Simon Dunmore spent two decades building Defected Records into the label that practically defines modern house music, then sold it in 2022 and stepped back into an A&R consultant role. Four years on, he's majority owner of something else entirely: House Culture, the house-music media brand that started life as an Instagram account.
Why would the man who sold a label buy into an Instagram account?
House Culture isn't a label or a club. Stephen Hedge and Richard Clark met as strangers on a Shoreditch dancefloor in 2012 and started posting records and party flyers for fellow house heads. The account grew toward 100,000 followers, then spun off a podcast in 2019, led by contributor Matt Rouse, that has pulled in guests like Fatboy Slim, Danny Tenaglia and David Morales. Dunmore showed up as a guest in 2024, liked what he saw, came back to host a five-part takeover series and some live onstage recordings in London, and kept talking to Hedge and Clark until the conversation turned into a deal.
"I was coming to terms that perhaps I needed purpose in my life and that I was premature in my retirement."
What does Dunmore actually get out of the deal?
No price has been disclosed, and the structure is a majority shareholding, not a full buyout: Hedge and Clark stay on as founders, Rouse keeps the podcast chair, and contributors Nick Gordon Brown and Steve Banks remain involved. For Dunmore, the appeal is reportedly the community itself. "I was taken by their passion for house music and the engaged community that they had built in a short space of time," he said, adding that the team is "committed to ensuring that the people who helped build this culture are properly credited."
What happens to House Culture now?
The stated plan is to turn a podcast-and-Instagram operation into a proper publishing outfit: original features, video, a newsletter, and an archive tracing the records, artists, labels and clubs that built house music, alongside new live events and music releases. That's a direct bet that the next phase of house-music media isn't another label imprint, it's a community-run archive with a veteran's Rolodex and distribution behind it.
