Performances in N.Y.C.
Fans emerged from pandemic lockdowns primed to hit the floor. Now online platforms are bringing fresh sounds and budding stars to bigger audiences worldwide.
Fans emerged from pandemic lockdowns primed to hit the floor. Now online platforms are bringing fresh sounds and budding stars to bigger audiences worldwide.
Credit…
Supported by
In late February, just after midnight, a cavernous warehouse in the Brooklyn Navy Yard thumped with the Ibiza-based D.J. and producer Solomun’s dramatic, synth-heavy house music as red light strobed over a sea of raucous 20- and 30-somethings. Two days earlier, he had been at the 20,000-capacity Sphere in Las Vegas opening for Anyma, an Italian American electronic music star whose run of New Year’s Eve shows sold out in under 24 hours, grossing $21 million in ticket sales.
Just before 2 a.m. a few weeks later, the London-based D.J. and radio host Moxie was shaking Brooklyn’s Public Records with a classic ’90s house track, smiling ear to ear as she watched over the sweaty 200-capacity nightclub. On a more frigid March night, Zeemuffin, a Brooklyn-based D.J. originally from Pakistan, was onstage at the Bushwick venue Elsewhere, headlining “Azadi” (“freedom” in Urdu), a bill that featured a wide array of global dance music sounds — Chicago house, Jersey club, Baltimore house, dancehall, the Baile funk of Brazil, the gqom of South Africa — while a sold-out crowd went wild.
Zeemuffin (real name: Zainab Hasnain DiStasio) took a trip back to Pakistan around the top of the year to D.J. a rave in Karachi where the near pandemonium at her set bordered on ecstasy. “Never in my whole life — and I’m from there — have I experienced anything like this” in the city, she recalled. She described a crowd of “queer people, trans people, Black people, white people, Asian people, all in one space,” and sighed. “It was unbelievable.”
Over the past four years, scenes like these are increasingly playing out all over the world, as dance music experiences yet another boom period. Festival lineups are jam-packed with D.J.s, while some of the biggest names in pop music (including Beyoncé, Drake and Charli XCX) have made dance music-inspired or adjacent albums. It’s usually at this point — when a newspaper sees fit to write about it — that the comedown starts.
This moment, however, is different.
Fueled by socioeconomic, cultural and technological changes, dance music and club culture have built on the progress of the past to leave a footprint deeper than we’ve seen before. As costs skyrocket for live instrumental acts to hit the road, a touring D.J. needs to travel with only a USB stick full of music. The continued evolution of D.J. hardware and software has softened the learning curve (and entry price) for beginners, while expanding possibilities for seasoned performers. And digital platforms like Boiler Room — the hugely popular video series that pioneered the de facto online D.J. video format — have changed the trajectory of what it means to be an electronic music artist or fan.
“Boiler Room has been an enormous force, bringing all kinds of electronic dance music from all over the world to people in their bedrooms, no matter where they are,” said the label owner and veteran music journalist Philip Sherburne. Previous generations logged time in record shops and found parties via fliers. Now, those worlds are a swipe away, chopped up and served algorithmically, in bite-size, hyper-compelling clips.
“After Boiler Room, you’re seeing extremely experimental Brazilian funk D.J.s.,” Sherburne added. “You’re seeing grime, you’re seeing techno. You’re getting the entire spectrum there.”
That range is another significant distinction of this moment — no single style of dance music has surged to popularity over the others. Hard techno, Afro house, drum and bass, tech house, U.K. garage: They’re all different, and they’re all finding audiences.
At the same time, local nightlife scenes around the world — demystified by the deluge of online content about them — are attracting more attention than ever. On TikTok, where the “electronic music” hashtag raked in 13.4 billion views in 2024 (up by 45 percent from 2023), dance music’s ever-expanding digital footprint includes influencers explaining the differences between genres, recommending where to hear them or explaining the history of dance music one record at a time. Bedroom D.J.s making music (or sometimes, just memes) can build substantial careers practically overnight.
It all adds up to the genre experiencing extraordinary reach: the variety of dance music people are producing and enjoying, the places they’re dancing to it, and the amount of media being generated about it. And depending on whom you ask, judging by the many interviews conducted for this article with D.J.s, label heads, bookers and venue owners across the dance music spectrum, that’s for better or worse — often both.
HISTORICALLY, WHEN DANCE MUSIC cuts across the American mainstream, it’s piggybacking on pop. In the ’90s, Madonna’s “Ray of Light” and films like “Go” dragged rave culture into the spotlight, as MTV played videos by Fatboy Slim, the Chemical Brothers and Aphex Twin, and suburban mall rats co-opted wide-legged rave pants.
