One year into building MIOAZ, Adrian Beretta is thinking less about rapid growth and more about whether an independent electronic music platform can create something people genuinely want to stay part of.
That idea sits behind MIOAZ’s first anniversary celebration at 93 Feet East on September 26th, where Braxton and Trilucid will headline with extended sets across a day built around melodic house, progressive music and slower musical progression rather than quick-fire festival slots.
The event also marks a bigger step for the platform. Alongside its expanding London community and support for emerging DJs, MIOAZ is developing MIOAZ Released, connecting live opportunities with production, releases and longer-term artist development.
For this FM PRO 10Q, we talk to Adrian Beretta of MIOAZ about building a credible electronic music community, giving DJs room to develop longer sets, backing emerging talent, and keeping human instinct at the centre as the platform expands across events and releases.
The more music becomes driven by algorithms, the more valuable genuine human curation could become.
Q1. MIOAZ is approaching its first anniversary. What have you learned about building an electronic music community in London during its first year?
Honestly, that it’s extremely hard work! We’re a small team, essentially my wife Ash and me. But I’d say one of the biggest lessons of the first year has to be patience and consistency. We learned very quickly that it takes time, and genuine commitment. We both have full time jobs so most evenings we’re working away on MIOAZ.
You can’t manufacture a community online or in real life, and you definitely shouldn’t try to rush one. We can create a brand, put on a great event and have an idea of what we want MIOAZ Live to represent, but people need time to experience it and decide whether they want to be part of it.
We also believe that the community has to extend beyond the people buying tickets to our events. There are some brilliant independent promoters, DJs and producers in London, and we want MIOAZ to become part of that wider scene rather than exist separately. If promoters support each other, more artists get opportunities and more people discover this music and everyone benefits. We always run an industry guestlist so very happy for other promoters to reach out to us.
We’ve also had to learn how to navigate social media, but MIOAZ Live gives us something online channels can’t, the opportunity to actually meet people. Welcoming folks at the door is important to us, so we try to be there as much as we can during the event.
So, after year one, we’re probably less interested in how quickly we can grow MIOAZ Live and more interested in whether we’re building something sustainable that people genuinely want to be a part of.
Q2. Why did 93 Feet East feel like the right venue for your biggest event so far?
There was something about 93 Feet East that just felt right for where MIOAZ Live at the moment. The team at 93 Feet East have also been amazing and supportive, and that’s important to a new brand.
It’s big enough for us to take a step forward with the first birthday, but it still gives us the intimacy we’re trying to protect. But the option to have the two rooms is really important for this event too because it allows us to explore the different sides of the MIOAZ Live sound while still making the whole eight hours feel connected. Room 1 will feature deep and melodic house, while Room 2 all things progressive!
And then there’s the location. Shoreditch has such a deep electronic music history and club culture. The 2pm start at 93 Feet East gives the event a very different character from asking everyone to arrive at a club at midnight. There’s a vibe around the venue that we just love, and we’re excited for folks attending our event to experience that too, especially if it is their first visit to the area. It’s also really accessible, which matters when you’re asking people to spend eight hours with you.
So, it feels like a progression for MIOAZ Live rather than an overreach at this time, and that’s important to us.
Q3. Braxton and Trilucid will both perform extended sets. What can longer DJ sets offer that shorter festival-style appearances often miss?
An extended set gives the DJ options.
If you’ve got 60 minutes, particularly in a festival environment, there’s naturally pressure to make an impact straight away. That doesn’t mean a 60 minute set can’t be brilliant because some DJs are incredibly good at it, but you’re inevitably only hearing a snapshot of what that artist can do.
Give someone two or three hours and suddenly they can change pace. They can play something unexpected, not just mix from the drop, move through different moods and take a few risks without worrying that they’ve only got ten tracks left to make their mark.
That’s actually one of the reasons Braxton is such a great fit for us. The first time we saw him was opening an Anjunadeep Open Air event and his pacing from start to finish was amazing. He understood exactly where he was in the day and didn’t try to force it.
Trilucid understand that musical progression too. They headlined our MIOAZ Live launch last year, so having them return for the first anniversary and giving both artists extended sets feels very appropriate.
