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PHOTOGRAPH BY TK; ILLUSTRATION BY TK
Nightlife
Chess Match
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A billionaire mogul gobbling up Miami clubs,
local nightlife impresarios joining forces, and
others cashing out—it’s all part of what may
mean tectonic changes in the Miami club scene.
PHOTOGRAPH BY TK; ILLUSTRATION BY TK
By Marc Goodman | Illustration by Paul Dickinson
The cast of characters
(FROM LEFT): David Grutman,
Chris Paciello, Eric Milon,
Roman Jones, Nicola
Siervo, Karim Masri, and
Robert Sillerman.
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hen Sofia Vergara’s legendary chest broke free
from its restraints during
a dress-tearing scuffle
involving fiancé Nick Loeb
and others at days-old Miami
Beach Story Nightclub on New
Year’s Eve, the only question
club operators David Grutman
and Chris Paciello should have asked themselves
was, Did they spell the name of the club right? The
imbroglio was catnip to the New York Post, TMZ,
and the Daily Mail and a great, splashy start to a
nightspot that’s inaugurating a new era in
Miami’s—and perhaps even America’s—nightlife.
The club Story began as an eyebrow-raising
brainstorm of sorts between four of Miami’s biggest nightlife titans: David Grutman, creator of
megaclub LIV; Chris Paciello of the Delano’s
FDR lounge and Bianca restaurant; and Nicola
Siervo and Karim Masri, of Wall and Living
Room at the W South Beach. Though they contributed ideas, Siervo and Masri soon refocused
on their existing projects, leaving Grutman and
Paciello to mold Story to their liking. (The four
remain close friends, says Grutman.)
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Beyond the alliances, Story is introducing a concept that Grutman calls a “huge risk”: The club’s
biggest night, Saturday, will be devoted to underground dance music—think DJ Luciano, not Flo
Rida; Marco Carola and Richie Hawtin, not Nicki
Minaj. Previously, says Grutman, “This was music
you’d have to go to a dark, black box in Wynwood
to hear. At Story, we’re putting it in a big, shiny box.
To do this on a regular Saturday night—it will
change the landscape of clubbing.”
The thought is to get out ahead of a trend they
feel must inevitably cross the Atlantic into main-
All this jockeying and trendspotting is about
money, of course. The success of nightclubs such
as LIV, Wall, Mansion, and Mokaï has paralleled
the explosion of EDM, or electronic dance
music, a $4 billion business. DJs are rock stars,
commanding $1 million and up for a festival
appearance, and at clubs, people dance not with
each other but facing the DJ, ecstatically, as if worshipping at the feet of a teen pop idol. Mainstream
singers, such as Rihanna, collaborate with DJs,
creating a wide and enthusiastic audience for this
music on everyday radio.
As the Story team reshuffled, David Grutman sold
most of his company to SFX Entertainment—a
tsunami-like new force in the nightlife industry.
stream consumption here. This European mainstay
has no vocals-based “songs” per se. “It’s up to six
channels of different tracks the DJs are mixing
simultaneously. They’re creating the songs, not just
playing them,” says Grutman. “From their sicko
heads, they’re making crazy music” on the spot.
Now, consolidation may herald further seismic
change in the US nightlife industry. As the Story
team reshuffled, David Grutman sold most of his
company, Miami Marketing Group, to what has
emerged as a tsunami-like new force in the nightlife industry, SFX Entertainment, the brainchild of
PHOTOGRAPHY BY WORLDREDEYE.COM (ANGELLO); JIM ARBOGAST (GRUTMAN)
Steve Angello at Story
on opening night,
December 26, 2012.
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PHOTOGRAPH BY TK; ILLUSTRATION BY TK
In addition to launching
Story, David Grutman (LEFT)
and Chris Paciello are the
movers behind Miami’s
megaclub LIV and of the
Delano’s FDR and Bianca,
respectively.
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salaries, who, according to one nightlife insider,
are letting EDM’s heady rise go to their heads.
