The economics of a VIP party
1843magazine.com
1843magazine.com
Here's how she operated. She knew and networked with many other models in the area. A club promoter would tell her he needs X number of women at this club on this night.
My sister would then wrangle the requested number of women to go out. She would absolutely lie and not tell them that she was being paid $1,000+ to bring them out.
She would make up lots of lies to tell them. Oh, this event is happening, or this celebrity will be there, or these people you should meet. Whatever she could do to get them there.
These women would then be given free alcohol or any drink they wanted all night. Drugs if they wished as well.
Pretty messed up, in my opinion, and I think it brought her down a dark path. But it was interesting to hear about the business side of this first hand.
One time I was down in LA and she took me to a very high end club and I got to see all of this up close. No way I would of gotten in without being with her.
Different world.
Seems like this would have been enough to get most people to go to a party at a bar in LA, without any lying or cajoling!
It depends on where you are and where the party is.
You in Silverlake but the party is in Simi Valley? Oh hell no.
You in Santa Monica but the party is in Bel Air? Oh hell yes.
The traffic is a nightmare in LA even on a Monday night. Taking Fountain won't work anymore after Waze got used up.
Like Yogi Berra said: Nobody goes to the beach, it's too crowded.
But that $200 is the difference between a "party girl" and a "whore". Perhaps not quite literally, but close enough that it's a really bad idea. The tactics used in the article to get girls to stay if they want to leave early are bad enough; once payment is involved...
And from the other side, rich people want to go to clubs full of party girls and will avoid clubs full of "whores".
1. The girls know why they are there. They may not know the economics of it exactly, but they got free admission to a club with a giant line and cover fee. They got told all night “those gentlemen over there want to buy your drinks” and then escorted behind the ropes. They’re not stupid. They knew this wasn’t because of their personalities, though many of them were lovely people too. I ended ul dating a med school student who went on to become a brain surgeon that I met that way.
2. Any sex was consensual. I never saw any prostitution or the like. Most of the girls just enjoyed the free drinks for a few hours left. The only girls I saw who were probably prostitutes were brought there by certain celebrities.
3. It’s not your bar tab that keeps the service flowing, it’s the gratuities. We didn’t buy bottles of Louis, and probably spent less on the alcohol than most of the people behind the ropes. But we probably tipped everyone (and I mean everyone) more than the guys who did. Every time the bouncers see a couple extremely attractive women they’ll send them to your table. Every time they’ve got a great party coming up the bartenders will send you a text. We had a house out there and invited them to our bbqs on their off nights, and that goes a long way.
4. Is all of this immoral? I don’t really see how. Everyone knew what they were doing.
1) skip the line 2) Cover is included 3) regular drinks at the bar are expensive as shit anyway. 4) You have a place to sit down in a crowded club. 5) you have a server that comes to you instead of having to find a place at the bar.
A regular night at the club could easily be $150 a person if you count cover, drinks and buying drugs. What’s another $100 a person for a much better experience at that point. Keeping in mind that if you don’t have a table, you’re stuck down on a crowded dance floor for hours and hours and when you aren’t fighting at a bartender to notice you.
The whole ecosystem persists all the way down to average folks going for a night on the town and hoping to chat up a few women (who are not paid/promoted models, but have ultimately similar motives). The superficiality permeates downwards too.
In my experience, the “hotter” the club, the less people dance or mingle, the more they signal.
Edit: I’ll draw a somewhat bright line between clubs who offer bottle service/VIP (in my view inevitably ending up like the above^, even if it makes practical sense) and those clubs which do not. It seems to me the bulk of the money moving would be occurring in the former.
When I was talking about ‘normal’ people getting bottle service, I meant people who were there because they liked the DJ and not for all the other stuff.
In my experience, most of the good parties are run by people who love dance music and know how to build a community around it. Most of them have nothing but contempt for high rollers who go to flash money around, even if they cater to them to stay in business.
There are, of course, plenty of clubs that are entirely oriented around dancing which are great. They tend to be on the less “hot” end of the spectrum (because the term basically means status-building).