For us, it’s about giving great DJs enough time to show you why they’re great DJs. In future, we’d love to give some of our support DJs those sorts of opportunities too.
Q4. How do you balance established headliners with emerging London talent when curating a MIOAZ line-up?
The word balance is really important. If we’re serious about building something for the long term, we need both.
Established artists can obviously bring an audience, but they also establish the musical standard and identity of the event. Then part of our job is to use that platform to introduce people to artists they might not know yet.
We don’t want the emerging DJs to feel like names we’ve put at the bottom of the flyer to fill the early slots either. They will make musical sense within the whole day. We also put a lot of effort into creating a story around our support artists with individual features, sharing their mixes and giving the audience a reason to discover them before the event.
That’s why we look for personality and identity when we’re selecting DJs. Can they make interesting choices? Can they surprise us? Do they understand where they are in the running order and what their job is at that particular moment?
Ultimately, I’d love people to come to MIOAZ Live for Braxton or Trilucid and leave talking about someone they’d never heard of before. If that happens, we’ve done our job.
Q5. Camilla Sadaghna and Claudia O were selected through your female DJ search. What did you look for beyond technical ability?
Camilla and Claudia are exceptional DJs, and we’re excited to see what they will do on the day. We were honestly blown away by the response to the search. There were so many talented DJs that choosing two was really difficult, and there are several DJs who submitted mixes that we’d absolutely like to find the right opportunity for in 2027.
Technical ability obviously matters, but we didn’t actually need the mix to be technically perfect. Sometimes hearing how someone recovers a mix when something isn’t quite right tells me more about them as a DJ.
What we were really looking for was how they interpreted the warm-up set. We were looking for a time-appropriate mood, but were on the lookout also for those moments where we thought, “Oh, didn’t see that track coming… but it really works.”
Having representative line-ups is really important to us. Which is why we ran the search in the first place. We want our line-ups to become more representative of the wider community we want MIOAZ Live to be part of. But the opportunity still has to be earned on the music. The standard of all the submissions made that very easy in terms of quality we were looking for, but the final choice was still difficult!
Q6. MIOAZ prioritises musical progression and atmosphere over headline-chasing. Is maintaining that identity becoming harder as the platform grows?
We’re probably not big enough yet for it to have become a real problem! But we can absolutely see how it could.
Of course we’d love to book bigger artists as MIOAZ Live grows. We’re not going to pretend we wouldn’t. But the question has to remain: are we booking them because they’re right for MIOAZ Live, or because putting their name on a flyer might sell more tickets? Organic growth matters so much to us. We’d rather the venues, artists and audiences get bigger gradually while the experience remains recognisably MIOAZ Live.
We went to some of the early Anjunadeep events in smaller London clubs, and seeing what that brand has grown into is incredibly inspiring. If MIOAZ Live achieves even a fraction of that journey we’d be incredibly proud, but the interesting part for us is building something people trust along the way.
If one day we’re booking an artist purely because they’re commercially big rather than because we love what they do, that’s probably the point somebody needs to call us out!
Q7. The new label will operate through three imprints: MIOAZ Released, Green and Blue. Why separate the music by sound rather than release everything under one banner?
It’s actually much less rigid than “three imprints” probably makes it sound!
The concept originally grew out of our MIOAZ Mixcloud series. We were using colours to represent different sides of the music we love, and when we started thinking about releases it felt natural to carry that idea across.
MIOAZ Released is the label, with the colour identities helping us distinguish different sides of the music. The core MIOAZ Released identity will probably become the home for the more eclectic electronic side like ambient, chill, electronica and potentially album projects in future. Green represents the deeper and melodic house side, while Blue moves into progressive.
There’s a continuum between all three though. We’re deliberately not creating rigid rules where a track has to meet set criteria, for example, to qualify as Blue rather than Green. It should be something we can feel when we hear it.
The colours are also becoming part of MIOAZ Live. The artwork and identity of an event can reflect its lead musical direction, so the original Mixcloud idea is gradually connecting the mixes, releases and events visually as well as musically.
