It's not really surprising, but the article seems to conflate raves with nightclubs, with numerous remarks about the cost of being out at a club all night and paying for things like expensive bottle service.
Raves are not clubs, and historically have never done that well in club environments. People who are really into staying up all night dancing to techno music aren't buying expensive alcoholic drinks, they're buying cheap water to stay hydrated. Many (though by no means all) take drugs, but generally that means one dose of a drug like MDMA at the beginning of the evening. Psychedelic drugs like LSD are also associated with the rave scene but are less compatible with a nightclub environment (bars, security, overgrown disco lights). People are more likely to consume psychedelics at an outdoor party or a warehouse space.
In my view what has killed raves was the declining availability of cheap accessible commercial spaces, police/administrative hostility to informal economic activity, and overcommercialization, which has tended to select for the shittiest music/DJs.
I think you are missing something. Clubs have always been the „mothers“ of raves. This has been the case since the only days of chicago warehouse parties up until what is now the case in berlin. Once the clubs go away, the off location parties will disappear next.
Not to mention cell phones everywhere.
> hostility to informal economic activity
America in a nutshell…
There was an article in the Guardian recently about a rave reunion event in the UK - I think it would agree with many of your reasons about what killed them: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/dec/10/sanctuary-club...
In Toronto the decline of the scene in the late '90s was accelerated significantly when the city clamped down on promotors by restricting them from renting venues on city owned property. This was after gradually requiring EMTs and increased security at events after Allen Ho died in 1999. There was a huge protest at city hall, but that had no impact on the course of things. Combined with the recession and then SARS in 2003, people effectively stopped going out to larger events, although people getting older with more obligations was certainly a contributing factor as well. However, there are still family friendly events held at Cherry Beach in the summer with people from the scene back then going on every year.
100% agree. The article does not seem to be written by someonene who is particularly interested in this subject. The fact that it starts talking about what is IMO the most overrated scene ever, Berlin, says a lot.
Using crackhouse laws to target rave promoters killed raves in the US: https://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=94397&page=1 The RAVE act that followed formalized the gray area use of those earlier crackhouse laws.
All of the rest of what you're saying killed raves is a result of this crackdown.
what is the definition of a rave at this point? Large crowds of people dancing in or outdoors to techno music is still a HUGE thing. There's video of tons of them on youtube. If often put them on while working. Is it only a rave if it's illegal?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yv33bb-C_bo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Wy2WYqD2Rs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEacozH2uXs
There's also huge EDM and other types of events (so I guess not techno but the vibe seems related, at least to me)
As someone in the culture 20-30 years ago, it was always something that was underground... not promoted in a traditional sense, and hosted in unpermitted spaces. Usually you wouldn't know until the day of the event where the location actually was.
Much of the time it would be in industrial areas that were pretty deserted and dark at night, far away from any life that would complain about the noise that would go on until at lease sunrise. If outdoors it might be out in the woods, on the edge of an Indian reservation, in the desert, etc. Often there was a gritty sense of danger and some really odd characters you would meet, certainly not helped by the substances they might be on.
What you linked is what I'd call outdoor parties/festivals. Maybe folks today call them raves, but these things existed back then and we certainly didn't.
I went to them 25 years ago as well. I get the same thing from the organized promoted ones as I got from the old ones. I didn't need it to be "underground". I just needed the people, the music, the vibe.
~15 years ago I remember a friend convincing me to drive a bunch of us to a rave that involved meeting a guy in grocery store parking lot between certain hours and writing down the instructions he gave us. We then drove an hour on the freeway, got off and spent 30 minutes on a series of forest service roads to get to a 2(3?) stage rave in a clearing in the woods. It went at least until sunrise, we left as the sun came up.
No need to listen to the gatekeepers. Rave is a verb. Raves are where people rave!
> No need to listen to the gatekeepers. Rave is a verb. Raves are where people rave!
While true, I think in this case it is referring to the noun, which peaked in the 90s early 2000s underground movement and was the basis for the PLUR culture that is uniquely absent in the club scene; and I say that as a person who has mainly been into clubs as I was too young at the time but knew plenty of those candy-ravers growing up but was really into various genres of psy music (ambient then, techno and then finally trance) before I ever went out to party.
I didn't read the article but I know there is a contingent of early dubstepers and to a lesser extend DnB (which was more widely accepted at the time) here on HN that grew up and went to events that were analogous to this as we listened to pirate radio from the UK and went to underground parties out in warehouses and in outdoor parties when things were only starting up.
This is the closest we had to the early rave scene, where everyone sort of knew everyone (including the artists, promoters or venue owners) and we still called it 'raving' as you mentioned, but these became the state-side analogues (Dub-Warz [0] in EC and SMOG [1] in WC) to DMZ [2] nights and eventually to things like Outlook festival [3] [4] when adoption had peaked.
All of this is to say, that the verb and the noun represent unique periods, that latter I think can still be found in festivals but have ultimately a more corporate and capitalistic motivation than just a bunch of party people bootstrapping and renting a bunch of generators and PAs and taking them out into a warehouse, desert or forest and dancing all night and day.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP9ve9YEjGY
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T150ZZZ0Luo
2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TziN0N40X3E
One big change is that they got better and much more organized. I go to an annual event with a few hundred of my friends and family. We rent a lodge in a national forest, set up an enormous sound system, and dance for 3 days around some very confused deer. There are food trucks and coffee bars and dozens of portapotties scattered around, plus daytime poolside sets while we swim around and listen to 100dB house.
We grayvers still like to have fun, just more comfortably. We have work next week, you know.
I’m confused. You say that you “go to” an annual event, but then you describe it at a massive private festival that you’re self organizing. Which is it?
There are all sorts of volunteer roles someone needs to do, from directing parking, to helping in the kitchen, to roaming around at 3am to see if anyone needs help, to working the first aid stand, and a hundred other things. I always sign up for at least a couple of shifts doing something, so feel like part of the "we" helping to put it on, but it's still something I go to as a participant to have fun.
In Australia these are known as "bush doofs" and are essentially community events - they're organised, run and attended by a group of people rather than an organisation.
You can't buy tickets to them, you have to know someone who's in the group chat for them. You can just turn up on the day if you know where the event is; they're always incredibly remote, usually on a patch of bush (forest) on someone's enormous farm or a national park, pitch a tent, join in, help out where you can. Security is "if you act like a dickhead you'll be asked politely to leave by a bunch of people". There's no financial contribution, except sometimes a hat is passed around if someone had to pay for equipment hire or similar. You can buy drugs there, but only if you know the person you're buying from; usually better to sort yourself out before you go, there won't be anyone advertising anything for sale at the doof.
They can look a little like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH_RWBSQ9ic
Note: Burning car and local farm fire truck to stop fire spreading.
As someone who does something similar, it’s easily both
Those two things are not mutually exclusive.
The best festivals are co-creative experiences.
> One big change is that they got better and much more organized.
If I'm thinking of the same groups you're mentioning, they were already super organized. Mostly because they've been going for decades now.
