Last week, I was looking on Companies House when I discovered a curious notice saying Boiler Room’s accounts were late. Surely some mistake? One email to the press office confirmed accounts had already been filed – Companies House simply hadn’t processed them yet. It was an automatically generated notice on the website.

This blog spoke yesterday – with the dissecting of Hannah Wants’s businesses – about finding out the real impact of the pandemic on dance music’s bank accounts, hence why I was looking for Boiler Room (UK) Limited. Well, those accounts are now online and they go all the way up to October 31st last year.

And they make grim reading. In 2020, Boiler Room made an accumulated loss of £11,877,734. Now, given they got a bailout last year of £791,652 from Arts Council England, the negative figure might not be surprising – and indeed, this is something they reference within the same document.

However, one look at the October 2019 figure – a few months before the pandemic – reveals they made an accumulated loss that year of £10,661,293. And going back through their other financial statements, the company appears not to have made any profit since 2016. They’re all in here if you’d like a look.

So since Boiler Room hasn’t made any money for eight years, why did Dice buy them? Well, either founder Blaise Bellville has charms and powers of persuasion not heard of before, or Boiler Room has something else going for it. Phil Hutcheon of DICE speaks about “The combination of Boiler Room with the distribution and technology of DICE”, but remains vague on detail.

And as for how much Blaise Bellville will be earning out of the deal? A source who’s been involved in a number of business acquisitions in the past says “He’ll be making something out of it, but unless DICE see gargantuan possibilities out of the acquisition, it’s unlikely to be the sort of headline figure your readers suspect it is”…