Shake your money maker

The New Zealand dance music business is now big business, and a study in how to market local brands and DJs against the coolest international club scene imports. STEPHEN JEWELL talks to the players.

With the influx of international "super-club" brands such as Gatecrasher and God's Kitchen that regularly arrive in New Zealand, it's become harder for local promoters and DJs to push homegrown events in an increasingly crowded market.

However, despite the increased overseas competition, a plethora of ambitious local club nights have sprung up, with Chemistry, which premiered last week at the St James complex, merely the latest.

Chemistry is accompanied by a mix CD of the same name, compiled by the club's resident DJs Grant "Sample Gee" Kearney and Sam Hill.

Kearney is also head of A&R (the signing, recording and grooming-for-stardom department) of Universal Music New Zealand and was behind Lagered, New Zealand's highest-selling mix CD series. The series has delivered seven volumes to date, which have sold about 20,000 copies each, and there's a new one on the way.

Meanwhile, he and Hill are planning to release a special Brain CD this year to celebrate the 10th anniversary of their original, groundbreaking club night.

While Lagered remains Kearney's baby, Chemistry is the creation of the St James itself, which wants to create its own super-club every six weeks.

"They're funding it and putting it on and Sam and I are hosting it, being residents who are getting out there and using our experience in the dance music industry to market it," says Kearney.

The concept of super-clubbing was pioneered in New Zealand by Lightspeed Productions, which staged the first Ministry of Sound parties and once adopted the catch phrase "super-club more often."

Recently though, Lightspeed has largely turned its back on super-clubbing at venues such as the Ellerslie Race Course and has instead chosen to focus on building up its own club, the Grand Circle, on the top floor of the St James complex.

"We used the term super-club because it was poignant at that time," explains Lightspeed's Chris O'Donoghue. "There were a lot of young people who had settled back in Auckland after living abroad and the term super-club pushed their buttons.

"It does appear that a lot of young people who are attending the large successful dance parties are very brand-conscious. They want to go to name events, overseas club nights or nightclub names, and seem to identify more with this than the quality of the artists on the bill."

Instead of pushing big parties such as Cream, Lightspeed is concentrating on building up its own, more intimate club, the Grand Circle, and developing a New Zealand version of Robodisco, the Manchester club run by paperecordings, whose DJs - such as Ben Davis, Dick Johnson and Miles Hollaway (who played the inaugural event night) - have been frequent visitors to this country.

"The Grand Circle is a bit different because it has been a club that has started up and we've had to let people know that it's there, for not only international but regular club nights," explains Soane, who along with Bevan Keys is one of the club's two resident DJs.

"When I was resident at Calibre, week in week out I'd pack the place out with or without an international," he says. "There is good local support and every week it's been getting better and better, but you have to keep developing. You can't just rely on the same crate of records every weekend."

According to Kearney, the branding and marketing of a club is vital to its success.

"You're constantly battling that New Zealand mindset that everything international is automatically better than what is done locally," he says. "To do that you've got to throw a lot of marketing money at it."

Make people believe through television, radio, posters and flyers that what you're going to be bringing to the table is going to be just as good and exciting as what Gatecrasher might be able to put on, because we can do it.

"We do it time after time, but there's always a bias that a DJ from the UK must be really good, whereas there's plenty of good DJs in our own backyard."

Hill adds: "But at the end of the day, it takes events like Gatecrasher to help what we do anyway. The more people go out, the bigger it gets, and the bigger it gets the easier it is to market and brand an event or a name."

Promoting a night such as Chemistry to an international standard certainly doesn't come cheap.

"You've got to be able to play on the same plane as the Ministries and Gatecrashers that are coming through town, so it's got to look as good," says Kearney. "That's why the launch of things like Chemistry is so damn expensive. If you look at the CD and party, the launch of Chemistry has cost over $100,000."

Fortunately, Chemistry's vigorous marketing, which included giving away 1000 tickets free with the CD, appears to have paid off as the night attracted a sellout, 2000-strong crowd, with many unlucky ticketless punters turned away at the door.

Auckland has also recently had a number of highly successful homegrown
Body1: club nights, including 95 bFM's hugely popular Oonst 4 and the more exclusive Velvet at the Toto Montecristo.

"In the case of those parties, they've created very strong brands with the parties themselves," says Kearney. "They're just a collective of local DJs, and if you put the same DJs on at some other nightclub that same night, they wouldn't get the same crowd."

Apart from Chemistry and Lagered, the past 12 months have also had a flood of locally produced mix CDs, including Peter Urlich and Bevan Keys' big-selling two Nice'n'Urlich compilations. Both Everything I Do and Nice'n'Urlich 2 have sold more than 11,000 copies, while similar house compilations, such as Greg Churchill and Roger Perry's BPM CDs, have sold in the low thousands.

"Lagered outsells Gatecrasher and Nice'n'Urlich outsells any international funky CDs of similar nature that come through," argues Kearney. "They're the three major compilations on the market.

"If you look at the amount of international CDs that are released here, the local ones completely wipe the floor with them. But they have to have the marketing behind them, and the ones that get on TV do well."

Soane, who is about to release his second mix CD - the third in the Lightspeed series - admits that mix CDs are a necessary evil when it comes to raising a DJ's profile.

"To be perfectly honest, I don't like them," he says. "I don't like doing them, but they're very good promotional tools. I'm not really into making mix tapes at home because that could be your best set. You can put it all down on tape and the next one you play live at a club is really stink!"

However, O'Donoghue maintains that the importance of the Lightspeed mix series cannot be underestimated.

"It is extremely important to the Lightspeed brand," he says. "It reflects the style of music that we push and that people can hear Soane play at the Grand Circle every Saturday night."

If the local events are getting as big as the imports, the pay rates between foreign stars and domestic DJs are still some distance apart. While Paul Oakenfold's Auckland appearance last year came with a $30,000 fee, the average British hard-house DJ earns around $8000-$15,000 a gig.

And while local DJs may be able to put on as good a party as their international counterparts, the rates paid to even leading New Zealand DJs such as Kearney, Soane, Greg Churchill and Roger Perry - which begin at $300 for a three-hour set and rise to $1500 a night for the very best - pale in comparison.

"You're worth what you can ask for," says Kearney. "It helps to have a mix CD out on the street. Lagered has made me one of a select few who can sell out venues by myself. Nice'n'Urlich can now do the same thing. People will always think of us first.

"It's been very difficult for new DJs to break into the scene. All the big names - Bevan Keys, Roger Perry, Soane - have been around for 10 years. It's not as if somebody can come along and suddenly have an instant profile."

Soane says the going rate for a DJ in New Zealand still isn't good enough. "The international acts are spaced so far apart and the local guys are keeping things ticking over until the next international comes.

"There's an illusion that you get paid exorbitant amounts of money, which you don't. You get paid well. I don't complain about what I get paid. I'm lucky enough to not have to get a part-time job in a shop or a takeaways. You've also got to take in the price of records. They aren't cheap."