u/moonkiska

I'm in west/central Pennsylvania so there isn't a whole lot going on. A "club" here consists of a bar that has room for a dance floor and our music scene generally consists of classic rock cover bands. In other words, if I wanted to DJ something besides a wedding or birthday party, I was going to have to host the event myself.

I put out some feelers and heard back from a number of potential venues. I chose one and we locked in a date. The owner said that he'd pay me $100 since it was his speakers and lights (I only needed my controller and laptop), I wasn't well-known, and he didn't know what kind of crowd I would bring. I countered that I would market it and bring the crowd but I wanted all of the door cover money and he'd keep his bar/food money. That kept it simple and easy. At the end of the night, he was HYPE about the crowd (said just under 100 people) and said that he had never paid a DJ this much.

Anyway, I wanted to put together an Emo Rave and "tour it" around the local area. Friday was the first one and it was a banger.

Unfortunately, I had to build the socials. I knew my DJ name wasn't going to move the needle locally so I made a new account dedicated to the Emo Rave and started posting low hanging fruit content like misheard lyrics, memes, nostalgia bait, etc. then I re-focused the content to the event. I made graphics on Canva and edited viral videos to fit the Emo Rave event and scheduled them out.

In my experience:

Facebook was the main driver. It's still pretty heavily used in our area for local events so that helped with the local outreach and actually brought users to the door.
TikTok helped a little bit locally, with a younger crowd, however, the algorithm also pushed content way beyond the local area.
TikTok is also where the Under 21 crowd found me. The plus side is that the Under 21 crowd is excited for the next one that is more age-friendly.
Instagram is a struggle. I don't really understand why content performs so differently on TikTok vs Instagram but I'm stuck at like 30 followers on Instagram while Facebook and TikTok are gaining some traction and over 100. (I'm aware these are low numbers in comparison but I think are decent relative to the area).
YouTube is basically useless. I'll host some promo mixes there for convenience but actively maintaining it is more work than it's worth at this point in the journey.
I did spend $20 on ads/boosts at both TikTok and Meta to see what happened. An extremely low spend so probably a waste of money on a pointless experiment. I don't think I'll try it again though since there is a little buzz forming locally.

As for the actual set, the Emo Rave was billed as 3 hours from 9pm-12am. The bar owner said, if the people were still dancing, "please don't say good night." So, I utilized that as if we may not have permission to go later but if the energy was right, we're just going to keep partying and "fuck an end time."

I didn't plan a set. I had 4 songs lined up to start. I was viewing it like any other concert I've been to where they start their sets with bangers right out of the gate. This is not the way for the local music scenes lol. In the future, I will start the night off slower and build up as opposed to rocking right out of the gate.

The first hour I was admittedly pretty nervous. People were not interested in dancing and just kind of hanging out, so I pivoted to playing some burner songs while people had some drinks and loosened up. After about 45-60 min, the floor started to liven up. Flow stars, LED hula hoops, and other flow dancing props started to come out. Things started to pick up here...it's SO MUCH easier when you have a crowd to feed off of.

I remembered reading advice here about the concept of flipping the floor and not going at 100% the entire time. That was solid advice. I rated my library in VDJ, using the stars to indicate energy level. I would work my way through 1-5 and just continue gauging the floor and determine if I needed to go up or down a star or two. I was nervous of running out of music (although I had plenty), not blending the singalong tracks with the rave tracks evenly enough, or accidentally playing an artist too frequently (ie. Paramore or Fall Out Boy).

At midnight, I played my last track, an edit of "I Believe You But My Tommy Gun Don't" and RIOT's "Overkill." I looped the guitar towards the end of "I Believe You..." and got on the mic and said that this is where I'd usually wrap up the set but if the energy is right, we're going to keep going. This had everyone sing that final part which lead into the end of Overkill and it worked perfectly. I got on the mic, said they were fucking awesome and the party was going to continue."

Around 12:45-1am, as people were kind of filtering out, I started to switch up the genre a bit but kept the rave vibe. Ended up playing until about 1:45am. Bars close at 2am in Pennsylvania.

Overall, the event was a success. Been receiving a ton of love from people on Facebook saying how great it was. Also heard some murmuring that some bands/DJs were talking some shit before the event even started. The assumption is that they're upset by the buzz and turnout. I don't know nor really care to entertain it. I only acknowledge it because people always say that haters are an indicator of success.

There are a number of venues that want me to come through. My concern now is that I won't be able to pull it off twice or that I will burn the locals out on the novelty of the Emo Rave so I need to make sure the timing and rotation of location is right.

Ultimately, it was one of the top nights of my life.

Westmont Indoor Golf Y2K Drink Menu

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First Set Recap - An Emo Rave in Pennsyltuckey

Emo Rave @ Funky Claud's Altoona