If you’re thinking of groups, plural, then you probably know the ones I mean. And yeah, I wear the 20th anniversary tank top to the gym.
Why not just say what you're talking about? Are these some secret festivals or something?
In this case, it's not so much that it's some big top secret thing, but that it genuinely is something friends invite their other IRL friends to. I brought it up because it was relevant here, but it's not something exactly advertised. As a practical matter, the facilities can only host a specific number of people, and it's already the case that there's always a waiting list for tickets.
(It's not directly a Burner event either, although with a lot of East Bay attendees, there's organically a large portion of people who go to both.)
is that a smiling gearhead i see in the background?
I have one sewn on my messenger bag, yes.
Insider cool points. TBH I find it sad to be doing this at great expense but not putting any effort into making something accessible for younger generations.
They are making accessible to younger generations - many regional doofs and burn adjacent events I have been to are all ages, existing members bring their kids.
If you are asking why they don't go out of their way to advertise to outsiders, it's because these events do not scale well, and what they absolutely do not want are thousands of insta/tiktok tourists who don't contribute back to the scene or bring extra scrutiny from police.
Nailed it all around. I see lots of small kids at the things. Whatever mental image people have of raves, everyone looks out for the little ones. We want them to have fun in a safe environment. There are tons of 20-somethings having a good time in perhaps a higher production quality setting than they’d normally be around.
The last things we want are people doing stupid crap to make the law have to come around, or to make it all about themselves at the expense of others’ enjoyment.
They’re talking about Regional Burns.
They’re all over America and I presume the world.
I still remember the first one I was supposed to go to. They didn't tell you the location until the day of.
It was a high school gymnasium.
Didn't work out so well.
So, basically, everyone grew up.
In Oakland we still have plenty of renegades!
Hey, neighbor. You sure do, and I'm happier for it!
can i get on the list?
Foopee and 19hz
Start going to shows and look for fliers
Also check out spaz parties.
I naively assumed that https://19hz.info would have a terrible search ranking, but it actually ranks #1 for "19hz". Fantastic website, been using it for a while.
We did that same thing for ten years in a row. Especially fun when some catastrophe happens, like a lightning strike to the house when everybody's in the garden, breaking all fuses, water pump etc. Remember we had probably three years without some crazy accident. Nobody got killed though, so all good.
Ah, good ol’ type 2 fun, where afterward someone can sell “ride the lightning” tshirts as a fundraiser.
I was up there this summer, great weekend :)
Right on! I missed this summer and the fall classic, but plan to head back to at least one of them this year.
(My social media profile pic is me wearing neon glasses there one year.)
I imagine it's more than just the deer who are affected by 100dB sound pollution and "confused" is probably quite an understatement.
What sound pollution? There are permits and everything, and woodlands are really, really big. A couple hills over you wouldn't be able to hear a thing.
Perhaps humans wouldn't be able to hear a thing, but what about birds, rodents, and other animals? 100dB is something only humans can produce. To assume that other species aren't negatively affected seems wrong to me. I don't have the data to prove it, however.
Hmmm
Raves died in the 90s for a few reasons.
1. They made dancing illegal (look it up before rage comments).
2. Corporate sponsors moved in.
3. Glow sticks / candy ravers
4. Drugs
5. Police tactics and not being able to be paid off by promoters.
6. The internet (remember map points and info lines?)
7. Models, actresses, famous types going and demanding special service / VIP.
8. DJ as GOD sick gross
9. OG promoters cashing out and not caring. Think Drop Bass and Daft Punk (google it).
10. Techno mainstream / a la hip hop. (DRUGS/S&M)
How much does it cost (not to organize, but for someone to attend)?
There’s a wide range, but the specific one I described is around $200 for a 3 day weekend.
Where's my invite?
lol @ grayvers
I left it all behind years ago but your event sounds awesome. Glad some people still keep the vibe alive.
Honestly, you won't find me on the dance floor. I'll be meandering around listening to the music I love at seismic sound levels, looking at the art exhibits people set up, and chilling with my friends. I just want to soak up the vibes and love everyone and the world for a few days, not dance myself to exhaustion.
Are you me? lol. I'm in SoCal though, and we still do our own family-style desert parties and we sometimes go to bigger desert parties (Moontribe still going strong), and sometimes go to the mountains in the central valley too. Slinky (which was near Fresno) was so much fun until it ended recently after 21 years :( My friend group doesn't have anything in the mountains quite like Slinky to replace it, but it sounds like you keep your invite list small, and for good reasons I know.
My wife still dances all-out, and she goes every weekend to see Doc or Farina or DJ Dan or whoever is in town. She can't live without getting sweaty from dancing, and I admire her for it especially as we're getting older - I'm in my 50s now, my knees are not what they used to be.
Have you seen the recently released documentary about Wicked Soundsystem? I'm guessing you're probably familiar with those guys. We saw it in a theater in LA and then went to the after party, it brought back so many memories.
California is a last bastion of sorts socially, because los Angeles is an extrovert magnet.
Ironically to the north, an opposite social civilization has attracted all the introverted people.
Entertainment must extrovert to gain eyeballs, but it uses the technology of the introverts to do so.
But underlying this ironic alliance is a force that cares not for the social polarity, it simply will nihilistically predate on both spheres to produce the maximal profit while eating away at the fabric of a functioning society.
The matrix really is the endgame goal: pods plugged into a VR machine. The matrix struggled with plausible explanations for why the machines kept humans in that state, and the endgame of capitalism likewise has no solution how the world would function at the end of its road.
A much more plausible take was that the matrix used human brains as coprocessors, credit to (who else?) Neil Gaiman for the idea.
Where do you live?
I'm in NorCal near Oakland.
A yeah the deer are just confused, no need to worry. Keep partying!
> The proportion of club nights running beyond 3am fell in 12 of 15 global cities between 2014 and 2024, according to a Financial Times analysis of events on listings website Resident Advisor.
Club nights are not raves. Raves are (usually) not posted on RA. The underground scene is doing just fine.
You're right, but on the other hand, are we really expecting "Financial Times" get even get "raving" right, or knowing about the underground scene?
The article seems to be written for people who reads a newspaper with their breakfast, not for people who had yet to gone asleep while that person reads their paper.
The FT is actually entertainingly into this sort of stuff.[0]
Honestly my favourite news outlet these days, despite my being well to the left of their editorial staff. I read it mostly for their drum and bass coverage.
[^0] See https://www.ft.com/content/7796593c-08ac-485c-afe9-a45ac2c28... or https://www.ft.com/content/084bab07-c5cf-4b25-ba7d-769af6b42..., but there's loads.
>I read [The Financial Times] mostly for their drum and bass coverage.
Brilliant. I love this on 174 different levels.
Agreed, and the same way I love reading this thread on HN. :)
Yeah I'm pretty sure the Financial Times editorial board would probably enjoy sending me to an internment camp for ideological reasons but I find their coverage is great when you ignore the slant, which is obvious and tends not to obscure the actual reporting like other papers.
