gel on taking back control in London’s grassroots music scene
a club commons in practice
~ FIRST SOME BITS ~
✶ A nu mix to listen to while you read! My mix for forecast, ‘deep moving dancefloor’, recorded live at one of my favourite venues, spanner’s, is full of downtempo, off-kilter, hazy vocal fantasies. (thanks Oopie and Jo for letting me play shoegaze in the club)
✶ Dissonant wrote a review of my new book Club Commons! It is so inspiring to hear how the ideas in the book are landing in different contexts. The stories I chose in the book are mainly in London, because I find it easier to write about things I am closer to, but I mention in there that you will no doubt have your own stories that may have well taken their place in those pages. This review connects the idea of a club commons to some gorgeous Brussels-based examples. Thank you Dissonant for expanding the book <3
✶ Equity launched the Nightlife Network and are holding open meetings for DJs to unionise. I joined their panel with other nightlife workers to discuss working together to improve conditions.
✶ I had the honour of speaking with one of my favourite club culture writers, and all round inspiration Ed Gillett (author of Party Lines) for his show on Rinse FM. listen back here.
✶ ex.sses and myself are heading to SHEFFIELD on JUNE 6TH to collaborate with queer members-led raucous community space GUT LEVEL for a club commons workshop + party
✶ A feminist library collaboration is coming, tba June 26th
✶ V IMPORTANT SAVE THE DATE - June 13th is the NO BORDERS FAIR at Pelican House which will host THE FIRST NIGHTLIFE SOLIDARITY TOWN HALL. These are open forums for any and all nightlife workers/ folk to come together, discuss shared issues, and strategies for solidarity, one year on from KKR/ Superstruct boycotts. SEE U THERE.
~ now to the juicy bit - on ticketing platforms and grassroots culture rising up ~
In the 1970s, the Lesbian Alliance of St Louis in Missouri, USA provided communal resources such as an auto-repair shop, a bookstore, a coffeehouse, counselling and legal services because, in their words, “we must create our own lesbian-identified structures.” Thanks to Amrit Randhawa/ Taxi Cab Industries, a font used by the alliance adorns the cover of my new book Club Commons, celebrating a long history of people creating their own economies and infrastructures in queer nightlife.
While on the surface, a bunch of spanner-wielding, grease-knuckled mid-western dykes from the 1970s might not appear to have much in common with today’s London’s grassroots music scene, ultimately, the principle of people having a say in the spaces that matter to them is one that resonates across space and time. And that’s exactly what new London-based grassroots, not-for-profit ticketing and events listing platform gel is doing. In a time where grassroots music is increasingly encroached on by corporates and private equity, gel is doing vital work.
This year, a jury in the USA ruled that Ticketmaster and Live Nation officially have an illegal monopoly over the live events and ticketing industry, and were also overcharging fans. Given both platforms also operate in the UK, it’s no surprise that a fan-led review of live and electronic music for the UK Parliament showed an “ongoing dissatisfaction with ticketing platforms”, in an environment where “the biggest issue facing live music [...] is the monopoly of companies such as Ticketmaster and Live Nation.” It was reported that the ticketing process “was exploitative and lacked transparency”, while “pricing, availability and resale practices can exclude some audiences, including those on lower incomes or with specific access requirements.”
According to the Music Venue Trust, the grassroots events ecosystem as a whole suffers from “critically low” profit margins (despite an increase in audience attendance), landlordism via rent hikes, enormous property costs and bills, a loss of venues and a weakening touring infrastructure outside major cities. Even the £1 ticket levy designed to address some of these issues by redistributing £1 from every major music event back into the grassroots, has not been left unscathed. It was recently reported that over £1.2 million of the £6 million raised so far has been “eaten up” by the Treasury via VAT charges, with the LIVE Trust calling it “frustrating that unnecessary VAT charges mean a significant chunk of this money is being diverted away from the grassroots.” These factors mean that today we have ‘underground’ music events backed by private equity, where your ticket money gets funnelled into things like… oh I don’t know, Israeli Data Centres and the dispossession of Indigenous land in Canada, as well as the increasing disempowerment of workers on the ground.
