Analyzing Trends in Techno and House Music from 374 Boiler Room sets
At Refine we keep track of what is being played and talked about in the world of House and Techno music. Therefore, we have been able to track music trends regarding both what is sought-after now and what has been often played so far. We have decided to make use of all this data.
We figured that Boiler Room, being a high profile event for artists, is a very interesting phenomenon to analyze. We were curious if, having all the data at our disposal, we could detect trends and get some insight into what and who’s being played.
Founded in 2010 in London,, Boiler Room has shows in around 100 cities worldwide and regularly hosts parties of genres spanning from industrial techno to hiphop and grime.
We sat down and did some digging into roughly 400 Boiler Room sets in order to do a quick scan through the trends from 2011 till today (Novemeber 2017).
Set lengths
Looking at Boiler Rooms fantastic live series, we have tracked 374 sets that account for over 5016 tracks, which makes it on average 13.4 tracks per set. It makes perfect sense as the average length of a Boiler Room is roughly 60 minutes.
Genres
Not surprisingly, techno and house are the dominating genres, making up a total of 57% of all the tracks.
Gender Diversity
Gender diversity in the electronic music scene is a frequently debated topic. Vice’s Thump did the math for 24 festivals in 2016 and came up with that festival lineups have an average of 20.4% female performers (ranging between 3.2% and 45%)
At Boiler Room, out of 335 Artists, 92.8% of Boiler Room’s guests were male performers, and only 6.87% were female. There was only one mixed performance (the Masomenos duo), which does not fall into either category.
Trends
Over time, techno tracks has had a fairly low share of the total tracks played in Boiler Room, with its peak before 2012 (40%). Since then, techno tagged tracks haven’t been the dominating genre. Techno makes for a total of 17%, the trend seems to be fairly steady. The year 2017, however, saw a slight increase in popularity of that genre in the renowned BR sets.
House music playback has been steadily increasing over time and now accounts for 32% of all the tracks at Boiler Room. The total average is 23.2%. House tracks are also played more frequently during the summer months than during winter.
Top Lists
The musical diversity of the Boiler Room events is unquestionable and that’s why we all love them. The results of our analysis have only confirmed it: the highest number of artist appearances at Boiler Room is 4 (yes! only). Here is a brief summary:
1st place: Disclosure (4 times)
2nd place: Frankie Knuckles, Jamie xx, Laurent Garnier, Catz ‘N Dogz, Lucy, Seth Troxler, Dubfire(3 times each)
3rd place: Rødhåd, Dasha Rush, Joseph Capriati (2 times each)
- including b2b sets, we are also probably missing a few events that are hidden in descriptions
Most Played Tracks
Here again Boiler Room does not fail to provide a huge diversity of music being played and a very low repetition rate of the tracks the artists present. Performers put a lot of effort in their sets to stay original. Note that New Order’s classic, Blue Monday, pops up as one of the most often played tracks :)
1st place: (3 plays)
DBX — Losing Control
- Anthony Parasole — Boiler Room, Dekmantel Festival, Amsterdam,
- Boys Noize — Boiler Room Berlin
- Tensnake — Boiler Room Berlin
Randomer — Bring
- Dubfire — Boiler Room,
- Bake — Boiler Room Glasgow — All Caps Takeover,
- Shed -Boiler Room Present Perfect Festival, St. Petersburg
New Order — Blue Monday
- Disclosure @ Boiler Room DJ Set at W Hotel,
- Derek Plaslaiko @ Boiler Room Berlin,
- Carl Cox & Nic Fanciulli @ Boiler Room Carl Cox & Friends Ibiza Villa
2nd place: (2 plays)
Psyk — Aumento
Cajmere, Dajae — Brighter Days (Underground Goodies Mix)
Emmanuel Top — Acid Phase
Mood II Swing — Move Me
Baikal — Pelican’s Flight
Kendrick Lamar — King Kunta
Pan Pot — Pot
Blawan — Passer By
Rampa — Necessity
Etapp Kyle — Ahora
over a 100 tracks, so we’re keeping that out. Heres a playlist.
Most Played Artists
Artists being played most is a bit of a tricky category as some of the artists play live sets and present their own tracks. Kendrick Lamar, for instance, comes up in the results since he performs a live show with only his own tracks, same with Mr G and Stephan Bodzin, Four Tet and Redshape. Architectural is not live but plays mostly his own productions. Hip-hop music also includes a lot of featured artists which account for a higher count.
Top:
Drake (28 times)
- RL Grime — Boiler Room, Epic B b2b Uninamise — Boiler Room New York,
- DJ Jazzy Jeff — Boiler Room What’s Brewing In Philadelphia,
- Baauer & RL Grime — Boiler Room Ray-Ban,
- Quantic — Boiler Room Los Angeles,
- Skrillex — IMS Asia-Pacific pres. OWSLA Shanghai, Boiler Room,,
- DJ Orgasmic — Boiler Room x Generator, Paris,
- RL Grime — Boiler Room Los Angeles, Residency,
- Kanye West & Flat White — Boiler Room,
- RL Grime & D33j & Nick Melons — Boiler Room Los Angeles (Red Bull Music Academy),
- Lefto — Boiler Room Brussels, Cubanisto,
- Craze — Boiler Room London, United
Mr. G (27 times)
- Derrick May vs Karim Sahraoui — Boiler Room Brussels,
- Eats Everything — Boiler Room Bristol DJ,
- Deetron — Boiler Room 021, Madrid,
- Move D b2b Jus-Ed — Boiler Room Berlin,
- Eats Everything — Boiler Room,
- Fred P — Boiler Room Cape Town — Stay True South Africa,
- Voigtmann — Boiler Room London,
- Marcel Fengler — Boiler Room Berlin (Studio Session),
- DJ Minx — Boiler Room Weekender, Lake Harmony, USA,
- Laurent Garnier — Boiler Room, Le Sucre Lyon,
Rest
Planetary Assault Systems (17 times)
Four Tet (17 times)
Armand Van Helden (16 times)
Machinedrum (15 times)
Cajmere (14 times)
Kanye West (14 times)
Joy Orbison (14 times)
Conclusion
House music is picking up in popularity. Tracks are very diverse and have a low overlap between sets. Popular club tracks, in turn, appear way less often in the sets at the Boiler Room events than anywhere else as artists invited to perform always aim for originality due to the reputation of BR. Nevertheless, while track originality is easily observable, the gender diversity among performing artists is still overall low at Boiler Room.
Refine Music
If you looking to discover electronic music Refine is an app that keeps track of whats being played around the web. Saving you time and effort to follow over a hundred electronic music labels as well as blogs and social media accounts
you can check us out here or download our iOS app here
Disclaimer
The results and conclusions is only drawn from the sets analyzed. There are many sets not represented in this study and it's therefore not representative of the entire catalog. Not all sets are complete with all tracks played. We can only discuss the output of the data collected.
Boiler Room and boilerroom.tv are in no way related to this post, we only use 3rd party references to collect the data.
A note on data: There are naming convention issues (and duplicates) when parsing this data from sets from around the web. They have therefore been grouped by date meaning any set played in the same date with a similar title a low Levenshtein distance) have been counted as one.
Bonus clip if you stayed around this long (because they’re still funny):
