Emo Night Brooklyn

Two friends from Surrey and a basement in Williamsburg

Alex Badanes and Ethan Maccoby met in Surrey at the age of two and grew up in England before moving to Boston for university — Maccoby to Tufts, Badanes to Berklee College of Music. The parties they threw as students were early, unnamed versions of what followed: emo and pop-punk records played loud for people who already knew every word. When both ended up living in Williamsburg, the parties moved with them, outgrew the flat, and were shifted into a bar.

The bar was Cameo, and the first Emo Night Brooklyn took place in its basement in early 2015 to a room that held about a hundred people. Entry was free. It filled, then took over the larger space upstairs, where attendance passed 300. Brooklyn Bowl, with a capacity of around 800, became the home room and the night started charging on the door.

For the first seven years it was a side project. Badanes worked in music publishing, Maccoby in tech sales, and the night ran at weekends. Both quit their day jobs in April 2022 to take it on full time.

One brand becomes a catalogue of nights

By July 2022, when Emo Night Brooklyn played the Echoplex in Los Angeles, the parent company — then Burwood Media — was running roughly 20 shows a week with 35 DJs and three booking agents on the payroll. The founders had already started recruiting DJs out of their own audience, and had begun cloning the model for other catalogues: Gimme Gimme Disco for seventies dance records, Broadway Rave for musical theatre, and others besides.

The playlist policy was decided early and has not softened. Maccoby has said the people who were annoyed that the night was not playing strictly defined emo "quickly realised this event's not for them". What gets played is the radio-facing end of the 2000s — the songs a room of several hundred can sing without prompting — rather than a curatorial argument about what the word emo means.

Speaking to Variety in June 2025, Maccoby put the scale plainly: "It started with one brand and one show, ten years ago... now we're averaging more than 1,100 shows every year in 60 cities." The company had eight full-time staff at that point and had sold around 1.5 million tickets. Badanes noted that tickets run roughly $20 to $40, "a fraction of what it cost to attend the tour for major artists". Every DJ is hired directly, through several rounds of interviews and a shadowing period alongside an existing resident.

What stands in for a discography

Emo Night Brooklyn has no records of its own. The equivalent body of work is the run of anniversary shows, where the DJ night briefly becomes a performance bill and the songs are sung by the people who recorded them.

The tenth-anniversary show, announced in December 2024, took place at the Brooklyn Paramount on 25 January 2025 and sold out. The guest list ran to Gabe Saporta of Cobra Starship, Kellin Quinn of Sleeping With Sirens, John O'Callaghan of The Maine, Ken Vasoli of The Starting Line, Derek Discanio of State Champs, Forrest Kline of Hellogoodbye, Chris Freeman of Hot Mulligan, Kevin Kaine of Knocked Loose and the duo Daisy Grenade. It sat inside a touring run of more than two dozen anniversary dates spanning December 2024 to February 2025, including Irving Plaza in Manhattan the night after the Paramount show.

That format was pushed further in January 2026. Long Live Emo Fest, announced in December 2025 and co-created with Burwoodland, ran at the Brooklyn Paramount on 24 January 2026 as the brand's first festival — a single night built around rotating sets and guest vocals rather than a DJ booth, with Kellin Quinn, Travie McCoy of Gym Class Heroes and Craig Owens of Chiodos among those appearing. The company's own archive lists it as having run in three parts across the evening.

Standing in late 2026

The most consequential recent development is financial. On 15 January 2026 it was reported that Mark Cuban had made what was described only as a significant investment in Burwoodland; no figure or terms were disclosed. Cuban framed it as a bet against screens — "In an AI world, what you do is far more important than what you prompt" — and, in other coverage of the same deal, as a case for leaving the house. Badanes called the backing of "an investor as respected and accomplished as Mark" an honour; Maccoby pointed at the size of the team behind the output, "a group as small as ours".

The numbers attached to that announcement were 1,200-plus shows a year and more than 1.5 million tickets sold across the brands, operating across the United States, Canada and Europe. Emo Night Brooklyn remains the brand the company is named for in headlines, and the one that carries the touring load.

The 2026 itinerary bears that out. The night played Ampère in Antwerp on 7 February and Saint Andrew's Hall in Detroit on 27 February; the company's own listings put it in Paris in September and Singapore in October. As of early November 2026 there are around a dozen and a half dates on sale through the end of the year, almost all in the United States: Alchemy in Providence and The Venice West in California in the first week of November, The Stone Pony in Asbury Park on the 19th, then a cluster on 20 and 21 November taking in Garcia's at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, Banyan Live in West Palm Beach, The Foundry in Philadelphia, Brighton Music Hall in Boston and Le Poisson Rouge in Manhattan. The Thanksgiving weekend run covers the 9:30 Club in Washington, Cobra Lounge in Chicago, Arrow in Allentown and Lincoln's Beard in Miami on 27 November, with Skully's Music Diner in Columbus and Saturn in Birmingham, Alabama the following night.

The night itself

Nothing about the staging has been scaled up to match the business. The company still describes the event in the same terms it used years ago — a late-night DJ-based dance party playing emo and pop-punk, with the possibility that one of the artists responsible turns up unannounced — and that description is accurate rather than modest. There is no band. Two DJs work a booth and a room does the rest.

A reviewer who went to Le Poisson Rouge and wrote it up in March 2026 had last attended in 2019, at the Asbury Park edition, and found the comparison held: "The floor was as packed in 2026 as it was in 2019." The set began at 11.15pm and worked through Fall Out Boy, Jimmy Eat World, Paramore, Blink-182, Evanescence and We The Kings. The pit opened during We The Kings' "Check Yes Juliet" and was, by that account, more frenzied than the surrounding crowd but still approachable enough to join. Phones mostly stayed down. The physical bill arrived the next morning: "my neck is still delicately whiplashed, and my calves are tender from jumping up and down."