Dombresky played our first music club member only party

How we did it, what we learned, and how it went.

Last week we threw a putyouon x Dombresky music club member only party. As we planned this event, we tried to apply the lessons from our pop up in February with Forester to streamline the process.

Including dollar figures in this write-up will hopefully help other curators understand what something like this may cost and the thought process behind it all

Dombresky x The putyouon Music Club

I started the music club with the intention of providing value to music fans in the form of a weekly playlist. I then increased the value by offering free tickets to select shows and festivals. For the first year I valued the music club at $4/month (basically based on $1 per playlist and less than half the price of a Spotify $10 monthly subscription price). After a year, we had 150 members, it was growing slowly but steadily. And then after a year of that, I assumed that if I could scale the club to over 1,000 people it would be far more valuable than $600 a month (150 members x $4). So I made it free.

When I did this, I saw an immediate jump in members joining and within 4 weeks, we jumped to 700 members. That was a combination of a couple videos on TikTok doing well and increasing website traffic, and creating a site pop up that made it clear that the music club was “now free”:

So after we had some momentum, I felt that I could use the number of people that were in the club to incentivize an artist in multiple ways. How this applied to Dombresky, was leveraging the club as a built in audience of house music fans he could get in front of, and get content of doing so. We sent a single text to the music club at 7 pm on Sunday, two days before the party. 400 RSVP’s were available, and we hit 400 RSVP’s in 42 minutes. So we had a buzzing private pop up event for his most recent song “In My Soul” and like I mentioned in this recent post, the most valuable thing an artist can do is content and pop ups. Because content is everything.

So we had a built in fanbase of music heads who we could put in front of him, he even posted the music club to tell people the message: The free event is for music club members only, and to get on the list to come you had to be in the club. This spiked the music club even more (517 to be exact).

The content team we put in place was set with multiple cameras to capture raw footage to give to Dombresky’s team, and I was of course going to do a recap about the night, just adding as much value for him as possible to justify the collaboration. So, what did this all cost?

We paid Dombresky $0. This is for a couple reasons: He wouldn’t want to charge people for a small Tuesday night party, he has radius clauses for other shows, and if he made any money his agent would have to get involved. He was willing to do a free show for fans, celebrate the release, and give back to LA. We ended up landing on hosting the event in Venice at Rose Room that ran us $2,000. We want to keep the events on the westside so we were looking at spaces that could fit 200-300 people with a operating bar and as much production support as possible.

current total $2,000

Once we locked in the space, we had to have it built out with production. Rose room had projectors, plenty of power and an in house sound system. But we needed more for this one. This is when we rented a full audio and visual production set up with four (4) CDJ 3000’s, a Pioneer DJ DJM-750MK2 4-channel mixer, a sub, two booth speakers, four monitor speakers, a lighting package with eight astera tubes, two booth cube lights and a laser. This combined ran us $1600 but it included set up, take down, and live production from the guys at Venice Afters Club.

current total $3,600

Then we hired a videographer who set up a multicam set up to get clips for us, which ran us around $1200. That came with Go Pro’s, two roaming Cameras, a static camera from the side, and delivered edits and assets as well.

current total $4,800

Our goal was to keep this under $5k and we were just able to. We’re essentially setting up a complete content play package here for the label and Dombresky, who are choosing to take a totally focussed approach to content and creating moments not only for In My Soul for his unreleased songs that he played as well to use for the rest of the year (or whenever they drop). This is such a value add for the artists, and a big reason that we believe we can keep offering these things to artists by getting them involved in the music club. Built in demand for artists. In fact the very next day I gave three music club members a +1 to an Odd Mobb x Omnom “HYPERBEAM” pop up in LA that they gave me free passes to for the club. See what we’re cooking over here??

With such a success from the night, we’re excited to do more. We included (free) surprise sets from Sam Silver, Angrybaby, Surf Mesa, and GUDFELLA. If you want to come to the next one, join the music club and in the meantime enjoy the weekly private playlist of new releases every Friday. If you want to learn how to build something like putyouon and scale a music platform- download the Music Curator Guide

Next week I’ll go into my process of recording and editing my content. Will be a good break down of what I use, how I use it, and tips I have for posting