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Boomrat: The Real Story Behind Dance's Hottest New Music Platform

How two kids took their idea from the dorm room to the big room

Electronic music culture has become well acquainted with tales of quick ascents by youthful faces. That said, the story of Boomrat is more Silicon Valley than festival main stage. Launched last week, Boomrat is a music discovery platform that aggregates music from both electronically-inclined blogs and curated playlists; it fits somewhere between HypeMachine, Pandora, and your hip friend telling you what's up.

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The idea for the platform was hatched by Andrew Silberstein and Ariel Lee, both now 23, after they met in the freshman dorms at the University of Southern California. What began as a heady notion between hopeful entrepreneurs was catapulted to baller status when the project was acquired by Live Nation earlier this year.

I met the duo in the most auspicious of circumstances, tumbling into a helicopter in Las Vegas headed towards EDC. It was immediately apparent that they weren't your average music app techies; their ambitions were loftier and more immediate. But how did they go from a dorm room to the big room in such a short time?

The whole story starts way back. Both Lee and Silberstein exhibited entrepreneurial tendencies and music nerdism early in life. "I used to have a cotton candy business," Silberstein explains in his typically measured and relaxed fashion as we lounge atop Soho House in Hollywood. "I was 11 at the time. I used to cater parties out of an industrial cotton candy machine. It's, like, in my dark past. I was serving it at soccer games in my hometown and then it got shut down."

What drove him to hustle at such a young age? "I was obsessed with music and I really wanted CDs and couldn't afford them, he says with a nonchalant grin. "I had to figure out a way to get them."

Lee's case is equally as intrepid, but way more salacious: "When I was fourteen, I started doing events in Hong Kong at night clubs… illegally… on school nights," she says, slowing down towards the end of the statement, emphasizing the badassery of the whole thing. Of the two, she's the whip, somewhere between affable and steely. The pair make a congruous team, both admitted music obsessives, glued to their inboxes and effortlessly at ease with each other and the weight of expectation that surrounds them now.

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The nascent version of Boomrat was honed at USC. "We were in entrepreneurial school together and there was this competition," Lee explains. "We pitched a really early version of Boomrat. It was, like, an artist incubator. We came in second and used the money to get this tiny little office in the arts district. It was literally three of us sitting up close, facing each other around one tiny table for hours on end."

The turning point came pretty soon after that. Lee continues, "We went to the EDMbiz conference in Vegas, and we saw [WME's Head of Music] Mark Geiger speak on a panel, and Mark was like, 'the future of EDM is gonna be something digital, it's gonna aggregate, and it's gonna filter content.' When we heard that, we were like, 'Oh my God, this is it'. We dropped everything else we were working on and just focused on this one thing. We ended up getting connected to this guy Peter Sussman who ended up managing us and connected us to Mark Geiger. From then on, Mark kind of became our mentor."

In less than a year, Lee and Silberstein's baby of a startup, Boomrat, was acquired by Live Nation.

"They were really expanding their dance music division and a digital component just made sense," says Silberstein of the music industry behemoth's acquisition. Lee expounds further: "I think Live Nation realized that if they really wanna make a difference in the dance music community, they need to have something that is built from the grassroots and actually built by fans."

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They weren't the only ones to hold that notion. The duo got advice from Insomniac C.E.O Pasquale Rotella along the way. "We talked to him a lot," says Silberstein. "He's been in the scene for so long and his biggest concern has been not letting dance music become overly corporate and maintaining the artistry and integrity. I think he saw that in us early on."

Live Nation and rival SFX have been in a blow-by-blow slugging match for the past couple years. When SFX purchased Beatport for a rumored $50 million in 2013, a response by Live Nation was a matter of time. With Boomrat, they're able to grow the platform from the ground up as they strengthen the feedback loop between Insomniac, HARD, and the myriad other electronically-inclined properties that may join the fore in the future.

Since Boomrat's launch, comparisons to other music platforms have been plentiful, but Silberstein ain't sweatin' it. "We used to use Hype Machine all the time to discover music, but it became less and less dance-focused. Pandora, Spotify, are great radio station applications, but they're missing the human element. Nothing can replace that. The goal was to cherrypick the best elements and then tailor it to dance culture and I think we've done that."

Even in it's early stages, the usability of the platform is obvious. The trending chart houses tracks we've seen spike all over the blog-o-sphere in the past couple of days, the playlists are full of new discoveries and feature exclusives from the likes of Curses and Booka Shade, and I've personally never seen so many Essential Mixes sitting in one place ready for exploration.

Despite the big money backing, the focus of Boomrat's discovery seems to be markedly underground. As Silberstein explains, it's by design: "We started listening to pop artists. I remember listening to David Guetta, y'know, and then slowly you start discovering the layers of dance music and going deeper and deeper. It seems a lot of our peers are going through the same discovery process and the goal of the platform is the curate the kind of music that we think will be helpful in that."

Check it out: Boomrat.com

More on the business of music:
EDM is Richer than 43 Countries (and Other Fun Facts From the IMS Annual Business Report)
How an EDM Conglomerate if Trying to Rule Dance Music

Jemayel STILL loves David Guetta (No he doesn't) - @JemayelK