By Julia Ben-Asher ’14
Photo Courtesy of Justin Brown ’10
Electronica Oasis, an electric dance music (EDM) website self-proclaimed to be New York’s most-viewed dance music blog, is managed in part by Justin Brown ‘10 and Chris Palliser ‘10, both economics and business majors.
The long-term project has been no easy feat. In 2006, Palliser’s older brother Rob attended a rave in Washington, D.C. “I was instantly hooked,” Rob said. “After a year of steady listening, I felt like I needed to do more, so I went online and bought my first set of turntables and records.” After moving back home to Long Island to finish his college degree, Rob used spare time to hone his DJ-ing and music mixing skills.
The momentum of Rob’s passion for EDM continued. In August of 2010, he and a few friends established a blog devoted to the genre called Electronica Oasis. “We started it because we liked it. We had no idea it would ever get to the point it’s at now,” Rob said.
Two months later he visited his brother Chris, a senior, at Lafayette. “Bring your DJ equipment!” Chris had said. Rob ended up DJ-ing a backyard party for five hours to a screaming audience, and added his brother and Brown (neither of whom had been involved with the music scene at Lafayette beyond taking Claps for Credit or Music in Film) to the blog management team. In the coming months he would return to DJ at fraternity parties, parties on Monroe during All College Day, and events at Campus Pizza. The team’s first “really, really huge” event was the March Field madness of November 2010’s Lafayette-Lehigh.
As the group grew more interested in EDM, they focused less on DJ-ing and more on the development of the blog. “The first year was a lot of work,” Brown recalled. “Setting up social media, just trying to get the name out there as much as possible.” The team juggled schoolwork and extracurriculars with contacting PRs, interviewing DJs, writing reviews, posting upcoming events, posting photos and videos of events, and more. “You get burned out because you want to get as much content out as possible,” he said.
The blog team keeps the musicians they work with happy by both finding a positive spin to put on every performance and by being entirely legal, posting links to iTunes where artists can collect per song rather than listeners downloading music for free. Brown explained that “That’s a rarity in the blogosphere.” Still, the group keeps customers happy. “You have to provide unique content [for readers] every time,” Brown said.
Their tireless work—described as taking up 95% of their time outside of their day jobs—began to pay off. “Within the past six months, we’ve just gotten big enough to the point where there can be money involved by ad revenue,” Brown said.
“We finally built up a good enough reputation that now their PR people email us when there’s a show—there’s not as much digging,” Rob said.
The team is constantly growing, adding writers each specializing in his own area of EDM and is currently at ten core people who work as “constantly bouncing ideas off of each other.” “Without each one of us it wouldn’t be possible,” Rob said.
The blog has 192 pages of posts and 4,366 Facebook Likes as of print time.
For the future, Brown hopes that the blog will be “The Rolling Stone for dance music.” Chris Palliser notes, “Typically, trends like this that follow the path of being virtually unknown to extreme popularity tend to burn out quickly, so we’ll have to see what the future holds for EDM.”
While it is of course great that alumni are able to contribute so extensively to a project unrelated to their fields of study at Lafayette, defining the well roundedness of a liberal arts education, some wonder if Lafayette curriculums themselves could one day expand to be more accommodating to a wider range of interests.
Lafayette’s Professor of Music Jorge Torres said, “What we tend to see is students’ engagement in the ways we’ve set up the curriculum—whether through lessons, ensemble participation, music theory, etc. But we might want to have a balance of that in the future, and widen our entry points into the department to continue to engage the students’ high levels of talent.” Examples of this could include non-traditional, alternative classes in music production, commercial music, and entrepreneurship.
The link to Electronic Oasis’s website can be found here: http://www.electronicaoasis.com/