
The economics of a VIP party - miohtama
https://www.1843magazine.com/1843/the-economics-of-fun/the-secret-economics-of-a-vip-party
======
kilroy123
My sister was a model in Los Angeles, and when she got a bit too old for that,
she did this for a while.

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.

~~~
chrisseaton
> These women would then be given free alcohol or any drink they wanted all
> night.

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!

~~~
modelthrows
Models get that wherever they go frankly.

~~~
mattmaroon
Not even just models. Attractive women all over the world can go out with a
$10 bill in their pocket and drink all night and still have enough left for
Taco Bell at the end. Free drinks are cheap.

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mattmaroon
I used to go to clubs like this in Vegas and get bottle service all the time.
A few notes.

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.

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empath75
Way back in the early 2000s, I was involved in edm event promotion, and bottle
service is a thing even for people who aren’t millionaires. It was pretty
normal for like a group of 5 guys to drop $1000+ plus on a table reservation
every once in a while and you do it for a few practical reasons that have
nothing to do with glamour:

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.

~~~
ethanbond
Well, “nothing to do with glamour” except insofar as the entire club scene is
built on signaling glamour (status, more specifically).

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.

~~~
empath75
Not really — some edm shows focus on the music as much or as more than the
glamour — Glow in DC is one in particular that has straddled that particularly
well. They have always had a lot of kids going who don’t dress up and go to
dance only. And of course the underground edm shows that don’t have bottle
service at all and are purely about the music.

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.

~~~
ethanbond
Yeah totally agreed. I personally have not encountered a club that has bottle
service/VIP that doesn’t degrade into the sort of thing described in the
article.

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).

------
bryanlarsen
Perhaps more of interest to the HN crowd is the end of the article where it
talks about the motivations of these promoters. They want to get out of the
small money business of convincing pretty girls to show up at clubs and into
the big money business of connecting rich people to investments.

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...

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
"Dre was convinced that his connections with the elite would eventually earn
him a big business deal... But these never came to anything. Clients were
happy to call him when they wanted to go out, but that didn’t mean they took
him seriously as a business partner."

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.

------
noelwelsh
I just finished listening to a podcast that interviewed the author of this
piece: [https://socialsciencespace.com/2020/06/ashley-mears-on-
the-g...](https://socialsciencespace.com/2020/06/ashley-mears-on-the-global-
party-circuit/)

She has a book on the same subject: [https://www.ashleymears.com/very-
important-people](https://www.ashleymears.com/very-important-people)

------
maroonblazer
Tyler Cowan did a great podcast with the author, Ashley Mears, on this topic a
few weeks ago.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_BzgKOJme8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_BzgKOJme8)

------
cosmodisk
When I was in my early 20s I used to hate nught clubs because they are loud
useless places,where you can't even hear your own thoughts because of sound
levels. Now I've grown up a bit, I can't imagine going to one even if someone
would pay me. If I was in a position to spend 10K a night in a club,my
understanding of having a good night would definitely not have a night club in
it.

~~~
Nextgrid
Night club experiences vary significantly depending on what club you go to and
what people you go with.

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.

~~~
mettamage
Disclaimer: like programming, I forced myself to like going out. A lot of
hobbies I have are things I didn't initially like. I like to understand how
malleable I am. Apparently, I'm pretty malleable, haha. In both cases, it took
years to like it.

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.

------
claudeganon
This article is more interesting for what it doesn’t talk about than it does.
There’s only the vaguest allusion to organized crime and sex trafficking,
which seems odd if you’re talking about a “secret economics” involving models
and night clubs.

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miohtama
I would be interest to from mentioned tech entrepreneurs and VCs who have been
into this and what is their first hand experience.

------
jger15
Hmm...paywalled but listened to Mears' interview with Tyler Cowen (below).
Excited to check out her book.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_BzgKOJme8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_BzgKOJme8)

------
jxf
Is there a non-paywalled link?

~~~
the-dude
The article is for VIPs only, sorry.

~~~
fennecfoxen
* VIPs, professional models, and the promoters who bring in the professional models.

------
smitty1e
The "1843" version of the article, without the paywall =>
[https://www.1843magazine.com/1843/the-economics-of-
fun/the-s...](https://www.1843magazine.com/1843/the-economics-of-fun/the-
secret-economics-of-a-vip-party)

> " 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.

~~~
zacherates
I'm pretty sure decadence is older than the 1850s... Yeah, it would seem
Martin Luther died in 1546.

Decadence requires power, and capital is the most obvious way to acquire it in
our society.

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randompwd
Pretty disgusting that this exists.

~~~
2ion
As if it has been different at any point in history.

~~~
randompwd
Oh well then, we best not try change anything /s

