cMiami Sabotage!

Miami’s club scene is famously one of the most cut throat in the world, especially around Miami Music Week time. Here are some tales of promoters behaving badly...

CAUGHT STEALIN’

“The night before our opening, someone broke in and stole all the liquor off the shelves,” one wronged director told us. “And a couple of weeks before
that, someone broke into the club and stole all the sound amplifiers out of the amplifier rack. Then, one of my competitors called a local paper and said ‘You know that [the director] has a criminal record, it was probably him who did it,’ – and the paper actually printed the story.”

ALL’S FAIR

“We had finished, everything was to code, and everything was ready to go,” a promoter told us. “We needed one final sign-off from [REDACTED] to be able to open for Winter Music Conference. We had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars booking talent and booking shows for our big WMC opening week, and [REDACTED] came in and refused to sign off. He said our roof drains weren’t proper. So we missed the opening and lost a ton of money – yet we opened the next week without having to correct a single roof drain.

“A competitor who I won’t name, but who’s a friend of mine – he and I have laughed about it. He said ‘Yeah, [REDACTED] is a friend of mine. I told him not to sign off, and it’s absolutely true.’ But, you know, we laughed about it after the fact, and I knew it was him, he knew I knew, and the truth is, I looked across the table, and said ‘I’d have done the same to you, absolutely. If it had been reversed and I had the ability to do it, I would have done exactly the same thing.’”

LIFE IN COLOR VS ULTRA

“We run a music festival, not a daycare,” Ultra blasted from its official Twitter page in September. Though the message was ultimately deleted, some saw it as a not-so-subtle jab at the competition. UMF had rescinded its all-ages status in favour of an 18-plus policy the year before. Rival festival LiC struck back, promoting this year’s two-day event with a highway billboard that read “Why wait ’til March?” Now, UMF is always set for the later half of that month, so not to be outdone, the veterans sent a very clear message, flying a hired plane through the sky above LiC with an Ultra-branded banner that read “We’ll see you when you turn 18.”