The website lets clubbers queue up, visit bathrooms, and even get turned away by bouncers, all to raise money for charity.
Are you missing the sticky and cramped dance floors of nightclubs? Craving the heavy bass beats of an underground DJ?
While I can’t promise you’ll be able to do the real thing outside anytime soon, a team of European promoters and creators have banded together to launch ‘Club Quarantäne’, a virtual online experience that recreates the highs and lows of late night clubbing in Berlin. Three live events have been hosted so far that can last up to 40 hours at a time and over 700,000 unique guests have taken part. More are planned for later this year.
All you have to do to attend is visit the ‘Club Quarantäne’ website via your desktop browser whenever a ‘club night’ is scheduled. The site uses a mix of 360-degree-video, live streaming, and interactive selection screens to bring the idea to life, complete with virtual bouncers and security questions you’ll have to answer correctly if you want to be ‘let in’.
There’s no guarantee you’ll be allowed entry, by the way. The first club night on the website saw 40,000 people rejected for getting questions wrong, though you can just refresh your browser and try again if you’re determined enough. Carlo Luis Ruben Schenk is a Berlin club promoter who’s part of the team behind Club Quarantäne, and he explained to Business Insider that there’s no clear way to get the security questions right. ‘It’s random. It’s also a joke about security guys and the night hosts in clubs. Sometimes it really feels random why you aren’t chosen to get in’.
While other online club nights have been floating about during lockdown, most have involved a simple Zoom stream of a DJ at home with a live chat. Club Quarantäne cranks things up a notch, with fully realised 3D spaces that you can roam around in and interactive visuals that will shift and alter depending on what you do. Virtual ‘bathrooms’ also serve as smaller chat rooms where users can alter their profiles and exchange Zoom links for external virtual parties with one another.
Club Quarantäne is completely free, but a virtual ‘bar’ area allows you to make donations if you so wish. Over €14,000 has been raised for charities such as Seawatch, which helps rescue refugees in the Mediterranean, and the team are eager to continue hosting virtual events for Pride dates in the future.
Schenk said they didn’t want to ‘just fill the gap until Covid is over’. Club Quarantäne aims to be ‘a new way of performing music on the internet’ and could be become permanent moving forward. Thanks to relatively recent innovations such as 360-degree-video and group live streams, these types of events that recreate real world experiences are becoming easier to produce, and it wouldn’t be a huge shock to see more companies doing similar things with virtual live music. The industry has seen huge financial losses due to lockdown and any way to potentially bring in extra revenue will no doubt be jumped upon.
Plus you’re less likely to make a drunken fool of yourself and crash into other people via a virtual experience. Not that I’m speaking from experience, of course.
I’m Charlie (He/Him), a Senior Writer at Thred. I was previously the Editor at Thred before moving to Bristol in 2024. As a music and gaming enthusiast, I’m a nerd for pop culture. You can find me curating playlists, designing article headline images, and sipping cider on a Thursday. Follow me on LinkedIn and drop me some ideas/feedback via email.
A late entry for the most disturbing art installation of 2025, Beeple’s ‘Regular Animals’ features a pen of robotic dogs bearing the likeness of tech billionaires and revered artists. They canter around, snap photos, and take NFT dumps.
‘You may live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension,’ declared Nikola Tesla in 1898. I’d say we’re probably at that point.
Onlookers at Art Basel Miami Beach are transfixed in a state...
The BBC found that more than 2,000 extremely abusive social media posts were sent in a single weekend of Premier League and Women’s Super League action.
As someone with roughly two hours per day scrolling X – no, I’m not proud of it – I’m fully aware of just how rife with abuse ‘Football Twitter’ is.
While much of the self-proclaimed community is based on good hearted fun, primarily laughing in...
As people become increasingly fatigued with second guessing whether media bares any hallmarks of AI, ‘human made’ is fast becoming its own USP. How grimly predictable.
Earning a crust in the world of publishing means my colleagues and I are more accustomed to dodging AI slop than most.
Much like the machine learning systems continually reinventing themselves, we’re becoming increasingly adept over time, specifically at twigging where the creative output of...
Are you an elderly Gen Zer? Confused about why the kids are nonsensically saying ‘6-7?’ Us too.
Every so often, a moment in pop culture will arrive as a reminder that youth isn’t eternal. Hearing an in-joke you don’t understand or missing an obvious conversational reference can make even the most mentally robust person uneasy.
Am I out of touch? Has the world moved on? Are we over the hill already?
As...
We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.
0 comments
