When you walk into a Sofar show, you are entering into an intimate experience that has been perfectly tailored to reflect the Sofar Sounds brand. Sofar seems to pride itself on a sort of genre-less curation, driven instead by “vibe.” On Sofar’s YouTube page, where thousands of performances are documented with Sofar-branded videos, you can get a sense for how evenly this “vibe” is distributed around the world-always mellow, laid-back, and unobtrusive. By and large, those rules demand that artists be smooth, seamless, and unplugged. But it should be noted that to fit with the Sofar “brand,” there are rules to play by. Over the past two years, I’ve attended a number of these shows and seen some talented performers. The music will be stripped back-very chill. And the curated audience will number in the range of sixty to one hundred. There will be a piece of printer paper with the Sofar logo and social handles taped up. There will be twinkly Christmas lights-very Instagrammable. But no matter where the show is happening, when an attendee walks into the gig, there’s a solid chance it will feel like this: The audience will sit on the floor. Sofar Sounds currently runs more than six hundred shows per month, with a presence in 441 cities around the world, from Boston and Bangalore to Brasília and Beirut. Meanwhile it pays more than ninety employees in over twenty cities. Sofar has repeatedly used a familiar line to defend its poor payouts: the company is far from profitable. And yet, Sofar has raised $38.1 million in venture funding over four rounds most recently, in May of 2019, it received $25 million in Series C investment led by Battery Ventures and Union Square Ventures, with additional funding from Octopus Ventures and Virgin Group. The folks who host the shows and help them run smoothly are largely volunteers-Sofar cynically refers to them as “ambassadors.” It’s telling, considering a recent piece by musician John Colpitts for Talkhouse reported that the New York State Department of Labor was opening an investigation into the legality of Sofar’s vast reliance on unpaid labor. Its slick promotional videos offer word clouds of Sofar’s corporate mythology: invite only! intimate settings! immersive experiences! And yet, it is largely another creation of tech middlemen where music is devalued in order to bolster a brand: participating musicians are paid poorly (generally one hundred dollars per set, while the company can make from $1,000 to $1,600 per show), sets are twenty to twenty-five minutes max, and it’s ultimately quite easy to leave without ever learning the names of the artists at all. Sofar sells tickets priced from ten to thirty dollars for “secret shows”-attendees “apply” for a chance to buy a ticket, but they don’t know the address until right before the show, and they don’t know the lineup until they arrive. Through its global platform, Sofar claims to be “reimagining the live event experience” and “bringing the magic back to live music.” In reality, it is more like a typical promotion company, but born of classic sharing economy–era schemes. This is Sofar Sounds, a venture capital–backed enterprise that has spent the past decade co-opting the timeless traditions of house shows in order to extract profits from the music world. “Our leasing team is over here in the corner!” “We have some information and some business cards!” they shouted over the applause. When they offered tours to interested parties, the crowd roared. The staff urged attendees to tag American Copper in all photos, and then talked up the building’s newly opened east tower and its fabulous amenities-rooftop pool, yoga studio, juice bar. “How’s everybody doing?” one of them asked excitedly, shouting over the hum of the crowd. I never thought I’d end up at this so-called house show either, but there I was: Friday night, sitting on the ground amid a sea of young professionals and residents of the lavish complex, in its twenty-ninth floor common room, sipping BYO wine from plastic cups and listening to a three-act lineup of purposefully anonymous folk and funk guys.īetween performances, employees of this $660-million-dollar apartment complex hopped on the mic. “I never thought in my life I’d be playing on the top of the American Copper,” he told a crowd of about fifty, referring to the name of the Murray Hill luxury apartment building in Manhattan where we were gathered, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the East River. “Thank you so much for this magical moment,” whispered a French singer with a leather jacket and harmonica.
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