, we can expect to see the same this festival season.

To understand why this issue persists, it’s important to follow the money. The interconnectedness of the modern live music industry reads less like an ecosystem and more like a spiderweb. According to recent research by Matthieu Barrier, Reset!, and Live DMA, 200 major European festivals are owned by just four corporations: Live Nation, Superstruct, AEG, and CTS Eventim.

The consumer complicity clause

The public, to some extent, understands this consolidation is happening. Yet the prevailing sentiment is one of resigned ignorance. They don’t always like the corporatisation of their culture, but they feel powerless to change it. This dynamic holds steady until something disrupts it and then the illusion starts to crack.

Last year, I wrote about the necessity of “scene alignment” – the symbiotic relationship between a festival and the culture it represents. In that piece, I argued that when festivals lose their identity, fans may enjoy the moment but leave without a deeper connection to the event or the scene itself, leaving the festival vulnerable. The same principle applies here. When the ownership structure behind a festival or platform drifts from the culture it was built to serve, that disconnect eventually becomes impossible to ignore. Audiences start asking: who is profiting from this, and do their values align with mine?

Glimmers of alternative models

Amidst this consolidation, a handful of initiatives are attempting to chart a different course. Same Same But Different Festival recently closed a fan ownership campaign that raised nearly $700,000. Meanwhile, the UK Government's call for a voluntary arena ticket levy would redistribute a £1 charge on all tickets to grassroots venues. Elsewhere, organisations like Live DMA advocate for policy interventions such as mandatory ownership transparency and structural funds for independent venues.

Yet these alternatives come with their own complications. When ownership remains small – whether through private equity, a tight-knit group of founders, or a limited pool of investors – the funnel narrows. A specific type of person tends to hold the reins: those with capital, who can afford financial risks, or who move in the right circles. This does not automatically produce better cultural stewardship; it simply shifts the locus of control, raising its own questions about representation and access. On the other side of the coin, well-meaning attempts at collective ownership have their own complications – fan ownership, for example, could get sticky where fans have competing interests or lack the industry expertise to guide decisions.

Then there is the proposition that if you truly care about a scene, you accept remaining small. A noble sentiment, but how does that work when rent rises, costs increase, and artists need paying? Choosing to stay small often means choosing to struggle, or to disappear. Most cultural organisations do not want to sell; they want to survive. Yet, in the current funding environment, survival often feels incompatible with independence.

Where do we go from here?

There is no neat conclusion to this question – but that is perhaps the point. The Boiler Room saga was a flashpoint, but the real story is the structural question the industry keeps avoiding: how do we fund grassroots culture without losing the autonomy that makes it what it is?

We can continue scapegoating individual companies while the underlying structure remains intact. Or we can have honest conversations about the alternatives – fan ownership, ticket levies, policy interventions – and their trade-offs. None offer a clean escape from the question of who gets to own culture and who gets left out. The remaining option is to make peace with the funding model as it stands.

If the industry wants to preserve grassroots culture, it needs to stop treating independence as a nostalgic ideal and start treating it as a structural problem requiring structural solutions. Otherwise, head after head of the hydra goes, but the body remains intact.