Bass Squad: Undergrad Party Promoters Smash Onto New York's Nightlife Scene

In June 2011, a group of four NYU students decided to mark the end of their freshman year with an entrepreneurial concept that always sounds good on paper to a bunch of 19-year-olds: let's throw raging parties. Choosing the name Bass Squad, the crew entered the cutthroat world of New York City party promotion with no prior experience in concert booking or event management. Despite the disadvantage, they managed to book Dillon Francis for his first performance in Manhattan. It has now been two years since the company's inception and the boys of Bass Squad have hosted some of the most sought after acts in dance music and rap including Baauer, Disclosure, Flosstradamus, Joey Bada$$, and A$AP Rocky. Every Bass Squad event one-ups the previous one, and the members of the Squad themselves literally just turned old enough to legally drink at their own jams.

Graham Fortgang and Lenny Vidgen, the respective CEO and Creative Director of Bass Squad, grew up in Manhattan, and they attribute their success in part to their understanding of the city's ethos. "You can't represent New York's electronic music scene without New Yorkers," says the fast-talking Fortgang. They had been building a network of contacts since high school–attending shows, meeting DJs, and scoping out venue spaces. By the time Bass Squad threw their first concert, they already had a built-in audience that could populate the shows. Moreover, being hyperactive consumers of music has allowed Bass Squad to predict various artists' success months before they blew up online, including pre-"Harlem Shake" Baauer and LOL Boys when they were still a duo. The Squad knows what young people will pay money to see because they are their target audience.

Their first show hit capacity at 900 people–mostly high school friends returning from college–and it was a "complete shitshow" in terms of organization (think lots of teenagers in neon tanktops vomiting in an over-crowded space). Since then, the group has gotten extremely professional. In our interview, it sounded like they'd been trained by a PR veteran, tossing out hackneyed lines like "Our company is unique and raw" and "We're a close-knit family that works as a unit." Their professional moves seem to have paid off though; the squad (which has added member Alan Abbott) have attained capital to fund subsequent endeavors and even rolled out their own merchandise line, which Ellie Goulding and Skrillex have been seen sporting.

Bass Squad currently hosts a few different events, ranging from the low-key Sounds of New York, which features Bass Squad DJs alongside up-and-coming underground acts, to the mega-series Night Vision, a partnership between Bass Squad and Noise 212, a live-streaming radio show and interview series run by the equally young JP Solis. Night Vision events are typicaly bigger than the other Bass Squad events, and headliners in the past included A$AP-Rocky and Disclosure, the latter event taking place at the infamous Le Bain. The next installment of Night Vision is on May 12th, and the headliners will be announced on the day of the show in order to build hype.

Fortgang says there's no such thing as being "too young" to throw events this big. "I remember being a freshman at NYU and lowering my voice over the phone to someone so they thought I sounded older," he reveals. "Ultimately, if you act professional and have the funds and track record to back it up, including relevant media, then people want to do events with you." Now that these kids are legally allowed to host events, it's only a matter of time until they have an office and a handful of interns who may even be older than they are. "If I can wake up and cruise over to the Bass Squad office to book my favorite artists with my friends, then that's the fucking dream," said Fortgang. More info about the Squad can be found on their Twitter and Facebook page.