The dance floor is disappearing in a sea of phones

In 2021, when the world was deep

in the throes of Covid-19

, English electronic producer Fred Again and his fellow DJ, the Blessed Madonna, met over Zoom to talk about the emotional weight of lockdown.

“We’ve lost dancing,” she said. “We’ve lost hugs with friends, and people that we loved, all these things that we took for granted.”

Her words were an earnest articulation of the loss of community, nightlife and physical togetherness that resulted from the pandemic. But she ended optimistically: “If I can live through this, what comes next will be marvellous.”

Doing what he does best, Fred Again turned that expression of vulnerability into a hit track. Looping the refrain “we’ve lost dancing” onto synthesised flute and kick drums, he built a buoyant 4/4 anthem about emerging from social isolation.

Five years on, the future is likely not what either DJ would have envisioned. While the pandemic has receded – and people have revenge-travelled and spent on long-deferred experiences – nightlife has returned in altered form. Clubbing increasingly resembles concerts: forward-facing, phone-lit and strangely static. The implications for entertainment are profound and already reshaping the economics of going out.

Fingers have been pointed at a younger generation that purportedly does not know how to party – one that drinks less, has less sex and is too aware every moment can be recorded and posted online. This is a generation raised on TikTok, where dances involve set choreography optimised for the camera and moves are flattened as if they do not exist on the sagittal plane.

One scene that upset many electronic music fans came out of Ibiza in 2024, when German Afro house group Keinemusik played their single Move to a crowd that barely did. The room was a sea of motionless lit phones. “Don’t move,” one commenter joked.

The transformation of clubbing is fuelled by commercialisation as well as social media. As clubbers behave more like viewers and videographers than participants, venues have leaned into spectacle: larger stages, higher production values and headline-driven line-ups.

Increased costs mean higher ticket prices, in turn raising audience expectations, and the cycle feeds itself. According to data from the International Music Summit (IMS), electronic music ticket volumes dipped in 2024, but higher fees kept industry revenue climbing.

For electronic music – a US$12.9 billion (S$16.4 billion) industry in 2024, the IMS estimates – these shifts are uniquely destabilising. Unlike rock or hip-hop, which can thrive in concert formats built around spectatorship and star power, the genre has historically depended on more intimate spaces and feedback from the floor.

“That’s what made dance music what it is on top of the calibre of music,” says Gavin Stephenson, a New York DJ and electronic music promoter who’s been organising parties since the 1990s.

Instead of following a fixed set list, a DJ should be “weaving a story where they’re going all over the place based on what the crowd needs, and reacting to and surprising you”.

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 organised 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.

Barely dancing

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 US$200 firsthand, and resale topped US$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.

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 per cent from 2023.

With styles ranging from tech house (the top sub-genre) to Afro house (which exploded in 2023) and dubstep, electronic music has even attracted private equity investors. In 2024, in a US$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.

Although it now has a stronger foothold in Europe than in the US, where it has 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 marginalised 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, fuelling 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.

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 commercialised 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 in April 2025 of 15,000 DJs by the Pete Tong DJ Academy found that 61 per cent believe a social media following now matters more than musical skill. 

A new night out

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.

“A club that used to book one headliner for a four-hour set at US$2,000, now books five DJs for 60 minutes each at US$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.”

For club owners and promoters, this type of line-up 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.

Because electronic music usually centres on one or two DJs behind a booth, it does not offer the built-in visual dynamism of genres with multiple musicians playing different instruments. To compensate, some acts use lasers, video screens, pyrotechnics or other forms of spectacle to set themselves apart.

That can backfire, as Avant Gardner, owner of the now-defunct club Brooklyn Mirage, found out. Reaching for more over-the-top audiovisual effects is one of the reasons the former mainstay of New York City nightlife met its demise in 2025.

The venue, which had a capacity of more than 6,000, was already home to an impressively large screen. Yet the heavily leveraged company opted to spend millions of dollars installing an even larger, 270-degree wraparound screen.

The renovation did not meet city construction regulations, scuttling Brooklyn Mirage’s reopening and forcing the company into bankruptcy. A spokeswoman for Avant Gardner declined to comment.

“Nobody was asking for the screen to be bigger. Nobody was asking for more production, more lasers,” says Ms Kseniya Sovenko, a co-founder of NYC Rave Girls, which runs a Discord community of 9,000 dance music fans.

“Literally, the number one complaint every year was ‘hey, you guys are overselling these shows, we want more room to dance’.”

But superclubs continue to expand. Five Holdings, the owner of famed Ibizan hot spot Pacha, agreed in February to purchase Avant Gardner for an undisclosed amount and plans to open Pacha New York in the former Mirage space.

Back in Ibiza, competition is intensifying from UNVRS, which opened last summer billing itself as the largest club in the world, with a capacity of 10,000. The so-called hyperclub Future made its debut in Bangkok on New Year’s Eve. And grand, immersive experiences such as the Sphere in Las Vegas, where melodic techno DJ Anyma staged 12 sold-out nights in early 2025, are pushing production levels ever higher.

Meanwhile the pandemic claimed many smaller to midsize clubs, and more old-school venues continue to struggle.

Europe’s famed clubbing capital, Berlin, has seen a rash of nightlife closures as the city grapples with a higher cost of living. And although stalwarts like Berghain remain a big draw, a non-profit industry organisation warned in November that half of the city’s roughly 250 clubs are at risk of closing.

No phones allowed

Although the centre of gravity has shifted toward larger, high-production clubs, many people are still committed to a style of partying that focuses on music and in-person connections.

More clubs have also been instituting “no phones” policies to reclaim the dance floor’s social energy. Venues including Signal, a small club that opened in 2025 in Brooklyn’s East Williamsburg neighbourhood, and recent addition Refuge, located just around the corner, cover all phone cameras with a sticker. Other larger, established venues like House of Yes and Elsewhere have also banned the use of phones inside.

Signal co-owner Josh Buhler acknowledges the trade-off – no social media posts means sacrificing free marketing – but a phone-free space fosters its own appeal.

“We went into it with eyes wide open,” Mr Buhler says. “In the end, word still spreads anyway.”

There will always be a market for highly produced experiences with headliner DJs, but, with the right encouragement, people do appreciate more lo-fi environs, focusing on spontaneity and the dance floor, he says. 

Every generation reshapes the culture it inherits. The way Stephenson the promoter sees it: Everyone gets to do this the way they want to. There are no rules.

He does his best to avoid drawing hierarchies since inclusivity is core to dance culture’s DNA, adding that “people can walk through to something like Avant Gardner but then also discover new things”. 

Ms Mary Wolff, NYC Rave Girls’ other co-founder, takes a slightly different but still pragmatic stance.

The new people flooding into dance music themselves aren’t the problem – ignorance of the culture’s roots is. Rather than gatekeep, she focuses on using NYC Rave Girls parties to educate through the floor itself.

What she will not compromise on is what the floor is for. 

“Dance floors are one of the last public spaces where strangers are allowed to be emotionally and physically open with each other,” she says.

“Without dancing, it’s just not a rave. It’s more like a very loud screen.” BLOOMBERG