Ticketing in the grassroots music scenes is not simply a financial transaction. It is about accessing “shared social and cultural experiences.” And these experiences are vital for broader movement building. In a booklet thinner than my smallest little finger called What Is Anarchist Music?, Ruud Noys observes how music with a seemingly anarchist aesthetic can in fact be produced and packaged by the very corporations that anarchism opposes. The booklet emphasises the cultural dimension of revolutionary struggle, played out through music and dancehalls, while also insisting that the processes behind the music and the events are themselves sites of potential transformation. Here, production and distribution are “key concerns” in any analysis of the radical transformative potential of music, and being DIY and independent is “a form of cultural production that can turn passive consumers into producers in their own right”.
On the question of grassroots groups ‘selling out’ to corporates (which these days tends to be derided as outdated, and has unfortunately been more positively re-spun in neoliberal parlance as ‘getting that bag’), the booklet prompts us to imagine a different set of choices altogether: “Imagine if these bands instead used their popularity to strengthen independent labels and their distributors, independent promoters and community spaces, zines and the whole punk underground.” Swap the band for the DJ, the promoter, the venue operator - or in this case, the ticketing platform - and you arrive at gel: a platform that represents what Noys calls an “alternative economy, organised along ethics and values distinct from the mainstream corporate/capitalist industry.”
All that to say - how we organise our events, make decisions and reroute the financial flows they generate, whether through buying tickets or performing on the night, are all stops on our road to a more sustainable and ethical music ecosystem. When community spaces are replaced by commercial venues, when our music spaces no longer belong to those who make them move, gel is doing the important work of creating alternatives by and for the people who bring them to life.
Some of gel’s founding principles include financial transparency, grassroots curation, and community responsibility. All of which sing to what a club commons is about, and why I was so thrilled to see it come to life. If a queer club commons is about people taking back control of the spaces that matter to them, creating their own community infrastructures, then it is also about shifting what ‘queer’ means; wrestling it away from a consumer category and towards a verb, an action, a way of disrupting the current broken order of things. If we are to take a leaf from the lesbian alliance of St Louis, I’d say this sounds pretty gay to me, and you know I mean that as the highest compliment.
I caught up with the brilliant gel team (Ben, Joe, Sara and Finn) for a rich conversation about using the platform, the slipperiness of the meaning of ‘grassroots’, staying connected to the community you serve, resisting corporate ownership, and why cultivating grassroots platforms is a huge move in a compromised system.
And of course, if you haven’t already - head over to gel for your weekend plans. {and keep your eyes peeled + hearts open for our silly summer london ~\\LILITH//~ party which will be listed there}
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How did the idea for gel first come about?
Ben: In March 2025, Ed Holloway (architect and co-founder of Beep Studio) and I set up a group responding to the relative lack of collective organising between different grassroots operators in London. The group brings together a range of different voices including grassroots venue owners, promoters, artists, activists and curators. My own involvement came out of 15+ years working as a musician, my academic research on nightlife and urban space, and my love of London’s smaller and weirder dance floors. Initially, the group was open-ended and loosely-defined, leaving room for its direction to be shaped from the needs of its members.
After a series of monthly meetings, it emerged that ticketing and the dominance of RA was a core concern shared by many of the group’s members and so we began to explore the possibility of developing an alternative to the existing corporate platforms. In late summer 2025, a few of us split off from the group to focus on the development of the listings and ticketing project, but the larger collective meetings continue to play a vital advisory function, and ensure that any new ideas are rooted in and accountable to the needs of grassroots operators.
Joe: I was running events and disappointed with the options for ticketing available, particularly the financial arrangement and user experience of RA. As a software engineer, I was working freelance for the first time and found myself with a lot of free time waiting for clients to respond. I had also been looking for a big software project of my own to get stuck into.
In June 2025, when planning my October event, I started building a custom event website which would also handle all the ticketing and payment things as well. Very quickly I realised that what I was building could (and should) be made available for other promoters and venues to use as well. My plan was to just build the thing myself and gradually get my friends running events to use it as well, then utilise my (fairly limited) connections with venues etc to try and get more people on board. In hindsight, to do this alone would have been faaaar more challenging than I thought at the time...
I was introduced to Ben and Ed’s group almost by chance after chatting with Conrad Pack at a party and realising that we were both potentially working on the same thing. So I went along to some meetings and the ball began to roll from there. At the point I joined, they had recently spoken to Harry Wiles from Headfirst in Bristol, and were unsure how to proceed with finding the right people to build it at a realistic cost, and how to fund this development without going down the common route of financial investment – which would defeat the underlying aims of the project.
