It may only be the closing date of January, but Ears To The House is already getting a flavour of what money spinners the dance music business world is getting behind this year. So far, there are two big hopes – the first appears to be spending obscene amounts of money on greedy higher echelon DJs and hoping customers agree they’re worth the massively inflated ticket prices.

The second appears to be music education. We saw signs of this last year when Pete Tong launched his £418 DJ academy – something which just reminded us at the time of Krusty The Klown’s notorious Clown College. There’s also the Toolroom Academy and Richie Hawtin’s shiny new apprenticeship in the possibly less shiny Huddersfield.

However, if you’ve got a lot of money you’re willing to spend, (or pour down the drain, depending on how you look at it) there’s now another option for you – a retreat. Yes, courtesy of Mixmasters, you can head to what they describe as “a luxury villa” in Ibiza for “Immersive 7-day Music Production Retreats for Serious Electronic Artists Who Want To Get Signed”. Their words, not ours.

So what do you get over the seven days? Well, you get access to tutors including Funk D’Void – a Scottish DJ and producer who’s been around since the mid-90s and has done rather well for himself. Other tutors include Robert Babicz, Huxley, Amber D and a particularly grumpy looking Graham Sahara – but never mind that, what else is there?

Let’s talk about what you’ll eat out there – because we seem to spend an awful lot of time at Ears To The House doing precisely that. They say “you will have all meals & snacks prepared for you by our own in-house chef” and access to a barbecue and bar. The “food is very important to us and each meal is prepared to the highest restaurant standards… drinks, snacks and locally roasted coffee are all included”.

Sounds delicious – although we’re not sure we could stomach the prospect of 12 blokes spending the week tediously talking about nothing but how much of a tech-house banger they’ve just made or how many hertz to roll off a bassline. The price tag for all this? It starts off at $4495 for the week.

Does this course really offer anything that couldn’t be learned from the endless YouTube tutorials available on the subject these days? We’d love to hear from anyone who’s actually done this retreat in the past…