Boiler Room to Divide Broadcasts into Four Genre-Specific Channels

Changes are underway at Boiler Room. The popular live video broadcasting service, which recently announced its intention to better police its comments section and be more inclusive in its talent bookings, is dividing its video offerings into four channels determined by genre, according to Trax Mag.

Since its founding in 2010, Boiler Room has hosted hundreds of artists running the gamut of electronic music and beyond, including Disclosure, Skepta, Grimes, Anklepants, and The Black Madonna B2B Mike Servito. (A Guardian profile from 2015 cites stats upwards of 3.5 billion minutes' worth of uploaded music.) "I think we got to a point where we cover so many different music genres and there are so many people following us that we need to make distinctions in what we broadcast," lead programmer Gabriel Szatan told Trax Mag.

According to Boiler Room staffer Ahad Elley (aka Ahadadream), each channel will have a designated head. Channel 1, hosted by Elley, will focus on UK bass and grime; Channel 2, hosted by programmer and From Them Depths label boss Charles Drakeford, will lean more towards house and techno; Channel 3, hosted by editor-in-chief Errol Anderson, will be dedicated to hip-hop; and Channel 4, led by Szatan, will be an experimental mixed bag of rock, jazz, ambient, funk, and other styles that, in Elley's words, "do not really have their place in a club." Periodically, each channel leader will also host a round-up where they play records and discuss the goings-on in their assigned music realm.

"We want to act as guides, like when you listen to Benji B's shows for electronic music, Gilles Perterson's ones for the new world music and jazz, or Mary Anne Hobbs for bass music," Szatan tells Trax Mag. "What made Boiler Room so unique at first when Tristan, Bradley and Nic introduced the performance—besides them having the best DJs in the world coming to perform—was that it was just a group of friends with a camera who were MCs for their own shows. It was enjoyable and we want to keep that aspect as much as possible. For that reason we try to put forward the faces of the Boiler Room team."

Updates are soon to come on the official website, but the change has already taken place on YouTube, though it's not too drastic: the account itself will stay singular, and the channel number will be included in the video title. For example, watch a Channel 4 roundup with Szatan and Project Pablo below.