There was barely an online to build one on
In the early 2000s, when I was starting my musical career, communities weren't built online because there was virtually no online. We had screaming modems at home. You could check some news, browse around, have some fun. Blogs existed, but nobody had decided yet that the blog was a format worth taking seriously.
So communities got built by going out and meeting people. Then meeting them again.
It worked like a snowball. You kept running into the same people in the same places, because you liked the vibe of the place and you liked the group that kept showing up. The repetition was the whole strategy, and none of us were calling it like that.
This was true far longer than I expected. The internet went mainstream. Facebook got big. And going out and meeting the same people in the same room was still one of the most stable ways to build something that lasted.
What AI can't substitute
A few weeks ago I spoke at Beats for Love, in their Talking Beats talk track, about AI in the music industry. A big part of that conversation was about what AI can't substitute.
Community kept coming up.
Building a strong brand requires building a community, and a lot of people go at that through capture: emails, mailing lists, follower counts. Sooner or later they look at the numbers and find they have a handful of super fans, the people who buy, listen to and follow everything they do.
The mechanics that produce those people, though, are older than any of the tools we use to count them.
How I accidentally built one
I started my second residency in one of my favorite clubs.
Before that I was going there for no professional reason at all. I went to listen to good music, have a beer or five, and reset my thoughts (I was working corporate back then, and that room was where I put my head back on after a week of it). It felt like a safe space, which isn't a small thing.
Eventually the owner recognized me. The bartenders recognized me. I became a regular.
Once you're a regular, you start seeing the pattern from the inside. The same group of people kept coming in, again and again. A set of faces on the same nights, with no name on it.
So we started a club night where we played the music we really liked. The second installment was TranceFamily, building on an existing trance community and some credentials I'd acquired through it. We started inviting great DJs.
The first TranceFamily night was almost empty.
Five or six people showed up. Not the launch I had pictured :)
Some of them had fun. Some didn't. And the ones who had fun brought friends the next time.
Six people, a few of whom enjoyed themselves enough to vouch for it out loud to someone they knew. That's what the next installment was built on.
Trust gets built in the room
After three or four installments we started to understand what was actually building the community.
Talk to the people who show up and greet them with a smile. Occasionally get someone a drink on the house. Make them feel comfortable. Make them feel that they belong there.
And sometimes, make sure the people who aren't a good fit for the vibe leave sooner rather than later.
That part never felt good, and I kept doing it. A community is the people you attract and the thing you protect for the people already inside it. The vibe is the reason they came, and it's the first thing to go if you treat every warm body as a win.
I don't have a clean rule for who stays and who goes. You feel it in the room, usually before you can explain it.
Same place, same people, same vibe
Eventually we had a community where even a Tuesday night could mean a full house.
People knew who was coming. They knew what the vibe was going to be. They knew what to expect. Same place, same people, different DJs, same type of music.
The community grew to around 400 people regularly coming to parties in a club with a capacity of 60.
That number came out of trust, accumulated over years of the same room behaving the way people expected it to.
Three steps, and only one of them changed
Community building comes down to three things, as far as I can tell.
Let people know you exist. There has to be something happening regularly, with a recognizable identity and a specific vibe. Irregular events don't compound, because nobody can form an expectation around them.
Gain trust. People need to experience the thing for themselves and come away feeling that they belong in it. Nobody can do this step on your behalf.
Keep the trust. This one never finishes. You're re-earning it every night you open the doors.
Back then, step one meant calling our friends or stopping by their houses to let them know something was happening. Today Instagram makes that step incredibly convenient, and I'm not nostalgic about the old way of doing it. Announcing is a solved problem now.
Steps two and three haven't changed at all.
Instagram can tell people where the party is. It can tell them when it happens. It can show them the vibe well enough that they arrive with the right expectations. Talking to people once they're in the room is still yours to do.
If you want a lasting community of people who genuinely enjoy your company, and whose company you genuinely enjoy, you have to remember them, and remember what they told you last time. You have to make them feel welcome, on the slow nights especially.
At your next event, get there before the room fills, and spend the first hour with whoever arrived alone. That's step two.