Sara: I had been invited by Ben to the grassroots music group after he’d seen a talk of mine at Auto Italia. I was particularly interested in finding new models that might facilitate interdisciplinary and experimental practice, as this was my main interest while curating the live programme at ICA. I was disheartened by the general lack of space for experimental work in music, visual arts and dance, and was really missing this. I had no idea it was going to come in the form of a listings and ticketing platform, and I am really grateful to Ben, Joe and Finn for being such a solid group to work with, all so thoughtful and open.
Finn: While working at Venue MOT, I had been disheartened by the amount of times promoters suffered financial losses that significantly affected their ability to put on events. Lucien, MOT’s venue programmer, had told me about HeadFirst’s model and how well it worked in Bristol; it sounded like something that London needed. A year later Ed invited me to the grassroots collective group, and as members spoke about issues facing venues and promoters, the biggest problem was money. As this became a gloomy topic that seemed unchangeable, someone (most likely Mike Levitt from Ormside Projects) suggested a ticketing platform for independent venues and promoters. Over multiple meetings this topic kept occurring and it felt like there was enough momentum to make this a real project.
Ben took the lead and started organising ways to make the platform come to life as it required more time than the group meetings could provide. Sara, Ben, and myself started work on how a platform should benefit grassroots communities. As the foundations of the platform were established, the largest task remained development. Mike Levitt mentioned Joe had been working on a platform, and shortly after we had a meeting where we each shared ideas for our ideal platform. It was clear our values and intentions were the same, so naturally we started working together.
How are you defining ‘grassroots’ and why?
We take the MVT definition as a starting point, though we support all kinds of grassroots arts and events, along with music. The MVT has a helpful framework for conceptualising things, and we draw on its cultural, social and economic aspects, as well as the simple but useful ‘elephant test’ – if most people think a venue is grassroots, then it probably is... Most crucially, we require that venues and promoters are independently funded i.e. they are not backed by brands or corporations, nor entangled in private equity or venture capital. If there are questions around the transparency of their funding then this is also a bit of a deal-breaker.
We support venues which prioritise a cultural and community focus above commercial imperatives. These venues form the backbone of London’s wider cultural ecosystem, and are most vulnerable to the challenges presented by rising costs, restrictive licensing legislation, and the skewed allocation of public funds.
We want to offer support to the spaces and events that need it most, many of which are ill-served by the larger platforms. We want gel to be a home for the lower-capacity events that get buried in the depths of RA listings, as well as the kinds of weird, multidisciplinary cultural forms that fall between definitions of nightlife, live music and art.
‘Grassroots’ is inherently complicated and slippery to define – institutional spaces and specific events at larger commercial venues undeniably play a role in the grassroots cultural ecosystem. We have already had to make a few tricky curatorial decisions in terms of what is featured on gel, but ultimately, the clearer we can make our values and identity, the better we will be able to support grassroots operators longer-term.
How does gel differ from other ticketing platforms?
On the financial side, the key difference is that we do not have any investors, share-holders, or any other kind of backers that may try to exert any influence over the company’s direction.
We are registered as a Community Interest Company (CIC) - this is sort of half way between a charity and a regular company. We can generate profit and (hopefully, eventually) pay the people working on it, but any surplus income that we generate has to be reinvested into the ongoing development of gel, or the wider grassroots cultural community. This financial arrangement gives us total control over gel and its direction, however it does mean that the four of us are all working on a volunteer basis at the moment.
In terms of operations and structure, we still operate in a fairly casual way as it is early days. We have relatively defined roles covering software engineering, operations, finances and curation, but there is a fair bit of overlap, and when it comes to decision making we basically just take a relaxed democratic approach, chatting over whatsapp/zoom calls/celebratory dinners. We have a set of guiding principles, summarised on the about us section of our website, and all decisions we make must satisfy our values and serve the communities that we represent first and foremost.
In terms of the platform itself, we are currently just a listings and tickets service. We have plans to publish some editorial style content but this would more likely be in the form of mailing lists, curated selections of events, short custom write-ups for events, rather than full-scale journalistic pieces – for now. As a not-for-profit, any editorial aspects to gel would be divorced from the promotional imperatives that guide much music and arts journalism.
