Resident Advisor

For the article on college advisers, see resident assistant.

Resident Advisor (also known as RA) is an online music magazine and community platform established in 2001 and dedicated to showcasing electronic music, artists and events across the globe. RA's editorial team provides news, music and event reviews, as well as films, features and interviews. Resident Advisor also provides global event listings and ticket sales platform, club and promoter directories, artist and record label profiles, and the RA Podcast.

Resident Advisor

Type of business	Privately held company
Type of site	music website
Founded	2001; 24 years ago (2001)
Headquarters	London, England, UK
Area served	Worldwide
Founder(s)	Paul Clement Nick Sabine
Employees	100
URL	ra.co
Launched	10 August 2001; 23 years ago (2001-08-10)

The company has its headquarters in London, with additional offices in Berlin, Los Angeles, New York and Melbourne.^[1] The website won a People's Voice award in the 12th Annual Webby Awards in 2008.^[2]

History

Resident Advisor was founded in Sydney, Australia in 2001 by Paul Clement and Nick Sabine as a website for providing news and information relating to the Australian dance music scene.^[1][3]

As Resident Advisor grew both Clement and Sabine initially kept their day jobs and hired staff to help with the site.^[1] In 2006, after Clement and Sabine had moved to the UK, they both began working full time on Resident Advisor and incorporated the company in the UK, with an office in Berlin opening 2007.^[1]

RA Tickets was unveiled in 2008 to allow promoters of electronic music to sell tickets. RA Tickets launched a face-value ticket resale system.^[4]

In January 2014, the first complete redesign in the site's history was announced, adding mobile support, responsive design, a new logo, full SoundCloud integration on artist pages and other features.^[5] At that time, Resident Advisor started to have more than two million users per month.^[5]

An article in The New York Times, published in July 2015, mentions Resident Advisor as "one of the most influential EDM-focused sites".^[3]

The company launched its first consumer-focused iOS app in 2015. The RA Guide, free in the App Store (iOS), takes the site's listings for clubs, festivals and concerts to the mobile market.^[6] Apple featured RA as a curator, with the launch of Apple Music, to contribute electronic music playlists to the streaming service.^[7]

In October 2020, following the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on British arts and culture organisations, RA received £750,000 from the Arts Council of England as part of the UK's Culture Recovery Fund initiative.

At the start of 2021, Resident Advisor launched a redesign of their existing website. The new design also coincided with a change to their domain name, migrating from residentadvisor.net to ra.co.^[8]

Other media

The RA Podcast is a weekly mix of electronic music from top producers and DJs. It launched on 6 March 2006 with a mix from Troy Pierce. In 2010, Resident Advisor started a second podcast series titled the RA Exchange. The site defines the RA Exchange as a series of conversations with artists (e.g., Guy Gerber, Morgan Geist, and New Order), labels (e.g., Defected Records, Future Classic, and Rush Hour), and promoters (e.g., Decibel, MUTEK, and Sónar) shaping the electronic music landscape.^[9]

Resident Advisor launched RA Films in 2011, starting with a documentary series called Real Scenes that covered music culture in Bristol, Berlin and Detroit. Over the following years, RA continued to produce a variety of video-based content including; live performances, interviews, and both short and long-form reporting.^[10]

Annual polls

From 2006 to 2016 Resident Advisor conducted two annual voting polls at the end of each year under the name RA Poll. The first polls the publications readers, who are asked to vote for their top 100 DJs^[11] and live acts^[12] of the year.

Resident Advisor ceased the polls in 2017 due to concerns about diversity and their growing influence on the music industry.^[13]

Album of the Year

Year	Artist	Album	Source
2006	Booka Shade	Movements	[14]
2007	Burial	Untrue	[15]
2008	Shed	Shedding the Past	[16]
2009	DJ Sprinkles	Midtown 120 Blues	[17]
2010	Caribou	Swim	[18]
2011	Nicolas Jaar	Space Is Only Noise	[19]
2012	Voices from the Lake	Voices from the Lake	[20]
2013	James Holden	The Inheritors	[21]
2014	Andy Stott	Faith in Strangers	[22]
2015	Floating Points	Elaenia	[23]
2016	Babyfather	"BBF" Hosted by DJ Escrow	[24]
2019	FKA Twigs	Magdalene	[25]
2020	DJ Python	Mas Amable	[26]
2021	Space Afrika	Honest Labour	[27]
2022	D. Tiffany and Roza Terenzi	Edge of Innocence	[28]
2023	Kelela	Raven	[29]
2024	Loidis	One Day	[30]

For 2017 and 2018, Resident Advisor published entirely non-ranked album lists.^[31][32]

Decade	Artist	Album	Source
2000s	Ricardo Villalobos	Alcachofa	[33]

For the 2010s, Resident Advisor published a largely non-ranked album list.^[34]