Marcel Winatschek

What Happens When the Soft Drink Buys the Hardest Room in the City

Coca-Cola’s Carbonate program in 2018 was either a cynical marketing exercise wearing a club-culture costume or a genuine attempt to put real money behind real artists—probably both, since those things have never been mutually exclusive. What suggested actual taste was involved: DJ Stingray, Marcel Dettmann, Chris Liebing, Robert Hood on the techno side. Those aren’t names you find by asking an intern to put together a playlist. Those are names that mean something specific to people who’ve stood in a dark room at four in the morning and felt the bass doing something rearranging to their internal organs.

The program moved through Leipzig, Cologne, Frankfurt, Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Stuttgart, and several other German cities, pairing headline acts with local collectives—groups like Trap or Die from Berlin and Ruffhouse from Munich getting the kind of institutional backing that independent promoters usually have to piece together in fragments. On the hip-hop side, German acts Nimo and SSIO shared bills with international guests including Yassin Bey and MadeinTYO.

The question with corporate club sponsorship is always the same one: does the brand get inside the room, or do the artists? When the artists are Robert Hood and Marcel Dettmann, the answer is that the brand is basically irrelevant. It’s still just techno, and the Coca-Cola logo somewhere near the exit doesn’t change what happens on the floor.