As we are here to serve grassroots culture, there is an informal vetting process for events submitted to gel. This means that unlike existing ticketing platforms, you can’t just upload any event and guarantee it will be listed. Most of the time, this is a simple decision as to whether something fits our definition of grassroots culture. When it feels like more of a grey area submission, we will do a little more research into a venue / promoter if required, and come to a decision as a group.
Also crucial to our project – gel operates as a platform that can hold more complex, hybrid formats, work that moves between disciplines, resists easy classification, and brings together different artistic, social, and cultural practices. This allows for events that might not comfortably sit within conventional programming and listings structures, creating space for more experimental and cross-cutting approaches.
What does using gel mean in practical terms for audiences, promoters, venues and artists?
There are a few different factors here that we hope work together in harmony, benefiting the whole ecology of club goers, promoters, artists and venues:
Cheaper booking fees – a flat rate of 6% (or 35p for tickets £5 and under) – which saves audiences money and (hopefully) encourages them to buy advance tickets more often.
Curated listings which help audiences build the confidence and trust to try out new events and venues.
Cross-pollination of grassroots cultural forms (including nightlife, live music, performance, visual arts, workshops, poetry, talks etc) which might not otherwise be presented in a similar space – connecting and growing different audiences.
A focused and easily navigable user interface, spotlighting event flyers, and making it equally easy to find something specific or browse for something unknown.
Quick payouts to promoters with the ability to access some funds before an event starts.
Being part of a community and knowing that all money generated from selling tickets on gel will stay within the community, rather than being used to satisfy outside investors or shareholders.
For a promoter or venue, there are two ways to list an event at the moment:
Via the public listings form https://gel.now/submit-event - this doesn’t require an account or any admin access. You input the details, we review it, then publish it if it’s a good fit. We’d also encourage anyone to submit events they’re excited about on this form, spread the word about things you’re planning to go to!
For anyone wishing to sell tickets and manage their own events, they’ll want to request admin access. If the promoter or venue is already listed on gel, they can do so via this form. https://admin.gel.now/request-access If not, they can get in touch with us at hello@gel.now - if they’re a good fit, we’ll get them set up and from there they’ll have full autonomy over managing their events and ticket sales.
If you are a venue or promoter interested in using gel, just get in touch and we’ll help facilitate your move – we’re more than happy to list events that are not using gel to sell tickets, as long as they’re the right fit. We are here to support grassroots operators, not to generate money at any cost.
Don’t hesitate to get in touch just because you’ve already started selling tickets elsewhere – you can easily include an external ticket url on your gel event page and keep your existing ticket setup.
We’re seeing a few promoters do a split ticket allocation, so they can maximise their audience and use gel in a sort of trial manner before switching fully. This is absolutely fine too and we anticipate this being necessary during the transitional period as gel gains more recognition. We have no intention to replicate the exclusivity contracts used by many existing platforms.
For audiences, buying a ticket through gel means:
Lower ticket fees.
Knowledge that your fee is not being siphoned out of the grassroots economy.
A sense that buying a ticket can function as a form of community participation, rather than just a simple financial transaction.
An option to make extra financial contributions directly to venues or to gel.
A smooth user experience.
We can’t offer the 24/7 customer support of a multinational ticketing platform, but we try to make up for it with a more personal service!
What does corporate ownership and private equity in grassroots culture mean for the people and spaces gel is trying to serve?
When these types of organisations move into grassroots culture, they are never doing it out of genuine passion or a desire to sustain culture. It is always motivated by profit, and in some cases functions as a way to wash their own reputation with the credibility that culture provides. In this sense, it is ultimately an extractive relationship.
Although grassroots organisations may initially be offered a lifeline or growth opportunity by investors, such involvements fundamentally transfer a significant amount of agency from the grassroots organisation to the external company. This has a wide range of negative effects – unless protections are in place (which they often are not).
This can manifest itself in many ways – decisions over what events can run and how they can operate, decisions over which artists can perform or how much artists can be paid, where the profit of an event gets directed to, or what happens when events don’t make any profit. All of these decisions can and likely will be distorted due to outside influence from an organisation whose sole purpose is to generate profit and appease shareholders.
Things take an even more unsavoury turn when PE firms with misaligned politics recognise an opportunity. The Superstruct/KKR fiasco was a perfect example of the events themselves losing agency over their owners and funding sources, finding themselves inextricably associated with the genocidal military industrial complex, and facing mass boycotts. It’s possible and even likely that the original people behind some of these events may be appalled by their new owners’ politics, but having taken the money they were powerless to do anything about it.