Some people think highly of the FT.
https://www.ft.com/content/09f792fc-5548-11e4-89e8-00144feab...
From what I’ve gathered, nowadays, “raving” refers to all legal parties that are posted on RA as well. The biggest difference is, younger people associate specific venues/music as “rave”s, where mainstream music isn’t played, and people are more likely to party in the brains. It’s just the definition has shifted since the 2000s.
I wouldn’t discredit FT writers as well, as I’m assuming they’re writing for a specific audience.
I still consider a legal warehouse party to be a rave. Depends on crowd, music, and vibe.
Well said. I like to imagine some old guy holding the pink FT pages in a London cafe, peering over his reading glasses while egg drips off of his toast onto his pleated houndstooth trousers.
some old guy holding the pink FT pages in a London cafe
Where do you think the people going to those raves in the early 90s ended up? As old guys who now have well paid corporate jobs in the city and read FT.
That guy could probably bore the crap out of today's youth with stories about how raves and music used to "authentic" and how everything today is crap.
I neither raved nor got a good job. Looks like I'm the schmuck in the middle that worked hard and then didn't get rewarded.
Same. Not rich enough to retire early, just rich enough that I can't afford to take any risks on anything.
You should have gone for "Work nothing, play a lot" instead of the typical one.
Pete and Bas Stepped Into the Building!
Raving has been around for 50 years, you’d think a paper could describe it correctly if not know the ins and outs of the current scene.
I would assume their current writers have been to raves
>or knowing about the underground scene?
Well, yes, it's just another kind of "underground scene", you know, the ones on private islands.
I'd expect them to not write a piece about something with which they have no familiarity and that their target audience has no particular interest in.
Did you read the article? It's mostly about the business of running nightclubs and organising music events. Something that falls cleanly with the interest of the FT and its readers. The headline is just some SEO optimised clickbait to get traffic.
Plus, as I mentioned elsewhere. A non-trivial number of today's FT readers are the same people that were at those original raves in the early 90s.
I assert this without evidence, but I would highly suspect club attendance numbers and rave attendance numbers to be strongly correlated.
That doesn't make sense to me. Anecdotally, most people I know who love actual raves generally didn't go to clubs, for one.
But also more broadly, I've heard from multiple local venues that one big change is that EDM crowds don't drink as much. This means venues make A LOT less money, and that means fewer venues. If I had to guess, another factor is that younger crowds don't have the buying power older generations had, so if anything they would be MORE likely to go to an "illegal" rave with no cover and do some drugs instead of drinking.
Basically, to me, economic forces suggests that the rave crowd and club crowd are NOT correlated.
edit: and more anecdotal data for you, I use to go to a lot of clubs when I was young (and fewer raves), but now that I'm older me and my group tend to either throw our own parties at home with our own gear, or go to "listening bar" type venues that wouldn't typically be classified as a "club." We're all too old to drink high priced shitty beer and deal with lines and bouncers. I'd rather be able to have a top sound system, order an IPA or cocktail, and maybe even have a seat to lounge in!
> Anecdotally, most people I know who love actual raves generally didn't go to clubs, for one.
In a similar vein, most people I know who love watching sports do not play the sport they enjoy watching. However, like the parent, I suspect that the numbers watching a sport strongly correlates with the numbers playing the sport. There need not be overlap between the watchers and the players for the correlation to stand. Something being in the zeitgeist lifts all related boats, it seems. Raves and clubs are different expressions of what is essentially the same fashion. It seems unlikely that only one expression would die off where the general fashion trend remains intact.
> Raves and clubs are different expressions of what is essentially the same fashion.
This is a very efficient way to communicate that you don’t have experience with raves and/or clubs.
Efficient communication of lacking said experience would be met with details provided by someone with experience, not a commentary on efficiency itself. It turns out it is highly inefficient.
Clubs close at 2am in most states of the US, by law.
Raves usually start about then.
They are not remotely the same thing.
Maybe those who go to raves are more likely to go to clubs too, but it doesn't mean that a decrease in club attendance means a decease in rave attendance. It may simply mean that clubs are not the preferred destination for partygoers anymore.
To support that, it looks like music festival attendance is going up over the years. Music festivals are, I think, closer to raves than they are to night clubs, which, by the same logic, would suggest an increase in rave attendance.
Also worth mentioning that some of what was called a rave before is now a club. There is a difference between occupying a decommissioned soviet building after the fall of the Berlin Wall and a fancy club on high valued real estate, even though it used to be the same place.
> To support that, it looks like music festival attendance is going up over the years.
This isn't global nor is it specific dance music but at least in the UK, festivals are struggling and have declined significantly since the beginning of covid - 204 festivals have disappeared since 2019: https://www.aiforg.com/blog-database/72-uk-festivals-cancell...
Covid definitely shook things up, but clubs didn't do well even before covid, while festivals were thriving. Now, it is a bit hard to tell as 2024 was just the second "normal" year, and it can take many years to grow a successful event.
It seems like now, we are indeed seeing less festivals, but the remaining ones are becoming bigger and more expensive. So, maybe less festivals but higher budgets.
Weren't there several mass casualties at clubs? I wonder if those had an effect overall. Anecdotally, I remember after several of the movie theatre shootings in the US, my immediate peer group self included decided it just wasn't worth it. Only in the last year or so have I started coming back to theatres.
No, not in the UK, not enough to be noticeable at least. We have sensible gun laws and so don't generally have mass casualty incidents, and don't panic when we do. (See e.g. the London Bridge van incident and pint guy).
I live in France and I saw many night clubs close for reasons I think are unrelated to security. I remembrer an entire street with nothing but night clubs, some of them quite famous, they closed down one after the other, the last one was in 2017 I think. I lived next to the beach for most of my teens, we had two night clubs, none of them remain, the next town has one that still remains but another one that closed in the early 2000s not to open again, a major electronic music came in its place, incidentally cancelled last year for financial fraud raisons. Where I live today, I saw one night club close, I think in 2019 (before covid) but I didn't see one open. In fact, I don't remember seeing a night club open since the early 2000s. Plenty of bars, but not night clubs.
These are anecdotal evidence, but that's a lot of anecdotes.
In none of these case I saw a particular event motivating this, I guess it was just not profitable. Also worth noting that most night clubs that are still open tend to get terrible reviews on Google (less than 3/5 on average). It is kind of a meme to complain about nightclubs you go to, especially if you get denied entry, but still, not very encouraging.
Strong negative correlation? Can't attend both events, and most people only have the weekend to attend max one event.
You should come to Miami. Some people start the night at a normal club, go to a rave at Factory town, and meet the sunrise at Space, all in one night.
How many of the people doing that are locals doing it as a regular thing, vs tourists doing it as a one off experience? The core argument in the article is that the younger generation aren't going to their local clubs regularly enough to keep them afloat, preferring going to do much fewer and more 'special' events. The places that can survive are those that either bring in lots of tourists and/or focus larger one off events that can pull in a really large crowd.
As a local, most of it is actual locals, often bringing out of town friends, but the core is always locals.
