The Dance Floor Is Disappearing In a Sea of Phones

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In club culture, the night generally matters more than the act. People come for the dance floor rather than a single artist. Concerts, by contrast, are organized around a focal point: a specific performer to be watched and consumed. Club drugs such as MDMA and ecstasy have also played a unique role, amplifying feelings of euphoria and a heightened sense of connection among the crowd.

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Barely Dancing

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More than 1,100 feet above New York City’s western skyline, one of last summer’s most noteworthy electronic music parties represented the perfect inversion of the genre’s underground roots. Nightlife operator Tao Group Hospitality turned the Edge observation deck in Manhattan from a tourist checkpoint into a sky-high club, booking well-known acts including Benny Benassi, Diplo and Adriatique. General admission tickets went for as much as $200 firsthand, and resale topped $700. Partiers rode elevators up 100 floors to the glass-walled deck and were greeted with a scene that stunned in its truest sense. City lights below, wind whipping audibly at times over the music and phones raised high to capture the show, the bodies at most gave in to modest sways.

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An influx of new listeners has perhaps made change inevitable. As a genre, electronic music gained 566 million fans across Spotify, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Facebook in 2024, IMS data shows, while the hashtag #electronicmusic clocked 13.4 billion views, an increase of 45% from a year earlier.

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With styles ranging from tech house (the top subgenre) to Afro house (which exploded in 2023) and dubstep, electronic music has even attracted private equity investors. In 2024, in a $1.4 billion deal, KKR & Co. bought Superstruct Entertainment, the operator of 80 music festivals, including techno events Sonar and Awakenings, and owner of Boiler Room, the popular online DJ set series.

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Although it now has a stronger foothold in Europe than in the US, where it’s been edged aside by hip-hop, the genre’s roots are actually stateside. Disco gave way in the ’80s to early electronic styles, like house in underground Chicago clubs and techno in Detroit, among marginalized LGBTQ, Black and Latino communities. Then came the rave boom of the ’90s, a decade that splintered out into many subgenres such as trance, acid house, big beat, and drum and bass. By the 2000s and 2010s, electronic had fully entered the mainstream, propelled by superstar DJ producers. Hitmakers including Avicii and Calvin Harris cemented the genre as a pillar of Top 40 pop, fueling the rise of massive festivals such as Tomorrowland. Today electronic music is most popular in Germany, followed by the US, Australia, the UK and Mexico.

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But as the electronic scene has mushroomed, more industry professionals and fans have argued it has lost the plot, using the abbreviation “EDM” as a derisive term for commercialized sounds. Tracks have grown shorter, for instance, and are also more likely to feature dramatic drops and breaks that translate well for online followers. A survey released last April of 15,000 DJs by the Pete Tong DJ Academy found that 61% believe a social media following now matters more than musical skill. 

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A New Night Out

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In a widely-shared Instagram post, Tbilisi, Georgia-based DJ Arnii complained that the demand for shareable moments over danceable experiences has pressured the ecosystem to create short-slot fixed sets, which in turn has eroded creativity and artist fees.

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“A club that used to book one headliner for a four-hour set at $2,000, now books five DJs for 60 minutes each at $400 apiece,” he posted. “More social media content, more draw from different fan bases, more perceived value for customers who think they’re getting five times as much.”

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For club owners and promoters, this type of lineup is safer business. Diversifying ensures that if one performer fails to resonate, the others can carry the night and continue bringing people in the door. But it comes at a creative cost. “In 60-minute sets, you get maybe 15 or 20 tracks, every selection has to hit immediately. Building tension becomes impossible, building narrative arcs become impossible,” Arnii wrote.