All of this is to emphasise that a more sustainable model is needed, where grassroots organisations can exist and survive longer term without needing to work with VC or PE firms. gel aims to be a step in that direction.
How might you guard against the drift of platforms from grassroots origins to corporate dependency?
How to actually guard against this pattern is a more difficult question. Here are a few ideas that might help prevent or reduce the impact of corporate ownership more broadly, as well as our own approach at gel:
Better knowledge of and access to funding opportunities that do not involve investment and transfer of ownership (e.g. Arts Council England or charity-based). In part, this is about expanding definitions of culture and public value, but it is also about education and spreading awareness. Many grassroots cultural operators and producers are unaware of the funding opportunities available to them, or lack the resources and expertise to win grants.
Some kind of public rescue fund that could be used instead of taking investment.
A better understanding of the longer-term implications of accepting investment. Grassroots communities did an excellent job of organising against SuperStruct/KKR last year which definitely helped raise a lot of awareness, and anything which can make this kind of boycott action feel more effective is extremely helpful.
A stronger community in general with engaged audiences and a more sustainable circular economy should help prevent grassroots organisations from being in a position to need or take corporate money.
In the case of grassroots organisers who are already partnered with PE/VC money, there could be better government policy to protect smaller entities from losing their agency or from further unexpected changes of ownership.
At gel, it has been important to ensure that our values and goals were as clear and well-defined as possible from the start, and our CIC designation is one way of safeguarding our not-for-profit status.
Platforms like Boiler Room were founded with cultural rather than ethical or political goals, whereas our anti-corporate, independent and community-oriented ethos guides everything that we do. Without this ethos, gel is nothing!
Our own individual involvement in grassroots culture, and ongoing participation in the grassroots nightlife collective provides us with a very immediate understanding of how our actions and decisions impact the wider community. Maintaining close relationships with venues, promoters, and nightlife workers holds us accountable and will safeguard the purpose of the platform.
If gel sustains as long as we hope it will, it might become important for us to create further legal protections within our company structure to ensure that independence survives any possible change of personnel.
Why is financial transparency important?
In a world where grassroots events and organisations are struggling to survive across the board, the best thing we can do is be clear about where money is going. Clearly there is often still a lot of money in events, with income arising from ticket and drinks sales, and outgoings covering anything from artist fees, transport and accommodation costs, venue hire fees – and on the venue side their rent, staff, and utility costs. If there is a lot of money in circulation but promoters and venues continue to struggle, then it must be asked – where is all this money going? Lack of transparency also decreases trust in a system, which over time, makes people less willing to participate. The ethos of financial transparency attempts to respond to these issues, and in an ideal world it would be applied at every level:
Promoters and booking agents being transparent about their costs and revenue.
Performers being transparent about their fees and expenses.
Venues being transparent about their operating costs and hire fees.
Ticket platforms being transparent about the money they raise from fees, and how they spend it.
As well as holding up our end of the bargain on the ticket platform side, we aim to encourage those using the platform to provide as much transparency as possible around their own finances. In the future we’ll be looking at publishing some tools and advice for this, and working with some promoters / organisations who are already doing this, so that we can offer a guideline approach.
What are some challenges you faced when trying to set up a new platform?
Coming up with a name was probably the number one challenge! Once most of the software was ready, our values were well defined and we had a rough plan, it ended up being the final piece of the puzzle and we were stuck on a name for a while.
Other than that, there have been challenging moments in terms of time and workload – all of us have (multiple!) other jobs and we were fortunate that a couple of us had a window of freer time to dedicate to the final stages of development and initial launch. The fact that none of us rely on gel for our income (and quite possibly never will!) presents its own challenges, but also gives us the flexibility to prioritise our core aims and values over financial incentives. In this sense, gel operates in a similar manner to many of the grassroots venues and artists that we support.
Are there other models, in nightlife or beyond, that gel is drawing inspiration from?
The most obvious comparison is to Headfirst in Bristol, in fact a common response we get when explaining gel is ‘London has always needed its own Headfirst’. There are some differences of course, but as an example of a sustainable, community-focused and financially transparent events platform, Headfirst is a key inspiration for sure. If we can achieve even a fraction of their impact and longevity for the London scene then we can consider gel a success! Harry Wiles (the founder of Headfirst) has also offered us a lot of advice and been really supportive, which makes for a refreshing change in a society which tends to place us in competition rather than solidarity with one another.