Maybe on a particular night, but on any longer timescale: how does one make friends who will tell you about the cool underground scene without first meeting them in the aboveground club scene? Maybe online stuff plays this purpose now but I assume its still mostly the former.
lots of places. the people at the warehouse rave usually did something else earlier in the night. maybe you met them at a bar or show and asked what they were doing later. “what are you doing this weekend” is a normal thing to ask anyone you meet in a third place. it’s not that big of a secret.
Most people have more than one weekend per year.
High volume purchasers in a category are more likely to purchase many things across the category.
I don't go to nightclubs ever, odds that I'm going to go to a rave are also pretty close to zero.
I have a friend who DJs, even removing the nights he performs, he goes to nightclubs infinitely more than I do. He also goes to raves more than I do.
I'm not in the club or rave scene - practically the opposite - but it astounds me that the FT thought they could draw useful conclusions about an underground scene by analyzing publicly-posted events on a site named Resident Advisor.
To be fair, RA is /the/ place to post more organized events. Even my local underground spot posts there. (Yes, it's underground, ~20 people show up to the small shows)
Goddamn. I looked them up and there's clearly an ingroup meaning that went over my head. I was hoping for a Meetup competitor that wasn't enshittified on day one.
For clubs maybe but EDMTrain is the go-to among all my rave friends.
"Rave" now days is somewhat ambiguous. If anyone uses it you can't be sure what they mean. It changed in the last 20'ish years.
Yes, but the decline is real in the underground scene as well.
At least near me I've seen a resurgence the last couple years.
The so-called dead cat bounce is oft seen in a decline.
I think there's a lot of nuance here. I teach DJing (house/techno mostly) and there's never been more interest in electronic music & DJing. Folks who thought I was a bit out there in high school for liking electronic & dance music, have recently all now become more interested in DJing and raving. The DJ today is continuing to grow into the modern rock-star (albeit, in terms of real $ of music money, it's no where close).
Moreover, as several commenters have pointed out there has been a big growth in festivals and awareness. Lots of people talk to me about "house music" now, whereas before it was a relatively "underground" thing.
Now, I think there's a question about whether the scale of such events have maintained the same cultural ethos as the early rave days, and that, though I'm not old enough to have participated, is likely a categorical no. There's a greater focus on 'documenting' experiences at these events rather than living it. Here's a clip of an rising group called Kienemusik [tik tok link](https://www.tiktok.com/@as.anca/video/7359750430345186593?q=...), where you can see there's more video taping than dancing. I would venture to say, we are so filled with wonder sometimes that we forget that part of experiencing awe is letting go of ego and just experiencing.
I know what you mean, and I wish I kept at it. I DJ'd a couple raves back then but it was something that any of my friends were into so I naturally fell out of it even though I loved it so much. I later got back into it briefly and made a few house and trance tracks when computer DAWs became popular.
There was a sense of freedom and optimism on the dance floor that I've never found anywhere else. I made songs like the songs that I most liked to dance to. Most of it came from Europe back then, but I wish I followed my heart, or at least spent half my time following my heart.
I feel bad for the kids in the video. In my day, and maybe yours, it would have been very unusual to see a cellphone in the club or at a rave. My kids schools don't allow screens and they go away for a couple weeks each summer to a camp that doesn't allow screens. They tell me that they really enjoy it after a couple of days, and I think it gives them a chance to feel the way we did as kids... back then there wasn't a movement of people trying to live more in the moment because everybody lived in the moment all the time.
Phoneless events are out there. This Never Happened bans phones from every event. I just went to Proper NYE which wasn’t a TNH event but had Lane 8 (label owner) on main stage and there was significantly less phones than other artists.
Probably a bunch of factors...
Tier 1 city RE prices have made live entertainment venues harder to run profitably.
GenZ studies have found a lower participation in "risky behavior" which late night clubbing may or not be considered.
Mobile internet & smartphones seem to be killing all forms of live in person interaction.
And finally electronic music of various forms used to be a niche, and now it's mainstream. In the 90s/00s my consumption of electronic music was mp3 downloads of BBC late night recordings. Now pop is electronic, electronic is pop, it's all on the radio, it's unavoidable.
It's shocking how often the answer to "How come X changed?" is either the creation of the internet or the cost of real estate.
Surprisingly often, it's both.
When my mom was teen, she says the way they had the most fun was to go to dancing parties in people's houses and sometimes in some special venue for younger people. That was in the 60's. As I grew up in the 80's we had nothing like that, we just went to night clubs or some street full of bars/restaurants. Dancing was mostly a thing you did by yourself, like in most night clubs still these days, not like she describes, with "their faces touching" :D.
It seems to me that every single generation changed and there needs not be an external reason for that other than young people wanting to do things the way they see fit, which normally is anything different from what their parents see as ideal.
Imho, the internet / mobile apps have drastically atrophied younger generations' face-to-face social interaction skills.
And specifically their appetite for the risk/discomfort that goes along with living in realtime physical moments with other people.
Human beings are awkward as hell, but that's what laughter and tolerance are the bridges for.
There’s an unspoken phrase here, it’s “in the way I think it should be done”.
Just because the younger generation are doing things differently it doesn’t make them wrong, in my generation it was sending text messages that was wrong because we weren’t talking on the phone. Before that it was talking on the phone rather than going to people’s houses.
I’ll also add what my psychologist told me.
Social skills aren’t innate in humans, we have to be taught them. Smaller family sizes and greater distances from extended family mean these aren’t taught by older siblings/cousins/etc like the used to and parents aren’t filling the gap, which means standards of social interaction are changing much more rapidly.
> Just because the younger generation are doing things differently it doesn’t make them wrong...
Yes, but that also doesn't mean change can't be bad or in the wrong direction.
What you describe isn't neutral, and it's pretty clearly not good.
In my experience young people are just as good at face to face interaction as they have ever been, but they now integrate online communication into the same interactions.
It's different but I think it's wonderful.
I actively work to learn how to do the same, and it's like having an extra-sense. The ability to backchannel while also doing face-to-face adds elements to communication that people who don't do it fail to catch.
(I'm 49 if it matters)
> And specifically their appetite for the risk/discomfort that goes along with living in realtime physical moments with other people.
The risk/discomfort lasted just that night. Nowadays everyone is posting everything everywhere. No wonder youngsters don’t want to risk it.
This is a form of social cooling in my opinion.
When Facebook first took off, I had an inkling radical transparency was going to be a societal outcome.
With everyone posting everything, and everyone's digital history recorded (if anyone cares to archive or dig it up), everyone would have skeletons in their closet.
I was hoping that would make society more tolerant and willing to accept faults in people.
In actuality, it just seems to have produced an industry of digital cleaners that the wealthy can afford, while everyone else gets fucked.
But then, that's why I limit my posting on social media outside of HN.
This seems like way too complex an explanation when a much simpler alternative is possible.
Most people are simply not that virtuous, because by definition the vast majority of the population has to have mediocre virtues or be in that ballpark range.
