Swissbeatbox announces new location and categories for GBB 2023, but is that wise?

In early 2019, a buoyant Pepouni spoke to me over Skype about the upcoming 2019 Grand Beatbox Battle. The event was going to be held in Poland, the first time it was outside of Switzerland in the event’s decade long history. For Swissbeatbox, the reasoning for the move was manifold, but it all boiled down to one word: expansion. Warsaw is cheaper than Basel and more centrally located. Fans from Eastern Europe and Asia would find the event more accessible, and it was close enough to western Europe to be a testing ground for the Swissbeatbox CEO’s bigger ambition: “We want to bring the GBB every single year to another country,” Pepouni told me.

“You already know that GBB [2023] is gonna happen in Tokyo,” opens Juliana Olanska, Swssibeatbox’s General Manager, in their wildcard announcement for GBB 2023. With this news, and the recent announcement that the GBB will add two new competition categories, Swissbeatbox is officially pursuing their goals of expansion in earnest. 

GBB 2019 was the most successful in the event’s history, and they communicated the plan to make the GBB a truly international event by naming the 2020 event “GBB World League.” Covid delayed the World League until 2021, and for convenience’s sake the event–which was eventually hosted in 2021–remained in Poland. Still, the 2021 event came with many drawbacks. The sound quality suffered. Staff were overworked. Mics broke on stage (?!?!?!). Most concerning of all, attendee and participant safety fell by the wayside. 

Given the failures of GBB 2021, one has to wonder: is this continued expansion the right move for Swissbeatbox? 

In many ways, the beatboxing community knows nothing other than expansion. Choose a metric to measure the community, and you will see a steady rise. Some include participants at the Beatbox Battle World Championship, views and subscribers on major YouTube Channels, and in-person attendees at battles. All of these metrics have measurably grown, and the soft metrics have as well. The production value for beatbox videos and events is far higher now than ever before, and artists build their brands rather than focusing on battles.

In my 2019 conversation with Pepouni, he laid out a narrative of growth and development from the moment he took ownership over the GBB. Firstly, expansion from a Swiss battle to an international battle. Secondly, expansion from one category (solo) to three (loop, tag-team). Sound and video quality were next, and around 2015, these constant improvements led to the first boom in Swissbeatbox’s following. Each of these changes came with small additions to the Swissbeatbox team. By the time Swissbeatbox was planning GBB 2021, they had a team of around 20 staff members, most of whom were part time. For the event, they hired security, an additional team of local volunteers as runners, and a video team as well. 

As Swissbeatbox and the beatbox world enjoyed their correlated boom times, Pepouni began his plan to expand the Grand Beatbox Battle. But lost, perhaps, in the insane battles and videos, is the fact that in 2018 the Grand Beatbox Battle ended a years-long partnership with B-Scene (the music festival that hosted the GBB in Basel) in order to host the event in Poland. 

The days with B-Scene were enormously important for the GBB, and for Pepouni specifically. In our 2019 conversation, Pepouni laid out the division of labor between B-Scene and the GBB. “They had very good service, food, a good venue, security. I didn't have to think so much about [those elements].” 

From 2018 on, Pepouni had to manage all that with expanded camera crews, as well as expanded artist and audience pools. For the 2021 GBB, Swissbeatbox’s most ambitious event ever, the scope of the event was clearly too much. In addition to the sound and safety issues, fans were forced to stand outside the venue for hours while Swissbeatbox ran behind schedule for sound checks. Artists and staff argued over where beatboxers could beatbox in the affiliated 5-star hotel. Video staff were not allowed bathroom breaks. t took about five hours to get press credentials for anybody who wasn’t affiliated with Swissbeatbox.

Most of Swissbeatbox’s biggest failings at GBB21 stem from not having enough staff and resources to do all the new things they wanted to. Once they were overcommitted, they had to prioritize doing some things better than others. Not only did Swissbeatboxforce themselves into that tough decision by biting off more than they can chew, but they also compounded the error by misordering their value stack, and assuming artists and fans would just be happy to be there rather than expecting Swissbeatbox to take them into consideration. 

In the months since Swissbeatbox paused uploading videos to consider their failings at GBB21, they have made no concrete commitments. For fans, they did nothing to improve safety. For artists, they didn’t give them proper sound support and time to breathe. Finally,  when it comes to their local partners, they gave them no confidence that they wouldn’t take advantage of them again. 

Additionally, with all of these indications that Swissbeatbox needs to add more capacity and reduce workload, they are adding Producer and Under-18 categories to GBB23. These are two categories that Swissbeatbox is least equipped to handle. With just one sound engineer, how will Swissbeatbox have enough time to stress-test and sound-check six producer sets? With so few staff, who will be planning for the safety of the (at least eight) under-age artists signing performance contracts with the GBB?

To be fair, it costs money to invest in staff, and there is precious little of that in the beatbox world (a topic for another day). What’s more, Swissbeatbox will be hosting the 2023 GBB in partnership with the local beatbox organization in Japan, and presumably the folks at Asia Beatbox too. There are far stronger beatboxing institutions in Asia than in Poland, and Swissbeatbox should be able to count on their partners for support. Nonetheless, Swissbeatbox will need to shoulder most of this burden on their own, and they have given fans, artists, and the parents of their new underage artists little reason to assume they can handle it.

The beatbox community is better off in years with its flagship events. To see that the GBB will be back after a year away is huge for the scene. But worse than a year without the GBB would be a year with another failed GBB. If fans can’t trust Swissbeatbox to put on good events in new countries every year, or to take care of the core competitions as they add new ones on the periphery, then Pepouni will have to change his stated ambitions or face a possibility of losing his artists and audience. 

Edited by Jack Ahern.