• Drive Boiler Room’s influence on youth, music and culture through a narrative driven campaign which spans installations, music broadcasts, documentaries and social content

• Demonstrate Boiler Room’s ability to drive premium story telling formats through the 4 part series ‘Migrant Sound’

• Drive Boiler Room’s cultural relevance in cultures and genres that sit outside of electronic music

• Drive press for Boiler Room across mainstream, b2b and culture titles

• Highlight the influence Boiler Room has as a non traditional youth focused media brand

SYSTEM is a campaign from Boiler Room that subverts the sensationalist negative coverage of immigration in Western media by driving multiple narratives, celebrating the positive influence of migration on the UK’s music and culture.

As part of the SYSTEM campaign, Boiler Room have debuted Migrant Sound, a four-part documentary series designed to celebrate migration and the positive cultural impact it has on society through a youthful lens.

Collaborating with some of the UK’s leading youth voices, Boiler Room has given a global platform to underground scenes across the world. These leading voices convey an alternative narrative to that of traditional media outlets, representing generations of immigrants in a way that mainstream media fails to. The campaign activates online and offline, with editorial, live events, performance and specially commissioned content including Migrant Sound.

The campaign was activated across the entire Boiler Room ecosystem lead via Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Boiler Room.tv and 4:3.

Traditional media presents an often negative, sensationalist view of migration. A recent report from Coventry University and the Open Society Foundations found that only 10% of 600 migration-related stories in tabloid and broadsheet newspapers published in the period leading to the 2015 General Election framed migration and migrants as a benefit, principally to the economy.

Boiler Room’s SYSTEM campaign bucks this trend.

Boiler Room commissioned an interactive art installation of the same name created by musician and performance artist Gaika at Somerset House Studios. The SYSTEM installation explores themes of immigration, blackness and anti-authoritarianism in the UK and runs throughout August until the eve of Notting Hill Carnival. This audio-visual installation is made up of contemporary interviews and material by Gaika featuring Nabihah Iqbal and curated material from community archives including Rice N Peas Archive, Paddington Arts and FremantleMedia.

In tune with the wider campaign, Boiler Room have curated two party series alongside SYSTEM at Somerset House. Both series of live-streamed events explore and highlight the positive impact of migration on music and culture in the UK. The first, SYSTEM: Sound Series, is a weekly event series at Somerset House in the lead up to Notting Hill Carnival featuring members of the sound system community and some of the biggest music scenes that have emerged from migrant culture including Aba Shanti-I, Judah (Deviation), The Soca Kingdom, and BBZ. The second series of parties, SYSTEM: Future Sounds, showcased up-and-coming names sound systems Tudor Lion, Natural Mystic and Caya Sound System.

This ongoing SYSTEM campaign by Boiler Room also permeates online. Alongside the live streams from their SYSTEM parties, Boiler Room have commissioned a series of editorial pieces edited by Gal Dem Music Editor Antonia Odunlami: SYSTEM Voices. This series offers an insight into topics closely related to migration and its cultural impact. These pieces will showcase young writers’ insight into police hostility, sound system culture and a full detailed history of Notting Hill Carnival and what it’s like to be queer at the annual street party. Each piece will shine a light on these topics to Boiler Room’s global audience, read the SYSTEM Voices series here.

Launching during London’s Notting Hill Carnival weekend, the four-part Migrant Sound documentary takes positive action against sensationalist news culture. Directed by the award-winning Jeremy Cole, best known for the Channel 4 series ‘Four to the Floor’, each episode is a youthful celebration of migration and its impact on UK music and culture. Combining broad societal stories with personal family anecdotal histories, the four-part documentary series allows for emotional storytelling mixed with vibrant visuals of migrant culture, told through the lens of youth past and present. The series is made up of four episodes - Arrival, Racism, Identity, and Future Sound - due for release over the coming weeks.

The series focuses on the impact of the Windrush generation and their descendants on UK music and culture.

Alongside the activity above activity Boiler Room curated a season of cutting-edge documentaries and feature films from the 1970s and 80s on their ground breaking streaming service 4:3. New pieces include Pressure (dir. Horace Ové, 1976), hailed as Britain’s first black feature film and a hard-hitting document of the plight of disenchanted black youths in 1970s London. 4:3 will also host Burning An Illusion (dir. Menelik Shabazz, 1981) - a love story that traces the emotional and political growth of a young black couple in Thatcher’s London - as well as Grove Music (dir. Henry Martin, Steve Shaw, 1981) and Grove Carnival (dir. Henry Martin, Steve Shaw, 1981), both of which record the real-life enjoyment and passion of the 1980 Notting Hill Carnival.

Total impressions 

• 22.8 million impressions 

People reached  

• 15.4 million people 

Video Views 

• 4.7 million views across the campaign 

Migrant Sound series views

• 1.1 million views, 3.1 million reach and counting

Press Coverage

• BBC radio (6), Guardian, Evening Standard,  It’s Nice That, Time Out, Noisey, GQ, i-D, Quietus, Fader, High Snobiety, AdAge and more.

Talent engagement 

• Skepta, Lethal Bizzle and Jammer

Real life interaction

• Over 5000 people came to a real life event (excluding Notting Hill Carnival)