So ‘radical transparency’ reveals as much negative as positive, on average.
Sure, that's the first step.
But the next step was how society would change (or not), suddenly realizing that most people are simply not that virtuous. Certainly not as much as their previously perception-dominant "best face" made them seem to be.
Instead of accepting that, we seem to still be taking pot shots at leaders or prospective leaders for faults.
Or... maybe Trump's twice electability is an indicator that most people are willing to overlook things, now.
Why are you assuming there must be a ‘next step’?
The general population can just not care about a ‘next step’ on average…?
Typically when a core previous truth changes, society changes in response.
Girls are not as interested in nightclub substantial interaction anymore. "Substantial interaction" defined as "genuine attempts to meet a guy to go to the next club/bar/party and then maybe home"
There's a whole separate realm of social circle snapchatting (networking).
Not to mention swiping in dating apps.
Every instinct I have agrees with you.
Yet I can't help but wonder if people also said the same about the telephone (which enabled socialization without colocation) and television (Which enabled entertainment as a passive indirect consumption)
I realize of course that the internet, and mobile (and eventually VR/AR) is Yet Another Step Further.
But...like every step does it not also come with benefits for some at the expense of others?
For example, I simply can't believe that true extraverts are simply going to be resigned to giving up all these physical moments - they will continue to seek out and create and participate in-person spaces.
To me, the problem is less about the way that we do or do not socialize, and rather the monumentally addictive nature of online and app spaces, and the fact that the companies in charge of them have no other motivation at his point it seems than to just push it all to the limit.
Our feeble caveman brains cannot handle the dopamine roulette that is the TikTok/Instagram/Twitter feed. We have no immunity to it, so the only solution is artificial restrictions like screentime. Then again, we've had to reckon with that with plentiful calories too as we trended towards universal obesity and have STARTED to turn it around (but not succeeded yet). And that took decades.
Every generation struggled with something. Our grandparents were choked by smog. Our parents had polluted waterways and lead in everything. We are engulfed in microplastics and addictive technology. Our children will wreckon with the effects of climate change.
Through all this, humanity continues to grow, invent new technology, and raise both the floor for existence and the ceiling for prosperity.
The worst thing we can do now is to give up on the next generation or on the future of humanity. Optimism is our obligation and responsibility.
> I can't help but wonder if people also said the same about the telephone (which enabled socialization without colocation)
There were a lot more letters before the telephone. In London, the mail would be picked up and delivered up to twelve times per day. Within the city, you could have back-and-forth conversations through the mail within a single day.
> and television (Which enabled entertainment as a passive indirect consumption)
Absolutely. There were periods of time in history when there was significant opposition to television. Hence the coining of terms like "boob tube", "idiot box", "idiot's lantern", "cultural wasteland", etc. You can see a bit more of some of that (although not with a primarily historical focus) here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_aspects_of_television#N...
EDIT:
For yet more on this topic:
https://behavioralscientist.org/history-panic-entertainment-...
https://20thcenturyhistorysongbook.com/song-book/the-fifties...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Arguments_for_the_Elimina...
And they were right. Television created nothing of value.
> And they were right. Television created nothing of value.
Exactly. Bad things can and do become normalized and then unremarked upon. Some people confuse that phenomenon with those things actually being good.
People often have clearer eyes at the transition.
It broke movie studios as gatekeepers for mass distribution.
> if people also said the same about the telephone [...] and television
I'd say they were probably right. Pre-solo-consumptive technology, people on average were better socialized.
It's inherent in the nature of improved consumptive and interactive experiences to smooth off the pain points.
Unfortunately many of those same pain points are also intrinsic to realworld, realtime interaction. And doing them more proficiently is a skill that one can learn and improve (or not).
Thank you for this post! I get too pessimistic sometimes but this helped me see things from a different perspective today. Kudos.
Agreed. Nihilism and fatalism are both cowardly.
They are integral to capitalism, because those are the essential outcomes of almost all game theory.
Because the principle of capitalism that shall not be said d is that the value of a human life is zero
... The second unspoken principle of capitalism is that the environment is worth zero
Finally, the third is that the human race is worth zero
And alcohol.
Boomers basically pulled up the social ladder of fun when it wasn't convenient to them anymore.
Technology combined with oligarchy is really leading to a demographic and social disaster. I think the iron placenta and designer babies are the only things that will prevent population collapse. Well, age extension will probably kick in too.
It's a race between us killing the worlds biosphere and us fading away to nothingness right now. I think there's plenty of population momentum to kill off the planet
It's interesting how the creation of the internet still hasn't caused real estate prices to plummet.
Even two years of covid couldn't do it.
Many cities effectively ban or heavily restrict new housing developments that increase density.
I'm really not surprised real estate prices continue to rise when building new units is often an extremely expensive, risky process that in some areas can be stopped at any time with literally no reason required
Huh, why is college getting expensive, healthcare getting expensive, day care getting expensive, hell even streaming services getting expensive, none of these are heavily restricted that no development is happening there.
And in many cities breakneck construction activity is happening still real estate is getting very expensive.
This seems rather simplistic reason to me.
One can easily see how high real estate prices can translate to all those being more expensive.
Colleges pay rent. Colleges pay salaries to people who pay rent. All those go up with high real estate prices. Further, even if the college owns a land, the money they earn on that land has to compete with what a developer who is willing to tear it down and put up a residential building which now earns higher rent or sale price.
I don’t think all the increase comes down to high real estate costs but it’s clear that high real estate costs can easily raise prices downstream across nearly every area.
I have a strong suspicion that a lot of it is the rise of the two income household. In the early years it increased household buying power, but as it became the norm many services began raising prices because people could actually afford to pay them now. So the net result is that the increased productivity from nearly doubling the workforce turns into higher and higher executive salaries while the average middle class household is now roughly back where we started, with the added burden of a whole second career.
Yes, this seems to make lot of sense. Initially second income maybe additional savings, day-to-day conveniences, some extra luxuries etc, now it is part of survival.
Since second job is sold as "freedom from household drudgery" and GDP booster it can't really be challenged.
Yeah, and property is a positional good. Its price is a function purely of willingness to pay. So if you double household income, and perhaps quadruple theoretical discretionary income (after food, energy, gas and so on), give it 40 years and real-estate inflation eats the damn lot.
The price of every good and service is a function both of willingness to pay and supply.
Positional goods cease to be so if you substantially increase their supply - this is why Rolex, Gucci, etc are constantly worried about knockoffs.
> why is college getting expensive
Because of government subsidies. (If you were willing to pay $100k for college and the government will give you $50k, now the college can charge $150k. Yes that's simplistic but it's the crux.)
> healthcare getting expensive
Healthcare is doubly removed from price feedbacks - patients don't pay for doctors, insurance companies do. Patients don't even pay for insurance, employers do.
Not too mention that the number of new doctors in the US is artificially constrained.
> day care getting expensive
can't help you on this one
> streaming services getting expensive
Streaming services started out undercutting cable prices. That's no longer necessary so the price is stabilizing. Plus now they are expected to produce their own content.
