The redeveloped Battersea Power Station is one of the most soulless, dead-eyed, wealth-obsessed places in all of London. This is a terrible place to put something like a music venue, unless your target market is the adult children of emigres with unexplained wealth, and I think it speaks to Apple’s sanitised, emotionally-distant, luxury-focussed worldview that they would consider it.
Incredible building. Awful development. They could have donated ten million quid to the Music Venue Trust instead.
The free U2 album looks like the work of a tastemaker by comparison.
Ahh yes because the only destiny of large buildings in London is high-end retail and luxury flats for the wealthy. That's what holds us back as a country, isn't it? Not enough places for the very very very rich.
I didn't at all say or suggest I would have preferred it to stay derelict. It's an absurd straw man.
There are many things that project could have been, for London, that it is not.
But if that's the only way you see progress — the creation of places for foreign wealth to be spent — then yeah, I am holding the UK back from that miserable dystopia.
I mean, you can say that Fred again and co. are "sanitised", "corpo music" and etc. But quite a lot of people will happily buy the tickets, and go to the concerts. The only reason I'm bringing him up, is cause Apple featured his live concert.
Obviously Apple is in the game of making money in the end. Your local DJ that plays sets at 2am on a weekday probably won't be performing at their venue. But I wouldn't call every random friend group "adult children emigres with unexplained wealth" as a single target audience. A lot of people will spend a couple of hundred $ for a fun night out, and they don't have to be extremely rich.
> Your local DJ that plays sets at 2am on a weekday probably won't be performing at their venue.
This is a really tone-deaf straw man caricature of what I am saying, I'm afraid.
> But I wouldn't call every random friend group "adult children emigres with unexplained wealth" as a single target audience.
It's a pretty solid, not even satirical summary of many of the people who live in that development. It's not really a place for Londoners.
If I were a gambling man I would suggest to you that tickets for those events are likely to start at more than the couple of hundred dollars you are suggesting people spend without thinking. The cheapest standing tickets for the next Oasis tour (at very large music stadiums) are more than $225.
I don't think Apple hopes to make significant revenue from ticket sales: this venue has seats for only 600. The purpose of the 600 seats is to give musicians optimal conditions for the creation of music (to be recorded or streamed live) and to showcase to selected audiences (e.g., journalists and other influencers) Apple's audio technologies: the venue is outfitted with a custom 48-speaker Spatial Audio sound system.
And like others are saying, it is at Battersea because Apple has about 500,000 sq ft of office space at Battersea. It's their UK headquarters.
I beg to differ. I stayed in Battersea for a week while exploring London. I found the place very welcoming, safe and inspiring. It’s convenient to get to and from with its dedicated underground line.
I can see how it fits the Apple
brand experience very well (they don’t do gritty stuff). In fact I believe there’s already an Apple Store there.
> There's also a little local shop for the residents that stocks wine costing over £1000 a bottle.
What a weird complaint. I’ve been in grocery stores that have wine costing $500+/bottle. I would expect any wine shop to stock rare and expensive wines. Now, if that’s all they stocked, you might have a point.
Come on now, when the rich go over to the artsy neighborhoods and fancy wine shops open up it's called "gentrification", but when they - actually a Malaysian group of investors - make their own place in a run down corner of London, a place that's accessible by public transport to anyone, and does justice to preserve the story of the power station, you call it grotesque.
Well, the type of places that OP described are full of service people, paid the best wage that people with little training can make, because they can ALWAYS be nice and welcoming… even when being screamed at and spat upon by the rudest, meanest, and most despicable nepo-jerk you could imagine!
But, aside from the convenient access to the underground, I’m really intrigued by what you found “inspiring” about this place?
(I don’t know a single thing about it, never even heard of it, so I’m torn as to which of you two to believe… lol)
It's a combination of a park, a residential neighborhood and a shopping center in the renovated power station. The station is incredible building, with its brick construction. The residential buildings themselves are also special, with some designed by Frank Gehry, and the shopping center is inside the power station building and has an family-rated-steampunk feeling to it.