And it may evolve. As MIOAZ Released becomes better understood, we may eventually decide those distinctions aren’t as necessary. We’re allowing the identity to develop organically rather than forcing a label structure simply because we’ve announced one.
Q8. How will MIOAZ Live and the label work together to help artists develop behind the decks and through their own productions?
This is really where MIOAZ Released and MIOAZ Live start to make sense together.
MIOAZ Live gives us somewhere to discover artists, give them opportunities behind the decks and introduce them to an audience. MIOAZ Released gives us the opportunity to work with the production side of their career.
Artist development is really the thread connecting the two rather than something we see as a separate third undertaking.
We’re particularly interested in artists where we can build a relationship over time. On the label side, we’d much rather find someone with a small catalogue of great unreleased music and work with them on a body of work than take one track, release it and immediately move onto somebody else.
Then perhaps they’re playing one of our events, we’re supporting their releases, they’re meeting other producers and DJs through MIOAZ and collaborations start happening naturally.
We’re not pretending we can offer emerging artists the world because we’re emerging ourselves! But we can give them genuine attention and hopefully create opportunities across both sides of the brand.
Having said all that, the label is really in a soft-launch phase. We’re still learning, and we don’t want artists entrusting us with their work until we feel we’ve figured a few things out ourselves. So, for now we’re testing things with a few low-key releases under some of my own aliases.
Q9. Which digital tools or platforms have been most valuable for managing events, discovering artists and growing the MIOAZ community?
Instagram and Facebook are obviously important for building the audience and communicating what we’re doing. Meta’s advertising tools have been important because organic reach alone is difficult when you’re trying to establish a new brand. It’s been an extremely steep learning curve but rewarding when you do see improvements in engagement to the content we’re producing. Both these channels are growing organically, and we’re definitely just beginning the journey!
Resident Advisor is our ticketing platform, which gives our events another route to discovery. Mixcloud has been particularly important to MIOAZ because the mix series actually helped shape the musical and visual identity of the brand. That’s where the original colour concept developed.
For discovering artists though, technology only gets you so far. SoundCloud, Mixcloud, social media and recommendations can put somebody in front of us, but then we’ll actually listen. Our recent female DJ search is a good example, we listened to all the mixes start to finish, rather than making decisions based on follower numbers.
Behind the scenes, the less glamorous tools are just as important like shared planning documents to help two people keep on top of something that can very quickly become complicated. We’ve also recently started building a mailing list through pre-sale signups using HubSpot.
Ultimately the technology should make it easier for us to build the community, but it shouldn’t become the community.
Q10. As AI, streaming algorithms and data increasingly influence electronic music, how can independent platforms use technology without allowing it to replace human curation?
Music In Ones And Zeros — it’s literally there in our name! Electronic music has always had that relationship between humans and machines.
I’m certainly not anti-AI or anti-algorithm. We’re a team of two, so technology that helps us understand data, discover something, automate repetitive work or reach the right audience is incredibly valuable.
Where I think we should all become uncomfortable is when AI, technology or data starts making the creative decisions.
An algorithm can tell you that people who like Artist A also listen to Artist B. It can tell you which post performed best, which track gets skipped or which artist has the biggest following. What it can’t do is hear a DJ play an unexpected track at exactly the right moment and think, “We need to book this DJ.”
It’s the same with the label. I don’t want us signing a track because data suggests that particular sound is trending. I want us to release it because we heard something in it and believe somebody else needs to hear it too.
So for MIOAZ, technology should inform human decisions rather than replace them. Use the data. Use AI. Use algorithms. But then be prepared to ignore all of that occasionally because your ears and your instinct are telling you something different.
In a strange way, I think the more music becomes driven by algorithms, the more valuable genuine human curation could become.
©fm
MIOAZ LIVE
Saturday 26 September 2026
93 Feet East, London
Headliners
Braxton (Extended Set) / Trilucid (Extended Set)
Also featuring
Bertt / Akay / Andrew Hamill / Daniel D / Garth Hill / James Damian / Mars
Plus MIOAZ DJ Search winners Camilla Sadaghna and Claudia O