Born on the Dancefloor

DICE was born out of frustration with how ticketing let down artists and fans. But with a mission rooted in club culture, it’s grown into far more

Words DUNCAN DICK

DICE’s Global Head Of Music Andrew Foggin took the first steps towards his current job when he heard Justice’s † album as an 18-year-old in Sunderland. “It was a massive moment. That crossover between indie and electronic, the genre-blending, was amazing. The Ed Banger crew, the Bloody Beetroots: it was absolutely going off around them.” 

Soon he was a regular at Newcastle club Digital, and even making trips to London for Erol Alkan’s Trash nights - which in turn inspired to put on his own parties in his hometown “to try to replicate the scene.”

And when Andrew made a permanent move to the capital, he was quickly involved in event promotion again, joining Phil Hutcheon, who was promoting the likes of Modular Records, Armand Van Helden and Bloody Beetroots (“right in my sweet spot” says Andrew) as he set up his own management company. 

It was during that time, says Andrew, that the idea of DICE was born. “There wasn’t a single event. It was a collection of experiences. At that time, as a manager, you had no insight into who was going to an artists’ shows around the world. You got sent your excel sheet from the agency saying how many tickets you sold, but no real data. 

“For customers, the ticket buying experience was painful. A ticket would be 20 pounds and you’d go through multiple web pages and then you’d see it was 32 quid. 

“From a promoter perspective; say you put on an Ed Banger show… who has actually come to that show? How do you speak to them again? Again, an excel spreadsheet of emails is not a real story about who the fans are. DICE came from just wanting to fix all that, and to understand more about fans. Phil had a background in tech and got really really obsessed with the ticketing and technology side.” 

On the surface, then, DICE was started by people immersed in the industry to try and fix the issues with ticketing that frustrated fans and artists. But, says DICE’s Executive Creative Director Patrick Duffy, the mission has always been bigger than that.

“There's just something about club culture and how you bond with people in those magical spaces that relates to the idea of community. I think the values of clubbers and DICE are very much aligned. When I joined DICE we talked about how there was this community of people out there that’s not being served - the community of people going to these events. We’ve all had that experience of going to a club or a gig and coming away from it feeling a bit badly treated.”

For a young, shy Patrick, clubbing was an opportunity to find his tribe and lose his inhibitions. “My epiphany was a night called Powerhouse in Stockton. Me and my mates used to listen to a lot of what you would now call happy hardcore. Lots of very fast, boingy, donk-y beats. So we went to this club night, and I was a very shy young man but it was one of those… I was like ‘I’m going nowhere near the dancefloor’, and two hours later I had my shirt open and a bandana on my head blowing a whistle. They had to drag me off at the end.”

When he became aware of the jungle scene via boxes of tapes from Resurrection and going to raves, it sealed the deal.”I was into hip hop, and jungle was a combination of mad techno and hip hop in this one glorious world.”

Ironically, when Duffy moved to London he drifted slightly from the club scene, and developed his longer standing interest in art and design. “I always wanted to do something connected to music, but in my mind the goal was record sleeves. The first album I ever bought was 808 State’s Ex:el. I had the cassette version which had this very basic graphic on it, the number 808 floating in space. It looks very dated now, but at the time I was like ‘how did they do that?’ It just seemed so futuristic. I used to sit and just trace and draw it. That was always the north star for me: to do something that ended up on the cover of someone’s album.”

After a stint as Art Director of style mag Sleaze Nation, jobs including Creative Lead at AirBnB and Head Of Design at Fallon London, the opportunity at DICE came by chance. “A friend said I should go and have a chat with Phil. He’s a very gregarious, engaging speaker, very much the visionary CEO. He laid the whole sales pitch on me, about how it wasn't just about being a big ticketing company - that’s just the first bit.’ 

“That conversation made me scared - and excited. He was talking about building a brand but also the totality of it: defining our mission, defining our values. Something I’d never done before.” 

That mission has evolved to become the simple, yet ambitious, ‘get people out more’. “We all obsess about it.” says Andrew. “It’s nothing too complex to understand. All departments are all thinking about how to get people out to go to more shows.”

That means an emphasis on thoughtful curation, the DICE app using a mixture of editorial and algorithm to suggest not just more of the same, but shows and clubs that expand the user’s horizons - as helpful mate rather than pub bore. “It's not trying to prove anything,” says Patrick.”It’s more like ‘I’ve thought about this, and I think you might like it.’ A friend trying to help you out.” 

As Global Head Of Music, Andrew’s job is finding the best partners for DICE around the world: “who are the best independent venues, promoters, festivals that we could collaborate with and work with on a big level? Whether that's your Sonars or Primaveras or big venues like Avant Gardner in New York, my job is identifying the right people to speak to and then making those conversations happen.”

Meanwhile Patrick oversees the culture and aesthetic of a business that despite now employing 300+ people across several countries - and generating enough capital recently to buy Boiler Room (to expand a live streaming offering that blossomed during lockdown thanks to collaborations with the likes of Bicep) - is determined never to forget that it was born on the dancefloor.  “I feel like DICE still represents the counterculture,” he says. “We want to try and keep it that way. It might be naive but we want to keep representing the people who are going to the club, or making a fanzine, or making their first flyer or putting on their first night. We’ve been those people. We all know that world, and we all love it and respect it.”