We stayed in an apartment overlooking the station front and it was a lovely sight.
I think their target audience are Apple Music subscribers who are going to watch the recordings of the live videos; they could probably care less who attend's their concerts. It doesn't seem like they want a music venue to support London's live music scene, but a music venue to produce content for their platform.
Frankly, that just makes it worse.
>They could have donated ten million quid to the Music Venue Trust instead.
oh, what the world could be like if music streaming platforms actually supported the industry that power them.
That reminds me a bit of The Harmsworth Room [1] in the Churchill War Rooms, where you can dine while you stare at the "original 1940s electric generator wall complete with dials and switches". Very cool space!
Yay, vertical integration! This shit needs to be stopped. Similarly to movie theaters and movie studios, venues, ticket providers and distributors/streamers/studios should not be allowed to be owned or controlled by the same entities.
OK, but the effect you are worried about won't be caused by Apple's owning 1 venue with a capacity of 600 people when there are many 100s of much larger venues.
The redeveloped Battersea Power Station is one of the most soulless, dead-eyed, wealth-obsessed places in all of London. This is a terrible place to put something like a music venue, unless your target market is the adult children of emigres with unexplained wealth, and I think it speaks to Apple’s sanitised, emotionally-distant, luxury-focussed worldview that they would consider it.
Incredible building. Awful development. They could have donated ten million quid to the Music Venue Trust instead.
The free U2 album looks like the work of a tastemaker by comparison.
Seems like on brand with Apple. You can now imagine how concerts will look like.
Honestly, people like you are what holds this country back.
I didn't at all say or suggest I would have preferred it to stay derelict. It's an absurd straw man.
There are many things that project could have been, for London, that it is not.
But if that's the only way you see progress — the creation of places for foreign wealth to be spent — then yeah, I am holding the UK back from that miserable dystopia.
Obviously Apple is in the game of making money in the end. Your local DJ that plays sets at 2am on a weekday probably won't be performing at their venue. But I wouldn't call every random friend group "adult children emigres with unexplained wealth" as a single target audience. A lot of people will spend a couple of hundred $ for a fun night out, and they don't have to be extremely rich.
This is a really tone-deaf straw man caricature of what I am saying, I'm afraid.
> But I wouldn't call every random friend group "adult children emigres with unexplained wealth" as a single target audience.
It's a pretty solid, not even satirical summary of many of the people who live in that development. It's not really a place for Londoners.
If I were a gambling man I would suggest to you that tickets for those events are likely to start at more than the couple of hundred dollars you are suggesting people spend without thinking. The cheapest standing tickets for the next Oasis tour (at very large music stadiums) are more than $225.
And like others are saying, it is at Battersea because Apple has about 500,000 sq ft of office space at Battersea. It's their UK headquarters.
There's also a little local shop for the residents that stocks wine costing over £1000 a bottle.
It's a grotesque place.
No music venue in London is really "gritty" anymore but loads of them are under threat from developers and need all the help they can to survive.
Putting a music venue in the Battersea Power Station development is just making a music venue for the foreign money laundromat.
What a weird complaint. I’ve been in grocery stores that have wine costing $500+/bottle. I would expect any wine shop to stock rare and expensive wines. Now, if that’s all they stocked, you might have a point.
But, aside from the convenient access to the underground, I’m really intrigued by what you found “inspiring” about this place?
(I don’t know a single thing about it, never even heard of it, so I’m torn as to which of you two to believe… lol)
We stayed in an apartment overlooking the station front and it was a lovely sight.
Frankly, that just makes it worse.
>They could have donated ten million quid to the Music Venue Trust instead.
oh, what the world could be like if music streaming platforms actually supported the industry that power them.
https://batterseapowerstation.co.uk/retailers/control-room-a...
[1] https://www.churchillwarroomsvenuehire.co.uk/spaces/harmswor...