Over the course of development and launch, we have come across and connected with a number of related projects. Each has its own local niche and specific angle, but shares the common goal of disentangling DIY and grassroots events from big tech:
Communal Leisure – DIY event listings for Glasgow and Edinburgh
London Sound Index – twice monthly newsletter for independent live music listings in London
Another Subculture - monthly listings zine for London’s punk & DIY activity
Red Calendar – leftist arts and action calendar in NYC
NYC Noise - experimental music listings for NYC
Bruxelles brûle t’il – collaborative events calendar for Brussels
There’s also a small number of promoters operating with financial and operational transparency - for example The Three Wheel Drive festival shares documents for its finances and operations. This model was an original inspiration for Joe when running his own events, and was one of the key reasons he decided to build his own ticket service rather than using the existing options. Another example is dance:music who provide a full breakdown of where the money from your ticket goes. If you’re a promoter or venue doing something similar, we’d love to hear from you. {I would also add ex.sses and I’s silly little DIY party ~\LILITH//~ shares our full budget with everyone involved in putting the event on. It mostly shows how the parties don’t make any money and how much jelly for jelly wrestling costs, but its principle in practice!}
Grassroots nightlife feels like it’s popping off right now in many ways, but also under a lot of pressure. Where does gel land in this context?
The ‘death of nightlife’ narrative in London over the past decade or so has done much to raise awareness about the compounding pressures faced by nightclubs and other cultural venues, including gentrification, rising costs, restrictive licensing legislation, and changing consumer habits. Towards the end of the 2010s, London’s nightlife communities struggled to respond to what felt like insurmountable obstacles, but since the pandemic, it definitely feels like there is a renewed sense of energy, with new grassroots venues, events and collectives appearing all the time.
gel lands on both sides of this – as a response to the strong and inspiring network of London’s events, but also as a platform to help support and sustain grassroots culture. Hopefully gel can also inspire others to feel empowered, get organised and explore new ways to own and manage cultural infrastructure. It’s great that individual venues and collectives are managing to flourish against all odds, but we also hope that organisations like gel and our wider grassroots collective can help forge more sustainable futures for grassroots spaces and culture.
What has the response to gel’s launch been so far?
Overwhelmingly good!
The ideas behind it have resonated with people in exactly the way we had hoped, and thanks to the community of people we were working with before launch, we reached a wider range of promoters and venues than we had anticipated. In the first month of public launch, we sold over 1000 tickets, listed 300 events by 150 promoters, at 100 venues, featuring 900 different artists. So it’s been a fairly immediate success in terms of proving the idea was a good one - but there’s still a lot more work to do of course!
We’ve done pretty much nothing in the way of promotion or PR and have a minimal presence on social media, instead relying largely on word of mouth. This might be slower than a viral marketing campaign, but it seems to be building a sustainable community of engaged users.
As well as a lot of promoters signing up to host events and sell tickets, we’ve had lots of great feedback and even a mention on the No Tags podcast which was nice. This dreamscroll feature will be our first proper write-up, and we’re very happy that it comes from someone so embedded in London’s grassroots community!
We even had a free and unannounced cybersecurity audit from a developer who saw the platform on its first day of launch, which almost gave Joe a heart attack as he thought someone was trying to hack us immediately after launching. Fortunately we had no major issues on that front!
A lot of people have complimented the stripped back, old-school design of our website – shoutouts to Joe (our amazing software engineer) and Oliver Kay (responsible for our logo and branding). Given the ongoing enshittification of many larger platforms, it seems as though a lot of people are craving a return to more simple design. As a number of people have commented, gel also foregrounds the vibrant visual culture of event posters and flyers that can get lost in the slop and scroll of instagram.
Is there a bigger networked or federated vision for grassroots ticketing platforms beyond London?
For the time being, we are focussing on developing our local offering. In the future, and if momentum builds in different places, there is certainly a possibility for a loosely networked or federated approach, but it would need to make room for localised variation, and safeguard against any possibility of centralised power.
Most importantly, any platform with a similar vision needs to be properly catered to the city or scene in which it’s operating. There is not and shouldn’t be a one-size fits all solution to this part of the puzzle - for example Headfirst serves almost all of Bristol, which makes sense due to its size - but this would not make sense for us here in London for obvious reasons, so we take a more curatorial approach.
