Context
Bar Choir was created in 2016 at Discovery Nightclub in Darwin’s hospitality and nightlife market, where venues need programming that gives people a reason to attend, participate and return. Tuesday had been the venue’s least profitable trading night. The opportunity was to turn that quiet night into a repeatable, high-energy event with its own audience, rhythm and commercial identity.
The format later travelled beyond its original room. Benjamin took Bar Choir on the road and proved that the model was not just a single-venue novelty; it was a transferable hospitality format that could adapt to different audiences while keeping the core social and musical experience intact.
Problem
Hospitality programming often fails when it depends on one-off novelty or passive audiences. The challenge was to design a format that could work week after week, support venue rhythm, engage hospitality workers and patrons, and remain simple enough for people to understand immediately. It also needed to produce a clear commercial result, not just a busy room.
Benjamin’s Role
Benjamin created Bar Choir, acted as DJ and main host, and shaped the Discovery Nightclub experience across multiple years. The role combined event design, music programming, live hosting, audience management, humour, pacing, promotion, commercial iteration and venue collaboration.
What Benjamin Built Or Changed
- Built a group singing and DJ-led participation format that made the audience part of the event.
- Developed repeatable weekly structure rather than a one-off activation.
- Turned Tuesday from the venue’s least profitable night into its strongest trading night other than Saturday.
- Used humour, song selection, crowd reading and venue pacing to keep the room engaged.
- Created a recognisable hospitality-night format that travelled to different Northern Territory audiences.
- Balanced entertainment value with the operational realities of licensed venues.
- Established a format that has since influenced many copy-cat venue events across Australia.
Stakeholders
Venue management, hospitality workers, patrons, performers, regional venue partners and nightlife audiences.
Delivery Approach
The approach was practical experience design. The event had to be simple enough for first-time attendees, structured enough for venues to program repeatedly, and flexible enough to adapt to different audiences and room energy.
Benjamin treated the event like a product: define the format, test the audience response, refine the running order, build repeat attendance, improve the trading result and make the experience easy for the venue to explain. The road format proved the model could travel beyond Discovery Nightclub while still retaining the same participatory character.
Outcomes
Bar Choir became a durable recurring venue experience and a major commercial success. It transformed Tuesday trading at Discovery Nightclub from the weakest night of the week into the venue’s highest-performing night other than Saturday. Its value was not only entertainment; it created a repeatable social ritual that built community, differentiated a quieter trading night and gave the venue a distinctive event customers actively returned for.
The format’s influence also extended beyond the original event. Since its creation in 2016, similar group-singing, venue-led participation formats have appeared across Australia, demonstrating that the core idea translated into a wider hospitality trend.
What It Demonstrates
Experience design, community building, audience behaviour insight, live facilitation, commercial event design and the ability to turn an informal creative idea into a repeatable operating format with a measurable trading impact.