Those attending Boiler Room’s two-day festival in London’s Burgess Park in August may have noticed a troubling message spray-painted on the site’s perimeter fence: “Boiler Room is owned by Israeli arms investors.” In nearby Brockwell Park, which hosted Field Day, Cross the Tracks and Mighty Hoopla – three festivals belonging to the same group as Boiler Room – graffiti depicted a bomb with the letters “KKR” emblazoned on it.
In June 2024, the controversial private equity giant KKR acquired Superstruct Entertainment, the company that owns these four festivals and tens of others, many of which were the subjects of boycotts by artists this summer. That’s because KKR has considerable business interests in Israel, including investments in Axel Springer SE, a German media company that runs classified ads for housing developments in the illegally occupied West Bank. Ravers for Palestine, an anonymously run Instagram page that has backed dozens of boycotts, characterised KKR in a recent post as “the beating heart of western capitalism where an insatiable lust for profits and power has no moral boundaries”.
And as the boycott has gathered pace, KKR and Superstruct have become entwined with a complex debate about the ethics of independence, funding and value that the cultural world is currently reckoning with. Artists including Massive Attack and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard have pulled their music from Spotify in response to that company’s founder Daniel Ek’s €600m investment in Helsing, a military-focused AI company. Last year, Barclays, which provides financial services to defence companies supplying Israel, suspended its sponsorship deals with Live Nation festivals including Download and Latitude following protests from fans and performers; the Great Escape festival in Brighton also announced it would no longer partner with the bank. Similarly, the investment management company Baillie Gifford cancelled sponsorship deals with a number of literary festivals following backlash to its ties with Israel and investments in fossil fuels.
So what should performers and audiences do when events that they love fall into the hands of organisations that they hate? And should private equity even be allowed near underground culture?
***
These questions have coalesced around one brand in particular: the KKR/Superstruct-owned broadcaster and promoter Boiler Room, whose global, year-round livestreamed events have made it an ongoing target for boycotts from politically engaged dance music fans. DJ EZ, MCR-T and Taylah Elaine pulled out of its September event in Toronto, where KKR’s investment in the controversial Coastal GasLink pipeline – which cuts through unceded First Nations land in British Columbia – made the connection especially pertinent. Performers booked for forthcoming events in Lisbon and Tokyo, among others, are also being called on to cancel their appearances.
Since it was founded in 2010, Boiler Room has grown into one of the biggest brands in underground music; thanks to its international reach and large viewer base, it has the power to turn emerging DJs into household names. In 2021, it was acquired by ticketing company Dice, which sold it to Superstruct this January. Boiler Room has attempted to distance itself from its new owner, saying in a statement that its staff had no control over the sale, that it retains editorial independence, and “will always remain unapologetically pro-Palestine”. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), the cultural arm of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS), responded positively to the statement and has not endorsed a boycott.
Boiler Room has weathered a number of other controversies, often around its perceived co-option of subcultures and commodification of dance music. In 2017, for example, the brand received £297,298 of funding from Arts Council England to cover the Notting Hill Carnival – a number of tags around the area reading “Boiler Room corporate scum” appeared shortly after.
However, in a music scene in which integrity and independence are highly valued, the disconnect between Boiler Room’s values and its ownership structure is arguably placing the brand on an unsteadier footing than ever. Given it is “a brand and an entity that has swapped hands so often”, one artist who cancelled all of their KKR-owned bookings tells me, “nobody owes any of these people anything”. Sentiments like this, if they become more widespread among performers and audiences, could spell the end for Boiler Room.
The Amsterdam-born DJ Jyoty worked for Boiler Room during its early days, and her own 2019 set has more than 4m views on YouTube. She was one of the artists who pulled out of Lost Village festival over its Superstruct-KKR ownership. “If Superstruct gets sold by KKR in five or 10 years, the harsh truth is the profits that were made in that time will go to exactly those things that we fear the most,” she says. Boiler Room did not respond to a request for comment on this perspective, nor any element of this piece.
Jyoty explains that she navigates bookings from a personal perspective, which means still turning down organisations that aren’t included on the official BDS boycott list, “just because they didn’t sit right with me”. After considerable research, she decided that KKR is one such organisation. She is sympathetic to the idea of a broader boycott – “It’s going to put a lot of people in a very uncomfortable, very painful, very sad position but that’s actually how most changes start” – and says that boycotts tend to stem from grassroots DJs and organisations, noting that “everything good comes from the ground up”. She is frustrated at artists with bigger voices and stronger brands for not using their voices: “Why don’t you fucking speak for once?”
But some artists who are aligned in their support of Palestine and opposition to KKR disagree on how those beliefs should be put into practice. In March, Ben UFO – one of the UK’s most respected DJs – wrote on Instagram: “I don’t believe there is any realistic possibility that a boycott of Boiler Room affects KKR in a meaningful way.” In an email to me, he adds: “If the goal is to materially impact KKR or the situation in Palestine, it’s not clear how boycotting events under Superstruct and petitioning individual artists not to perform achieves that goal.”