Expecting everything to have the same root cause is unrealistic.
The reason is growing inequality. Those are just symptoms of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
> In economics, the Baumol effect, also known as Baumol's cost disease, first described by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen in the 1960s, is the tendency for wages in jobs that have experienced little or no increase in labor productivity to rise in response to rising wages in other jobs that did experience high productivity growth.
Stuff that's made in China gets relatively cheap, so stuff that's not made in China gets relatively more expensive.
All government interference—significantly restricting supply and then doling out free money/tax-breaks to pay for whats left. As if govt leaders never took an econ 101 class.
I just think people who say this are very funny and weird. I took an econ 101 class, but drawing supply demand curves to talk about wide ranging governmental policy is just a bad methodology.
Right, using arithmetic to set a budget is bad methodology. Might want to rethink your statement.
Where exactly did I say you should run a deficit? The words that I said were “wide ranging governmental policy.” I was thinking of examples like the minimum wage, where people often try to use econ 101 reasoning to definitively prove that raising the minimum wage must produce significant unemployment, when the real world literature turns out extremely muddy and contentious, ie the effect is much less than expected for a variety of complicated reasons that a supply and demand curve do not capture.
Perhaps economic issues at the scale of a modern country can be more complicated than would be covered by an econ 101 lesson.
Perhaps not, to a first approximation.
They did take econ 101. They simply know whose interests they serve: people who already own property.
There is no supply restriction. We're close to the record-high number of housing units per capita, it's only a bit lower than in 2007, and we're likely to surpass it by 2026.
This is not the right calculation. Housing units per household makes more sense, as the number of people per housing unit has been shrinking since we started collecting data as peoples preferences change. From what I can tell it peaked in 2011 at 1.17 and has declined to 1.12 since, and considering that we expect some vacancy from moving, condemned units, and people prefer certain areas and dont like many others, the trend does not support that we have enough housing. Not to mention the prices clearly show demand is there
The calculation changes if you only include adults in the denominator - there is a lot more adults relative to children compared to the past. The solution is to remove the very much existent density and other supply restrictions - see: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/04/th...
and
https://kevinerdmann.substack.com/p/household-size-and-the-h... which goes into more detail
> The calculation changes
Nope. It becomes slightly further from the record high numbers, but still better than at any time before 90-s.
At this point, the misery caucus is just grasping at straws. In a couple of years, the housing inventory will make even that metric irrelevant, but the price of housing will still be going up.
> The solution is to remove the very much existent density and other supply restrictions
Nope. The solution is the opposite: preserve the SFH at all costs and shut down the misery caucus. Build new cities, not new density. Create jobs outside of dense hellscapes.
Because the reality is that NOT A SINGLE CITY has lowered the housing sale prices by increasing the density of existing areas. Not a single one in the US, Europe, or Japan.
“Flat earth” style economic denialism is not as cool as you seem to think. Govt interference propping housing prices through various means was previously mentioned as well.
> “Flat earth” style economic denialism is not as cool as you seem to think.
Yeah, can you then point out an example of a city where densification worked to decrease the housing sale prices?
Tokyo? Nope. Seattle? Definitely nope, even though its housing inventory grew by 25% within 12 years. Moscow? Nope.
If it's so "round Earth", then there must be some early metrics that can indicate the success of densification railroading in places where it's been tried?
For example, Minneapolis went full cookoo nuts by abolishing parking requirements and the SFH zoning in 2019. They gave out the city to be screwed up by developers. How's it faring now? Oh, the price growth not only not slowed down, it ACCELERATED: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ATNHPIUS33460Q
Do you know Mark Twain's definition of "insanity"?
I said nothing about "densification." This whole diatribe is in your mind. My original point was about there being a well-documented shortage of housing across the country. You can argue against it if you like but just look foolish.
You point at few absolute price decreases which is true but don't take into account multiple variables (like population increases, inflation, tax policy) or understand higher order derivatives. In which case you've got no business arguing in these threads.
> My original point was about there being a well-documented shortage of housing across the country.
Can you point out the shortage on this graph: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1koDH ?
We do NOT have a housing crisis. Not even close. Housing is more affordable and of better quality than ever.
We have a DENSITY crisis. People are forced by economic forces to move to relatively few unaffordable locations.
> You point at few absolute price decreases which is true but don't take into account multiple variables (like population increases, inflation, tax policy) or understand higher order derivatives. In which case you've got no business arguing in these threads.
What "higher order derivatives"? I read most of the new research on urbanist policy. And so far everything I've seen confirms what I said.
That is because the internet is what largely has made real estate more valuable.
In pre-internet times, people shared real estate. Bars, restaurants, church, etc. Their discretionary income went into the fees, offerings, etc. to make these places comfortable. With the rise of the internet, people started preferring to stay home to use the internet. All that discretionary income once spent on fuelling those third places is now competing for each own's individual domain, thus driving up the price where individuals are found.
Two years of COVID exacerbated things because even those who still got out of the house from time to time were forced to stay home, so what remaining money was still funnelling out to activities outside of the home was entirely redirected into individual real estate.
The pin that pokes a hole in this theory is that commercial rents, at least in my part of the world in an expensive city, have risen faster than residential. Presumably this wouldn’t be the case if those third places were in such rapid decline.
Also, I’m pretty tightly involved in the local bar and hospitality scene, and most places are doing just fine — not quite pre-COVID levels at a number of places, but some are busier than ever.
> not quite pre-COVID levels at a number of places, but some are busier than ever.
The real estate bubble, if we are to call it that, goes back to the early 2000s at least. Pre-COVID, implying somewhere around 2019, isn't telling. For what it is worth, the housing price data I have in front of me shows that prices have come back down to nearly pre-COVID levels as well, so that more or less tracks anyway.
How does it compare to the 1990s? The landscape has definitely changed here. A couple of decades ago there were three busy bars mere steps from my place. Now, there isn't a single bar in town. Those closures brought consolidation to bars found in the next town over, which saw them thrive there, but now the decline is staring to become visible there too. The next, next town over is probably busier than ever as a result with even more consolidation slowly starting to take place, I can believe you there, but that doesn't imply general strength of the industry.
The media regularly reports on the dying death of the third place. Your local experience may not be providing an accurate picture.
Supply is artificially limited.
Supply can't possibly keep up when real estate is used as an investment.
As an analogy to the dead internet hypothesis I present the dead real estate market hypothesis. Increasingly it's just investors buying and selling properties from each other.
And it's not just a hypothesis. China built enough homes to house its population twice over, yet it's not reflected in the prices. All because everyone and their grandma is investing in real estate.
> China built enough homes to house its population twice over, yet it's not reflected in the prices. All because everyone and their grandma is investing in real estate.
Yes, but this is reflected in China's vacancy rate: 22% by some estimates.
In the US, home vacancy rates are sub-1%.
Not saying people aren't treating homes as investments, but it seems clear we also have a supply issue.