In the 2010s, acts like Calvin Harris, Daft Punk, Skrillex and Diplo brought electronic dance music (or E.D.M.) to Top 40 radio by teaming with Rihanna, Taylor Swift, Pharrell Williams and Justin Bieber. Forbes reported that the 10 highest-paid, high-flying D.J.s earned $298 million in 2017; the list included Harris ($48.5 million), Tiësto ($39 million) and the Chainsmokers ($38 million). The following year, the superstar producer and D.J. Avicii, who had spoken about the stresses of the job, died by suicide. The dance party, at least in the mainstream, seemed to ebb.
Five years ago, amid a pandemic and the global lockdown that came with it, the question of when nightlife would resume — let alone, what it would look like when it did — had no clear answer.
The world, as it turned out, wanted to dance. A lot. After over a year of social isolation, people of all ages began making up for lost time. Some had missed out on the years when nightlife typically starts to call; others, aging out of it, were catching up on the years that were stolen from them.
“Coming out of that, it was quite overwhelming at times,” said Moxie (real name: Alice Moxom). “The first show that I announced after lockdown, at a venue called Village Underground, just sold out, like that.”
It didn’t stop at nightclubs — the mainstream market for dance music exploded, slowly, and then all at once. The electronic artist Fred, again.. went from playing New York’s 575-capacity Bowery Ballroom in December 2021 to having a Boiler Room performance go viral in 2022 to headlining Coachella with Four Tet and Skrillex in April 2023. Last summer, he sold out the L.A. Memorial Coliseum — 75,000-plus capacity — with only five days’ notice.
In 2023, albums by both Beyoncé and Drake nodded to house and club music. Charli XCX promoted her 2024 “Brat” LP at the Ibiza club Amnesia. A track on FKA twigs’s pulsing “Eusexua” was mixed at the Berlin club Berghain. And Katy Perry made a not-at-all inconspicuous appearance at the South African D.J. Black Coffee’s celebrity-magnet HI Ibiza residency to push “143.”
Still, dance is eclipsing the pop it has used to infiltrate the mainstream. “Move,” a track released last year by Adam Port, one of the members of the German label Keinemusik, has over 542 million Spotify streams — more than any one song from releases by Charli XCX, Katy Perry or FKA twigs. Artists like John Summit, Sara Landry and Sammy Virji are becoming household names in their own right.
“There seems to be more new dance music than new music with guitars, especially in our venues,” said Josh Moore, a talent buyer who has been booking concerts with Bowery Presents for 18 years. “We’ve been booking dance acts in rock clubs for a long time, long before the pandemic,” he added, “but it definitely does seem to have picked up lately.”
Later this summer, Bowery Presents will throw one of New York’s biggest concerts of the year: Keinemusik, with an estimated 40,000 planned to attend the event at Flushing Meadows Corona Park. American music festival lineups have become increasingly dominated by dance music acts, and dance music festivals are pulling record crowds: Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas attracted 525,000 attendees last year over three days. (For context, Coachella 2024 drew approximately 200,000 people over two weekends.)
The international market for dance music is (as usual) even bigger. Large-scale dance music festivals are becoming destinations, like Albania’s UNUM Festival, or in India, where the Amsterdam-based festival DGTL has started editions in Mumbai and Bengaluru. On the smaller end of things, hyper-niche electronic music festivals are popping up and attracting significantly more interest, like New Jersey’s Dripping. Or upstate New York’s Sustain-Release, now in its 11th year and more mythological than ever: Admission is granted exclusively to those with memberships, which are by referral only.
And if the veritable mecca of dance music, Ibiza, is any measure, the Spanish island has shattered tourism spending records over the past few years, enjoying a 30.78 percent increase in tourist spending from 2019 to 2024, a year in which tourists spent a record 3.964 billion euros (or $4.47 billion), per the Balearic Institute of Statistics. This month, the largest nightclub in the island’s history, [UNVRS], pronounced “universe,” is set to open. It announced itself with a trailer featuring Will Smith, and when it opens, will have a capacity of 15,000, making it the world’s largest nightclub, a venue on par with arenas.
DANCE MUSIC’S LATEST MOMENT isn’t entirely a party. Longtime practitioners and devotees fret that the ineffable qualities that make nightlife great — and the spaces and D.J.s who made it that way — are under threat as it spirals upward and outward.