Given all this M&A, some fear a bland corporatization of club life, with first-come, first-served
online ticket sales leading to mass-appeal music,
and club interiors standardized as if part of a
“The alliance of national companies with regional
businesses will provide the local business owners with
a platform for national growth.”—Noah Tepperberg
is much the way Live Nation swallowed up regional
concert promoters in the ’90s. It’s a strategy that’s
vertically integrating the scene, allowing outfits
like SFX to put on events, connect EDM fans to
each other on the Web between shows, and to
deliver the audience to marketers, while giving
operators and promoters such as Grutman the
capital and international reach to indulge all their
expansion ideas. If Grutman wanted to open a LIV
in Berlin or do a pop-up Story at a 200,000-person
EDM festival in Croatia, SFX’s deep pockets, huge
infrastructure, and reach can make it happen a lot
quicker than he could on his own.
Miami is a big part of Sillerman’s plans—he has
also bought most of Eric Milon and Roman Jones’s
The Opium Group, owner of some of Miami’s
largest clubs, from Mansion to Set to Mokaï. With
this much of the market under one umbrella, SFX’s
clubs could gain leverage over DJs and their
Subway franchise. Don’t fret, Grutman says. SFX
will not interfere in the actual operations of the
clubs under its umbrella, but enhance them.
“It’s impossible to generalize if selling one’s business to an SFX or Live Nation is a good or bad
phenomenon,” says Noah Tepperberg, a major
player in US nightlife and co-owner of Avenue and
Marquee clubs in New York and Lavo in Las
Vegas. “One thing that’s for sure is that the alliance
of national companies like SFX with regional businesses will provide the local business owners with a
platform for national growth. I would not be surprised if you start seeing Miami brands popping up
in LA, New York, or Las Vegas.” (Tepperberg
won’t say if SFX is in his future.)
Back at Story, Paciello and Grutman are filling
the place, fueled by EDM and DJ culture, via a
novel concept that is actually fairly old: a dance
club that has an honest-to-goodness dance floor
(the biggest in Miami Beach, at that). “It’s a fanfriendly door,” says Grutman, settled with Paciello
around a table in the upstairs office. “It’s not an
ultra-VIP, Frenchy-Frenchy lounge. I charge $125
for a pre-sold ticket at LIV; here, as a fan, you can
get the same thing for $40 or $75, to see Tiësto or
Avicii. We want the fans here.”
T
he high-yielding, bottle-service
tables theoretically displaced by
a dance floor are still present—
Story has 10 more than LIV—just
stacked upward, stadium-style.
Central to the concept is the
huge, altar-like DJ booth, with a VIP seating area
just behind it that sold for $100,000 (not including
taxes and an $8,000 service charge) on New Year’s
Eve to a Nigerian heavy hitter who brought just
six (including two Hilton sisters) of his allowed 50
guests. And several regular tables did more than
six figures’ worth of business that night as well. The
club’s first week, the end of December, boasted a
lineup of stadium-filling DJs: Kaskade for New
Year’s Eve, as well as Avicii, Tiësto, Cedric
Gervais, deadmau5, and all three members of
the splintered Swedish House Mafia—Axwell,
Steve Angello, and Sebastian Ingrosso. (SHM
member Axwell actually suggested the name
Story to the partners.)
With Story, Paciello says, club designer Francois
Frossard—who also designed Louis, Set, Mansion,
and LIV—“killed it.” Terraces of seating nooks rise
stadium-style from the central dance floor. You can
PHOTOGRAPHY BY SETH BROWARNIK/WORLDREDEYE.COM (MOKAÏ, HILTON, AERIALIST);
FONTAINEBLEAU MIAMI BEACH (LIV)
Robert Sillerman. Sillerman founded what grew
into Live Nation, the world’s biggest live entertainment producer, and his SFX project is on a stated
$1 billion first-year spree to buy up to 50 nightlife
companies such as Grutman’s, as well as music festivals and ticketing entities across the nation. This
Paris Hilton stopped by
Amnesia during WMC
2012 and sprayed the
crowd with a CO2 gun.
