Responding to criticism and calls for boycotts, Boiler Room released an official statement which disavows the private equity firm that owns them.
The statement was unsigned and posted on the company’s socials, indicating that it’s an official statement from the company. The statement disavows their current ownership by KKR, a private equity giant which purchased Boiler Room with the assets of ticketing agency DICE in January 2025.
Just who authored the statement — which repeatedly uses words like “we” and “our” — is unclear, but it appears to speak on behalf of “the brand.”
KKR “has investments that categorically do not align with our values,” the statement reads. “No Boiler Room staff at any level held ownership or voting rights in the company and had no control over the sale. We are also unable to divest because we have no say in our ownership.”
This is where we are in 2025. We are being asked to measure the sincerity of political positions held by an underground dance music brand owned by a private equity company worth more than half a trillion dollars.
KKR has numerous healthcare, pharma, infrastructure, utilities and information services companies in a portfolio worth more than half of a trillion dollars ($637.6 billion under management in 2024). Among them Israeli companies like Global Technical Realty, which says it creates “built-to-suit data centers for hyperscalers.” Pro-Palestinian artists and members of the dance music scene have criticized the sale and stated they would not play for Boiler Room so long as revenue would flow to KKR.
Despite their discomfort with KKR’s business, the Boiler Room statement is quick to assure that “no investor, past or present, has ever influenced our output.”
And after lamenting that Boiler Room has no say in the company’s ownership, the statement also confidently predicts that “this will never change.”
Let’s take a beat here and recap this so far:
A statement was issued on behalf of a brand, against the brand’s ownership which, nevertheless, does not and will not interfere in the independence of the brand they own. Apparently a “brand” can now form its own opinions and personality, independent of its owner. The view of this brand should be respected as sovereign, meaningful and sincere.
The brand’s owner may be engaged in and profiting from investments from which the brand claims to be diametrically opposed. The brand’s own revenue also benefits the owner doing this stuff too. But the brand wants you to know it really doesn’t like it.
This is where we are in 2025. We are being asked to measure the sincerity of political positions held by an underground dance music brand owned by a private equity company with half a trillion dollars under management. You just can’t be too cynical about this world anymore.
I have no inside knowledge who wrote the Boiler Room statement, but I would guess that it was done by a consultant on behalf of the brand with the support of management. No “little guy” wrote this and posted it up on official brand accounts, with the official brand logo.
I would also guess that despite our assumptions, the statement was also not released to protect the brand of Boiler Room itself. It reads like the kind of thing issued by a corporation to satisfy the anxieties of a third party — perhaps an artist worried about their fanbase turning on them if they play a Boiler Room event. With this letter in hand, the considerate artist (who have their own “brand” to worry about) can now take the gig, cash the check and answer no more questions — just point to this clusterfuck of PR messaging and wait for the news cycle to move on.
Boiler Room has been cosplaying as a grassroots movement and adopting the language of community activism almost from the beginning. Even under its original owners, Boiler Room was backed by UK venture capital firms. There were no “good old days” — just days when most people didn’t know any better.
Is that too cynical? Again, I don’t think you can be too cynical. Not when brands are writing open letters pleading for you to understand that their intentions are pure.
The intention, in this case, is that Boiler Room’s brand remains “unapologetically pro-Palestine.” And statement concludes with flurry of a holistic language, claiming that a streaming platform and event brand is “led by the communities we serve” to “empower the artists, DJs, creative minds, risk takers and community leaders.”
This bit dates from the old, pre-KKR brand playbook. Boiler Room has been cosplaying as a grassroots movement and adopting the language of community activism almost from the beginning. Even under its original owners, Boiler Room was backed by UK venture capital firms. There were no “good old days” — just days when most people didn’t know any better.
Years before KKR entered the picture, even before it was purchased by DICE, Boiler Room had already evolved into a full-fledged party-brand-for-hire, leveraging the data vacuumed up from their listeners to hard-sell local promoters on paying “brand fee/royalties” in exchange for pasting the BR logo on their event. Back in 2019, this controversial (and to fans, still curiously unknown) business model was revealed after Boiler Room’s outreach to Aaron Clark from Pittsburgh’s Honcho and Hot Mass parties with an offer to brand events as Boiler Room parties in exchange for cash.
There wasn’t much reason to be cynical before then — not much more than a hunch. After that pivot, after DICE, after being the latest “underground brand” to be wholly owned by private equity, there’s no good reason to be anything but cynical now.
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