"Real Estate is Investment" should naturally lead to overproduction as investment-only properties get built to satisfy that demand—as we see in China. In the US, we don't see that.
The methodology is to take a hot city like Shanghai or Beijing, and count the number of windows lit up at night on a standard 30 story concrete apartment building. You'll find something like 25% of the units never light up. Now, those are in cities where people want to live, it is much worse in lower tier cities and new districts without services or jobs of lower tier cities.
Property taxes in the US mean you can't speculate so easily on property (you lose ~1% value a year). But they have 99 year leases instead, but everyone thinks the government will let you renew those with minimal fees.
If they built double the houses they need, how is the vacancy rate just 22%?
"need" can have a lot of flexibility.
For example in some countries, many students share a house. Whereas in other countries, every student will have a whole house to themselves.
In some places, children will get their own house at 16. In others, children, parents, and grandparents are all sharing one house.
Because people want to live in particular areas
This is really the issue. There are plenty of places people can live and afford. But everyone wants a particular lifestyle and a certain job in their desired field and maybe proximity to certain people. That sense of entitlement has been rebranded as an affordability crisis but it isn’t that. It’s just entitlement. People should instead live within their means and make sacrifices. Not everyone gets to live in highly desirable places like SF and that’s okay.
Is it entitled to want to live in the city you were born in and grew up in?
I think this paradox makes sense to me when combined with the comments above. The best way to maximize return on real estate is to influence gov to restrict supply
> In the US, home vacancy rates are sub-1%.
That's homeowner vacancy rate. Rental vacancy rate is around 6.9%:
A 6.9% rental vacancy rate implies an average vacancy of ~3.5 weeks per year. Given the high turnover of many rentals, that seems pretty low to me. Turnaround time just to do a make ready for a new tenant tends to be a week at minimum, sometimes longer for proper overhauls (replacing carpet, fixes damage, etc). Sure, not all properties turn over every year, but there's also quite a few properties that have longer vacancies to counteract that.
>"Real Estate is Investment" should naturally lead to overproduction as investment-only properties get built to satisfy that demand—as we see in China
China had massive home overproduction because the goddamned totalitarian government told builders to build or else. It was not market forces.
How do you suppose we do that in the US? Especially with this administration?
In the US, builders don't build 100 starter homes because it is more profitable and easier to build a couple McMansions and sell them for crazy prices. THOSE are the homes that get built as "investments". No builder will benefit from producing a large supply of homes, so they don't. The market will not self correct.
> How do you suppose we do that in the US?
Exempt or lighten planning requirements for affordable housing construction. California is going in this direction now.
There are other levers like subsidized financing for developers building homes targeting a certain price range as well as favorable tax treatment of those profits.
A lot of these have would probably have some bipartisan support.
This is what they did in my county. If you build a house as the actual owner (not as an LLC or for rent or sale) and promise not to sell within 1 year there are no design, code, inspection or planning requirements.
Lots of people taken advantage of this here. It is a pressure release valve available to those who can't afford commercial construction or boomers wanting 5x the real value they paid for their home. You can build whatever you can afford without oversight so long as it's only for your family. Most people end up just dragging in budget prefab, but you get the odd earth bag house, shipping container, one man shop carpenter, or just rich people with weird design ideas not allowed elsewhere.
Of course the naysayers have screamed bloody murder about everyone dying in a fire, but this has been law for 2 decades now and none of the apocalyptic prophecies came true.
In China, the local government gets income from leasing new construction land for 99 years, hence the incentive to build.
In the US, the largest amount of government land is held by the Feds and they keep increasing the limits on what the land can be used for year after year. Figure out how to make new home building key to government finances like in China and you will INSTANTLY have the problem solved and even have over supply.
Homesteading federal land should be reopened.
Some say there's little demand but that's horse shit. People snap up much worse desolate land around me to homestead for mucho dinero. Building a house with your own hands on public or unowned desolate lands is the most essential of basic human fulfilments. The youth cannot afford the already built homes nor their construction, so they ought to be able to take matters in their own hands.
As someone who has taken raw land with no utilities to a full house all with my own engineering and construction labor this is only half the story.
To build a starter home I not only had to go to bumfuck Egypt with the most libertarian zoning anywhere near jobs I can find, i also had to rule out the 9/10 of properties with practically irrevocable covenants made by self righteous boomers back in the 80s who already built their pig farm shithole and don't want their precious livestock living near anything but a mansion.
Then I had to find a rare loophole around code compliance and inspections so I could DIY it on weekends and not be subject to weekday inspections. Most codes want stuff like an expensive egress window even though no one living in the house is bigger than a much smaller sliding window, and it goes on infinitum.
Then I had to find a place they hadn't outlawed water yet through a grandfathered well, and finally get buddy enough with the power company to actually get them to run power without royally fucking me with arbitrary requirements. Almost the entire system is designed around grandfathered protectionism while kicking the next generation in the teeth with entirely different and constrained rules voted on by people who who live in places that don't even conform to the requirements imposed on you, which of course gives them a free artificial value boost as well.
A lot of the time code requirements get changed because someone fucked up so hard local government was forced to actually clock in and do work. It's also worth keeping in mind code isn't a ceiling it's the floor. As in it details the most half-assed way to build anything and have it still be legal. All of that said I'd love to have a word with the folks that have decided 3 acre minimum tract sizes locally are a requirement to put in a mobile home. Talk about defeating the purpose...
Agreed, but one thing to note on the Chinese real estate is that a lot of it is apparently "tofu dregs", so a good portion of the real estate is just a building waiting to fall down that you can crumble with your bare hands (lots of YouTube videos on this) and a lot of the supply is also in the middle of nowhere. So the supply is kind of not as much there as you would normally think. To use an analogy, does building a massive housing complex in the middle of the Mojave help American home prices come down?
> enough homes to house its population twice over
This is because a ton of them are in the Chinese equivalent of like Boise, Idaho where demand is fairly low. People want to live where the high paying jobs are.
Bad example, Boise is a hot and desirable market.
Better example: northern Alaska.
Alaska in general. Fairbanks, Anchorage, Ketchikan are currently in decline, as is Alaska as a whole.
I get your point, but that's a terrible example because Boise is one of the fastest growing metro areas in the country.
Whether or not real estate is a good investment depends on supply growth. You have the causality backwards.
Also made possible by the internet and computers in general, I'd argue. Without the easy availability of prices, sales data, and general number crunching capabilities I don't think this would be happening. Certainly not at the scale we're seeing.
This is the lesson the board game Monopoly was originally intended to teach. The Georgism side of "The Landlord's Game" sometimes feels as relevant as ever, and as obvious as ever why those rules not packed into the game by Hasbro. (They aren't fun and we don't actually want to question what real estate ownership should mean.)
It isn't a hypothesis. It is a well known fact. The more expensive a property is the more time it will be spent vacant because a lot of the very expensive properties are just uses as investments.
why doesn't someone introduce a legislation to tax vacant second homes at astronomical rates
> why doesn't someone introduce a legislation to tax vacant second homes at astronomical rates
They tried this in China. People would just get divorced so each partner had their own home. It turns out you can easily find someone in your family to "buy" a house as well.