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PHOTOGRAPH BY TK; ILLUSTRATION BY TK
Glitzy bottle service at
lounges like Mokaï can
account for more than
half of the club’s profits.
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see a huge portion of the whole club from every
seat, so the views of partiers ascending and
descending the multiple staircases enhance the
drama and people-watching. And, Grutman
points out, “There are subwoofers in every banquette.” Cutting across the ceiling is a
diamond-shaped curtain of hundreds of what look
like large stalactites of lit ping-pong balls synced
with lights on the columns and the back walls.
Infinite Audio’s custom sound design makes your
hair twitch with the bass.
N
PHOTOGRAPH BY TK; ILLUSTRATION BY TK
ightlife insiders estimate
that a high-volume club such
as Story might average well
over $1 million in revenue
per month. For example,
LIV is estimated to have
earned $35 million to $45 million in 2011,
according to the trade publication Nightclub &
Bar. A large percentage of revenue comes from
table sales—as much as 80 percent. With luck,
Story’s 62 tables will fill with the 50 or so clients
in the club landscape who can be counted on to
spend $10,000 to $250,000 a night—something
that happens as often as 50 times a year at LIV.
Indeed, Story is a business. The actual cash
investors are Fontainebleau owner Jeff Soffer
and club heavy hitter André Boudou, the latter
of whom opened Amnesia in 1993, in the space
Story now occupies. “This was the scariest place
on earth,” Grutman says of the neighborhood
before then. “Amnesia was a game-changer. It
Though LIV has dominated
the club scene since
opening in 2008, Grutman
feels there’s room in Miami
for Story.
brought the big, splashy, European-flavored
dance-club aesthetic to Miami.” After a long and
successful run as Opium nightclub, the building
hosted a reboot of Amnesia that only lasted a
year. In the spring of 2012, with the space now
available, Paciello and Grutman went to Soffer
with the idea for Story. It was a canny rear-guard
measure as well as a potential new money-maker.
Of the move, Paciello says, “It was an opportunity to grab the space and protect the other clubs
we have, and for all of us to work together.”
Better they take the space than someone else,
and thus control the market with two big clubs
and achieve purchasing power with bookings
and liquor.
But how to avoid cannibalizing their other
clubs’ business? Is Miami really big enough for
LIV and Story, not to mention the other large
properties in town? “We’re counter-programming
residential buildings—Ian Schrager’s new One
Ocean development will be next door—the pair
say they’ll do whatever it takes to be good neighbors. “There’s so much soundproofing here—much
more than is required,” says Paciello. “It’s just
called respect,” adds Grutman.
“We think Story will bring new life to the other
places in this neighborhood,” Grutman says. “I
want all the other clubs and bars around here to
be busy.” (In the same way, he says, neighbors
Estiatorio Milos, Prime One Twelve, and Joe’s
Stone Crab feed Story with a flow of customers.)
Two expert club hands, SFX’s deep pockets, a
location in the burgeoning South of Fifth neighborhood, a recovering economy, ever-increasing
Miami tourist arrivals—what could go wrong?
“This club could be perfect, and it could still fail,”
Grutman warns. Paciello adds, “If it’s just not
good timing.” But for these guys, optimism is
“Story was an opportunity to grab the space and
protect the other clubs we have, and for all of us to
work together.”—Chris Paciello
it to our other clubs,” says Grutman. “Friday is
more open format at LIV—pop, rock, ’80s, and
house—whereas [at Story] we’re just going to be
house on Fridays. LIV’s Saturday night music will
be played here on Friday.”
In a neighborhood fast filling with high-end
second nature. Miami is on a seemingly unstoppable rise. Grutman says all the other clubs in
town “serve a purpose for Miami, as I do. We’re
both pushing Miami Beach, right? We’re pushing
Miami, Miami, Miami. So it’s great for the city.
I’m a big fan of this place.” Let the Story begin. OD
The Opium Group relaunched a
renovated Mansion in 2012, with
the addition of dramatic aerialist
performances, then sold the club
to SFX this year.
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