The event is only half the product. The aftermath is just as important

When I was chief business officer at Defected Records back at the start of the decade, the best thing we made in any given week tended to get made on the Monday. Defected is a house music label that also throws parties, so on a Saturday night there would be a few thousand people in a dark room somewhere in the world, dancing to a DJ until the lights came up. Someone would have shot the event on a shaky handheld iPhone. By Monday afternoon the videos would be up and everyone who’d been there would go hunting through them looking for themselves. Then the playlist would land, people would start poring over what had actually happened at 4 a.m., and whether the second record in that back-to-back was as good as everyone was saying. All of it went in the marketing folder and it was used to sell the next Saturday. I think we had it the wrong way round. Monday wasn’t advertising for Saturday night; it was mostly that part of Saturday night people got to keep. Almost every marketing budget I have seen since is built the other way round, but it’s an expensive mistake to keep making. The Aftermath Economy I have been calling this the aftermath economy ever since, and this summer during the FI…