Indeed, how much a boycott will damage a brand’s parent company’s parent company is a difficult question to answer. As is whether performers, who are often in financially precarious positions, should feel responsible for refusing gigs that don’t contravene BDS guidelines.
These debates are largely taking place on social media, which some people argue polarises them unhealthily. “As a result of the moralising approach of campaigners, many professional artists and other industry participants feel as though they can’t speak their minds without being accused of hypocrisy for simply trying to navigate the music industry,” says Ben UFO. He points me to a 2023 statement from BDS that says: “we all have limited human capacity, so we’d better use it in the most effective way to achieve meaningful, sustainable results that can truly contribute to Palestinian liberation.”
It is often emerging artists who lose out. An appearance on Boiler Room can jumpstart a DJ’s career, but that’s now offset against the reputational cost of being perceived as having stepped out of line. “These smaller acts, who can barely get by paying their rent, are always the ones sacrificing themselves,” Jyoty says.
As Shawn Reynaldo reports in his underground dance music newsletter First Floor, Superstruct-owned festivals have a knack for “quietly restocking their lineups whenever someone who can’t stomach the connection to starvation and genocide drops out”. The seemingly abundant availability of replacement acts – “scabs”, as Reynaldo characterises them – further complicates small artists’ decision-making when it comes to joining a boycott.
This fraught debate has pitted artists who are broadly in agreement against each other. “There’s so much energy being spent ripping ourselves to shreds that arguably could be repurposed and deployed to Nigel Farage or Keir Starmer,” says Gideön, who was involved in organising the recent Together for Palestine concert at Wembley Arena and runs Glastonbury’s queer clubbing haven NYC Downlow. However, he ultimately supports a boycott of Superstruct-owned brands, and describes the present moment as a “great unmasking”: an inflection point when longstanding systemic issues with how dance music is distributed and consumed are being brought to the surface. “All of this is tied up with the capitalist desecration of house music in the first place, and with the colonisation and theft of Black queer culture.”
***
As festivals have grown in scale, become more expensive to stage and, since Covid, struggled with advance ticket sales, they have become difficult to fund through ticket sales and sponsorships alone. National arts funding, which some festivals rely on, is unpredictable, and selling to private equity is clearly an attractive option. The stability it brings, however, comes at a price: once a business is sold, its founders can no longer choose who the financial beneficiaries are.
Even if Boiler Room can’t be blamed for the sale of its parent company and its subsequent relationship with KKR, it was responsible for its earlier sale to Dice. At that point it relinquished control over who would benefit from its success and who its performers are, in some sense, working for.
The same is true of all of the music brands that have found themselves facing boycotts this summer. “None of them made the choice to have KKR, but once you let private equity firms into your business, that’s the wrong first choice to make,” says Bob van Heur, the founder of Le Guess Who?, a multi-venue experimental music festival in Utrecht which is run as a nonprofit and financed by a combination of public funding, ticket sales, and donations from its supporters programme.
Conversations about Boiler Room and similar brands often take private equity’s participation in ownership and funding structures to be a given. Le Guess Who?, which receives 40% of its funding through government grants, represents an alternative model, one that, though less secure and smaller in scale, avoids being mired in the toxic debate around private investment. “Not everything needs to be big,” Van Heur says. “We’re always looking for growth everywhere, I think that’s a complete mistake.”
Though he admits that he “did everything wrong in life” if he wanted “to become a millionaire promoter”, given that the festival’s future is effectively decided every four years by state and municipal funding bodies, he’d rather do things this way than sell out to private equity. “Because of the corporate structures taking over everything, it becomes a monoculture,” he says. “Now, half of the agents book [based] on data. In the end, that’s not an opinion, that’s nothing new [...] as a curator, my job is to look into the future.”
Berlin Atonal is another independent festival funded by public grants and ticket sales. “With a venue like ours, the value is cultural rather than transactional,” says co-director Laurens von Oswald. “The impact is harder to measure, but it’s deeper, more genuine, and ultimately more sustainable.”
Other independent institutions are challenging the orthodoxy that a Boiler Room livestream is an essential step towards mainstream success. In August, the independent clubbing collective Daytimers staged Daytimers World, an event that took place across eight venues in six countries in collaboration with a number of local collectives and organisations. It was funded almost entirely by ticket sales, with additional funding for one party via public money in Zurich.
“In a year dominated by talk of private equity’s influence in dance music,” they said, “this hugely ambitious, community-first project sets an example: that with solidarity, anything is possible.” DJ ex.sses is a member of the female and non-binary Sisu Crew, who earlier this summer organised Strikefest to platform acts that had pulled out of KKR-owned festivals. “There’s so much more to life and so many more networks to be made outside of these institutions,” she says. Boiler Room and so many others, though, remain trapped inside.
