Avant Gardner Acquires Made Event, Electric Zoo for $15 Million - EDM.com

New York Metropolis’s hottest EDM venue has taken over its premier digital pageant.

Final week, Billboard reported that the funding group behind Brooklyn hotspot Avant Gardner is buying New York promoter Made Occasion for $15 million from LiveStyle.

Settled earlier this month, the deal contains Made Occasion’s crown jewel, Electrical Zoo, the most important digital dance music pageant in New York. Because of the acquisition, Avant Gardner will function Electrical Zoo this 12 months. The 100,000-capacity fest yearly takes place over Labor Day Weekend and boasts an array of famed DJs like Porter Robinson, Martin Garrix, DJ Snake, and Carl Cox.

Electrical Zoo.

Alive Protection

Regardless of a robust foothold in New York’s dance music scene, Avant Gardner and Made Occasion have assorted backgrounds.

Two Swiss males, live performance promoter Billy Bildstein and banker Philipp Wiederkehr, co-founded Avant Gardner in 2017. On the time, Bildstein and Wiederkehr had restricted publicity to New York nightlife. Nonetheless, the previous’s expertise throwing events in Europe and the latter’s operation of a multi-million greenback non-public fairness and asset administration agency—which manages the fortunes of a few of Zurich’s wealthiest firms and households—fueled their quest for conquering New York Metropolis’s EDM scene.

5 years in, Avant Gardner has emerged as New York’s most frequented digital music venue. It usually attracts the world’s most celebrated DJs and throngs of beat-hungry revelers to its 80,000 sq. foot venue, which incorporates three distinct efficiency areas: Brooklyn Mirage, Nice Corridor and Kings Corridor.

However meteoric success hasn’t come with out its fair proportion of challenges. From run-ins with area people boards to shutdowns by the fireplace division, the highway to the highest was a bumpy trip.

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Made Occasion has confronted setbacks via the years as effectively. A far cry from the European origins of Avant Gardner, Made Occasion was based by husband-and-wife workforce Mike Bindra and Laura De Palma in Lengthy Island Metropolis, Queens. Plus, its issues have much less to do with native authorities and are extra within the realm of economic woes.

Afrojack performs at Avant Gardner.

Frits van den Brink

In 2014, leisure business veteran Bob Sillerman’s ill-fated SFX purchased Made Occasion. The acquisition was a part of a buying spree geared toward cultivating a large community of digital dance music promoters below the SFX banner. Sillerman had undertaken an analogous technique within the 90s, efficiently creating the unique SFX reside occasions firm that finally turned Stay Nation.

This time round, nevertheless, SFX racked up insurmountable money owed. In 2016, the corporate filed for chapter simply two years after buying Made Occasion. Rising from chapter with AEG Stay chief Randy Phillips on the helm, SFX then rebranded as LiveStyle Inc, retaining lots of SFX’s belongings, together with Made Occasion.

After Phillips’ departure from SFX in 2019, LiveStyle started promoting lots of its pageant belongings. In 2020, Disco Donnie purchased again Disco Donnie Presents and LiveXLive, and bought Spring Awakening pageant promoter React Presents. And simply final 12 months, U.Okay.-based occasions promoter Superstruct Leisure purchased Dutch occasions model ID&T. Made Occasion is reported to be the final U.S. pageant property LiveStyle deliberate to promote.

Outdoors of working Electrical Zoo, it’s unclear how Avant Gardner will incorporate Made Occasion into its enterprise mannequin. However New York digital music fanatics are protected to surmise Avant Gardner bringing its manufacturing prowess to the pageant—and with that, a potential return to the animal-themed levels that initially put the “Zoo” in Electrical Zoo.