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This article was taken from the April 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Squashed into a room in Hampstead in London are roughly 100 strangers. Many live a long way away -- Tel Aviv, Buenos Aires and Los Angeles. The one thing they have in common: a love of undiscovered music. "The kind of person who shows up at a gig and doesn't know who's playing is a really passionate and switched-on fan," says Rafe Offer, the London-based cofounder of secret-gigs startup Sofar Sounds. The Hampstead event, held in January (the band: Khushi), was the 587th living-room gig put on by Sofar since launching in 2010. Just like the acts, the audience is curated, based on their passion for little-known music, and is not told until the night before where the gig will be. The music itself is a secret until played. "We are now in living rooms in 41 cities and aim to do 100 gigs per month in the next year," says Offer.
From Minneapolis to Melbourne, local Sofar (short for "songs from a room") teams pick four acts for each show; gigs are free but donations go towards creating hi-res videos for the bands. The startup, which raised £150,000 from early-stage investors including Index Ventures and former Last.fm chairman Stefan Glaenzer, will be using the money to expand digitally. The aim: to be the go-to music-discovery place via sites such as YouTube, SoundCloud and Spotify. "We're planning a mini-deal where all the content we film in Scandinavia would be exclusive to Spotify," says Offer.
Sofar's other cofounder, Rocky Start, says they are also building their own digital gateway over the next year. "You'd have to be a subscriber to our app to apply to events and stream music from shows direct to your phone," says Start. "We are the opposite of Spotify in that we don't want to deliver everything, only a selection as dictated by our community. If you want to find out what music is cool in any city in the world, you'd come to us."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