Artists and venue owners have argued that festivals siphon money from nightclubs, which also stand to lose regular business during global economic downturns when disposable income is tight. That’s to say nothing of increasingly competitive commercial real estate markets in cities where nightlife thrives, or the shaky state of Ibiza’s civic fabric, as essential workers are priced out of the island. A generation drinking less and spending more time online isn’t helping.
The financial interests around the music business are changing, too. KKR, a large global private equity firm, now owns some of the world’s largest music festivals via its portfolio company Superstruct, in addition to Boiler Room. Some of its events have not gone over well with the largely progressive dance music community.
Festival lineups and Spotify playlists, along with more viral forms of dance music and its biggest celebrities, tend to overshadow and underrepresent the marginalized communities foundational to dance music’s bedrock.
Artists like Honey Dijon remain dedicated to highlighting the genre’s Black and queer roots, which were sown in Chicago and Detroit nightclubs and New York lofts. “Past, present, and future exist on a continuum,” she told The Times in 2022. “And it’s just reintroducing things into now.” She credited the trans women she met working in nightlife for providing support and resources for own transition; as many writers have noted, electronic music has long provided a safe space for trans and nonbinary artists and fans.
Technology has facilitated a quantum leap for the promotion and dissemination of the music, but phone filming in nightclubs is increasingly a vibe-smothering scourge, erasing the anonymizing catharsis of a dance floor. Established D.J.s with years (if not decades) of experience are struggling to promote themselves on social media while competing with newcomers who may leave as quickly as they show up.
“The proliferation of Instagram stories, and TikTok stories by D.J.s showing themselves — it doesn’t feel great,” said Eamon Harkin, a D.J. in New York since 2007 and the co-owner of the beloved Brooklyn nightclub Nowadays since 2015. He likened the practice to putting the D.J. on a pedestal over the music (and the dancers). “It feels like we’re pulling away from the essence of the culture, which is about a collective experience on the dance floor, with somebody just choosing the music, and trying to put it together in a purposeful and intentional way to elevate that experience.”
Nowadays was one of the first of a growing number of Brooklyn nightclubs — like Basement and the just-opened Signal — to mirror its European counterparts, with policies banning phones on the dance floor.
Before her five-hour set at Public Records last month, Moxie grabbed lunch in the backyard of a Greenpoint restaurant and discussed some of the obstacles dance music is facing, including a string of nightclub closures in her native London and a mentality shift among some young people toward observing rather than participating. “It’s ‘I’m just going to stay inside and watch a D.J. on a stream set,’” she said, “or ‘Now I want to be the D.J., and I’m just going to practice at home.’” (“You need the crowd,” she said. “You need the crowd to participate!”)
Those who are motivated to leave the house — and there are still many — are finding the resurgent scene more pluralistic.
“Women don’t feel so intimidated by it,” Moxie said. “There’s not so many gatekeepers.” That’s a marked difference from when she was coming up 10 years ago in the male-dominated London dubstep scene. “And that is actually a positive thing about social media,” Moxie explained. “Now, you can get a following via a different route — it doesn’t have to be a mix on the BBC.”
In January, a Japanese D.J. named Yousuke Yukimatsu turned attention to Tokyo’s raging nightlife scene (and himself) with just one blisteringly exciting Boiler Room performance. Podcasts like “Safe Spaces Series,” hosted by the Brooklyn D.J. Tony Y Not, shine a spotlight on the mental health issues D.J.s face.
Even the genre’s roots are managing to endure in the bedlam of its hyper-evolving present. Just a few weeks ago, there on Instagram was Kevin Saunderson — a techno inventor and pioneer — explaining its history to a fan who had no idea the genre was birthed not in Europe, but in Michigan.
“Respect to the new fans and the old heads,” he captioned the post. “Detroit techno is forever 🖤”
Taking on ‘Salome’: For his Met Opera debut, the renowned German director Claus Guth is staging Strauss’s breakthrough opera with a focus on themes of trauma and abuse.
’Real Women Have Curves’:The new musical on Broadway is based on Josefina López’s original play and the 2002 film adaptation that starred America Ferrera.
Trapped in a Cave: Floyd Collins was pinned under a rock while exploring a cave in 1925. That history, recounted in song, is now on Broadway.
No Power? No Problem: The “Sunset Boulevard” star Nicole Scherzinger briefly entertained the crowd when “a technical malfunction on the sound side” forced the cancellation of a matinee performance.
Pushing Sisyphean Beach Balls: Celia Rowlson-Hall’s “Sissy” at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, a dance-theater hybrid featuring Marisa Tomei, pokes at the boundaries between art and life.
Advertisement