The most valuable asset you can have when setting up this kind of platform is a real connection and presence within the community you are trying to serve. You need to understand the challenges faced by people operating in your local scene, and also the way the scene operates in general in order to make a difference.
We’ve received a few emails from people along the lines of ‘my city / country needs this!’ so naturally we are discussing how we can help. Finn and Joe had a recent call with two organisers from Leeds who are in early stages of developing something similar to serve their city.
More specifically – a lot of the code itself that Joe has written for gel could certainly be helpful for others trying to set up something similar. He’s currently investigating making the core portion of the backend source code open source. This would ideally empower others to set up similar projects and save writing a significant amount of code from scratch/solving many of the same problems again. If this sounds like something you might be able to help with, please get in touch! We would love to hear from more software engineers.
It’s worth saying now that we are very happy to provide guidance and advice on setting this kind of thing up, whether it’s on the software engineering front or the operational, logistical and community related challenges.
What would scaling up mean to you?
Any kind of scaling has to keep our values front and centre – we are here to serve grassroots venues and operators, not to expand as an organisation solely for the sake of growth or to enrich investors (or ourselves for that matter).
As a grassroots-oriented, not-for-profit, there is an inbuilt limit to our scalability and we have no intention of trying to replace RA or Dice wholesale. Having said that, if gel helps pressure larger platforms provide a fairer deal to grassroots venues and promoters, that’s a way of scaling our impact without necessarily scaling gel itself.
In order for gel to provide a more practical and user-friendly listings function than the larger platforms, we have to be cautious to balance growth and curation. London is big enough that we could list hundreds of grassroots events everyday!
The first ‘goal’ is to reach the point where we can begin to pay ourselves a fair wage for the time we spend working on gel – if/when we achieve this we will be able to start saving extra revenue for community re-investment and other projects
It’s worth noting that the money gel is currently making is enough to comfortably cover our web-hosting costs, so we are technically sustainable at this capacity. We will hold off from paying ourselves any salary until we have a better idea of the long term budget we might be working with.
What is next for gel?
Right now we’re focused on making the core listings and ticketing side of things as strong and well-established as possible. Primarily this means keeping up our momentum and getting more promoters and venues onboard. Naturally there’s a bit of inertia with some who have been using existing platforms for a while, combined with some apprehension about using a new service for such a critical part of your event. Fortunately our first month has not seen any major issues and we have built a strong core user base, so hopefully we can build on this
In the not too distant future we’d like to start sending out regular newsletters, spotlighting certain promoters and events in them and helping people connect with grassroots culture outside of social media. On this front, we’d like to work with others to do guest curations and mail-outs. There are a variety of newsletters and zines already offering more curated listings of events in London––La Fomo, G’s Selections, City Symposium and Another Subculture are a few good examples, each covering slightly different cultural scenes––and we view these platforms as possible collaborators rather than competitors.
We’d also like to explore features such as ‘related events’ on the website – i.e. if someone is looking at a day time exhibition on gel, we would show some suggestions for gigs they could go to that evening, or club nights even later on. This would always be done in a custom curatorial way rather than using recommendation engines to generate suggestions, in keeping with our curation-based approach.
Longer term, there are many projects we’d like to be able to help make happen or even run ourselves as gel - a lot of which depend on us generating enough money to do so. We’re also in the process of applying for a couple of Arts Council grants to help facilitate other things. Watch this space!
In the meantime, here are a few ways you (yes you!) can support gel:
As a event-goer, buy tickets on gel! not only do you support gel by doing this but you support the promoters and venues.
As a promoter, shift over your ticket sales to use gel - either fully or partially, the more the better!
Spread the word - share gel links to your friends, and if you know of anyone else running events who might be interested, let them know.
Give feedback - get in touch if there’s anything you like or don’t like about the website, if you notice any bugs or if you have any ideas for new features - we’re all ears.
Ultimately support for gel means support for grassroots promoters and venues, so even if you just go to more events anyway, you’re helping achieve the same aims!
long live grassroots culture <3
this is so exciting!!! thank u for writing this 🫶 gel will also be a great resource for all those people i know who want to get of instagram/corporate algorithms but are scared of missing events/feeling disconnected. yay 4 gel!
thank you for sharing this!!!