Not really sure where you're coming from? The club scene is pretty egalitarian, both in politics and practically - everyone's the same on the dance floor. The only exception is the VIP areas, and I don't think they're an essential part of the club scene.
A club that can be successful and not devolve into this is an outlier that certainly takes extreme care to stay that way.
Hell, in Vegas the dance floors of some clubs seem almost like an afterthought.
I was in Miami (Beach) for a few weeks, and despite its status as a party town I like partying much more most other places. Frankly Miami as a whole was kinda sickening for its massive income disparities and how everyone seemed to aspire to become "VIP"s, both at night and in life in general.
Great clubs are egalitarian, where everybody is just having fun and spreading the joy to the people around them. Unfortunately they can be hard to find without local connections, as Google often only surfaces the high status clubs.
Well, dancing and mingling is about signalling status too. In the end, it's just male and female evolved monkeys doing their mating rituals...
The most valuable social status, the type that actually matters, is the one you get from not caring about what people think of you, having massive fun and brightening the day of the people you interact with.
That's an argument about why financial status signalling is ineffective for true friendship and true happiness.
Not about whether financial status signalling happens or not.
Besides, many people don't care for "true friendship and true happiness" (or get that from other sources). They do their financial status signalling still, to advance themselves, have others kiss their ass, get women, and feel good by flaunting their money...
It is one of the paths towards angel investment. It's not that hard to find people who claim they know rich people and who can "hook you up". It might be slightly more fruitful a path than responding to the Nigerian prince email in your spam folder, but only slightly...
I'm not convinced this was Dre's primary motive. In a good year, he earned $200,000 -- certainly enough for comfortable life. He also partook in the presence of the powerful and wealthy mixed in with models. He was getting paid and still got the entertainment aspect of attending the party, and that's why he was there.
She has a book on the same subject: https://www.ashleymears.com/very-important-people
Your typical night club in the heart of the city filled with drunk people (overflowing from bars) is not the same as the more "upscale" nightclubs on the edges of the city.
The former case is a miserable experience and I agree with you, but the latter can be enjoyable.
In both cases there were moments where I even felt a raging passion for it. For programming it was making a computer graphics engine and for going it's whenever me and the DJ aligned musically which put me into a trance and helped me to dance so much that I was basically working out.
Fun fact: immersive multimedia is the underlying "passion factor" of going out and programming. Both activities sometimes give trance-like states or feelings of wonder and other magical feelings.
> Night club experiences vary significantly depending on what club you go to and what people you go with.
This. I used to experiment by going out alone, sometimes (15 times in total).
Things get a lot more fun when 30 British tourists take you under their wing, because they like your openness and disarming demeanour. It doesn't even take much social skills to be honest. I was sober the whole time.
Or when you meet a group of 20 Spanish people (learning Spanish while slightly intoxicated, haha) and learn some Spanish Dance moves while meeting a future Dutch girlfriend.
I love Amsterdam :)
Or (I'll stop after this one) learn to fire dance in Thailand (without fire) and actually learn a basic trick! Everyone, including myself, was surprised I was capable of any form of movement let alone coordinated successful one. We were all super wasted.
But I also had nights out alone where I'd wallflower, that wasn't a lot of fun. I never knew up front if I'd wallflower or get some epic adventure as my social skills and pro-activity have a high variance. In most cases, I had epic adventures though.
And the same is true for when you go out with a group of people that you know. I did that a whole lot more. Going out with friends can actually be quite tricky in order to get a fun party result. I found that going out alone was easier.
You can create these yourself!
> This piece is from 1843, our sister magazine of ideas, lifestyle and culture.
So probably should change the link anyway.
I'm in the EU, so maybe paywall is US only.
> " Over the last few decades, a new elite has emerged, partly as a result of deregulation of the financial sector in the West and partly because of the spread of global capitalism across the world. This elite is more geographically dispersed and mobile than the aristocrats and capitalists of yesteryear."
Remember that decadence is not intrinsic to the human condition; rather, the fruit of capitalism.
Decadence requires power, and capital is the most obvious way to acquire it in our society.