Vacant home doesn't mean a house with no owner. I am not sure how getting divorced makes vacant home occupied.
if someone shows up there 3-4 days a week, how would you know? Even China doesn't have the surveillance setup to tell if someone is living in a house or not (well, they can check to see if it is renovated, and can check to see if the lights turn on at night). It isn't really a rule of law society, so you can't use "the trust but sometimes verify system" they used in Vancouver, and it is definitely not like Switzerland where your neighbors are constantly spying on you. It is a bit counter intuitive, but checking on these things is harder in China than in the west.
Vacancy is hard to prove and typically proxies like water usage or having lights on are used, but they're inaccurate.
They did this in the UK. A quick lookup says that a home that is vacant for over 1 year could be taxed 4x
Additionally, since 2004, there’s a law that allows local authorities to take over empty homes and sell them, to make sure they are used for housing
Not sure what the effects have been of either
We did that long ago - well the rates are not astronomical, but taxes are higher. Some states (probably all but I don't know how to look this up) have a homestead credit, and they date back to the 1800s.
One thing missing - renters cannot homestead their apartment and so the funds that own the apartment have to charge more rent to cover taxes on those apartments.
This becomes devastating to people who are trying to sell the "second" home in a market where it often takes months to get sold.
fuck them!!
Because they want to sell an asset? That seems myopic.
Do you know who owns most real estate either directly or indirectly? Pension funds. And who wants to shake up their pension? Nobody. It's the most democratized form of asset ownership, literally everybody is going to get angry.
And secondly... Are the second vacation homes really the problem? I'd guess the problem begins around 3rd or 5th, not the second one, which is a fairly common and usually also a good thing to have - for both the owner and the society.
Second vacation homes (plus Airbnb) become a problem for locals of that area. The young ones can't survive there and eventually have to rent (or provided as comp package) from established businesses (B&B/hotel).
> And secondly... Are the second vacation homes really the problem? I'd guess the problem begins around 3rd or 5th, not the second one, which is a fairly common and usually also a good thing to have - for both the owner and the society.
I'm not sure if you mean owning one primary home and two vacation homes, or one primary home and one vacation home when you mention a "second vacation home," but either way this strikes me as out of touch.
In 2024, US home ownership rate is 65.6%. (https://www.bankrate.com/homeownership/home-ownership-statis...)
In 2022, 4.6% of housing was comprised of second homes. (https://eyeonhousing.org/2024/09/the-nations-stock-of-second...)
4.6% of 65.6% is 3%, meaning at most 3% of Americans own a second home (but this doesn't account for citizens that own 3 or more homes, so the actual percentage is even lower.)
I don't consider that to be common. I also wonder: why is it a good thing for society (or even most homeowners?)
not talking about real estate in general. whats the proof that most vacant homes are owned by pension funds ? I don't think so.
Why? Because politicians aren't generally in the habit of introducing legislation that pisses in the face of the folks that fund their election campaigns. Oligarchy's a bitch.
Do you like all your Capital fleeing to other countries? Because that's how you enrich Canada, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Lichenstein, etc at the USA's expense.
https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/taxes/speculation-vacancy...
We already have speculation tax in Canada.
Sometimes I dream with a wishful solution like defining areas of "great living desirability" (basically the cities where seemingly majority of people compete to live in), and charge a yearly tax of N% the market value of each home (with crazy high N, like 20), for owners who have more than M units in that area (with a convervative M, like 3 or even 2). ...You'll see how greedy investors flee fast, and the remaining buyers are honest people who don't want to speculate, but to actually own a home where to actually live.
Only if there is unlimited investors
Not commercial RE
Commercial RE too. When you say supply is constrained, they don’t mean there’s no RE available, they mean RE isn’t available at a lower price. Most cities in the US right now have a huge commercial RE vacancy rate, yet if you try to lease it, you’re not getting rates that a free market low demand situation is going to get you.
Yes it is. There's no zoning law that says "You can only build houses here, no apartment, unless you build commercial real estate"
Commercial real estate is generally illegal anywhere dense housing is also illegal.
No, it's not. Supply of housing is not in any way limited. Cities are desperately fighting a rearguard action against greedy developers plopping multi-story monstrosities in former SFH areas. All in the name of "affordable housing".
While the supply of house units per capita is at the record-high levels.
Reality: housing is cheap, abundant, and high quality. Just not near the downtown cores of large cities.
The internet doesn't change "location location location" that much. It doesn't change weather, or scenery, physical entertainment options, in-person social opportunities, or backyards and amenities.
It's also created big windfalls - due to easy distribution/sales for online stuff - for more than enough people to drive up prices in many of the most-already-in-demand regions.
Ye olde rich person historically has traditionally addressed the "there are different pros/cons to the city than rurally" dilemma by having multiple properties. Which of course only eats into supply more. Is the percentage of people able to do that now higher or lower than it was when a country home required full-time live-in staff?
I know people with an urban condo and a country house. At one point, I did think about it but decided I didn't want the hassle and, anyway, preferred to have my choice of cities during a given year. I'm sure there are circumstances where a second home makes sense especially for people who want to migrate summer/winter or heavily use a ski condo.
> Even two years of covid couldn't do it.
My jurisdiction gave free money to everyone that lost their job/income, with far more liberal eligibility criteria than unemployment insurance had, at fixed amounts conveniently we’ll above the monthly rental costs for most.
Kept the rental market propped up.
Companies came together to demand everyone back into work at physical locations in part to keep real estate pricing high.
I'm as anti-RTO as anyone, but I've seen this asserted over and over but have never seen anyone give evidence in favor. As I understand it the claim is something about cities giving tax breaks to companies for having offices? Or is the idea that CEOs have investments in real estate?
Does anyone have a source that actually shows that this was a factor?
It did affect housing. I remember the great deals one could find when remote work was in full swing, and all that was said about vacant office, or smaller cities growing at the expense of bigger ones.
It was only two years though. An industry can hold off and fight back in that time.
That's because most people live in cities because they prefer it, not because their office was there.
I think it is almost entirely job driven. Given the choice of equal pay, most people would pick a cheap suburban 2000sqft house with a garden for 10% the price of a SF condo.
Of course, variation exists
I think you have it backwards, and I think “most” is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Given equal cost of a home, most people would prefer to live in a city. Especially if you look globally, cities are absolutely trampling suburbs with demand. Yes, people in the suburbs often chose that preferentially, but there are less people in suburbs.
In America, suburbs are disproportionately popular. I’m guessing that has more to do with civics than preferences. Most of suburbanites I know in America either live near their suburban job, or express some fear/distrust of various aspects of city life - and it’s mostly related to cars and transportation.
costs aren't equal. The price of an acre plot in downtown SF is not the same as the suburbs.
My point is that if you remove jobs and pay from the current incentives, city demand would decrease dramatically.
If you removed the legal protectionism imposed by zoning codes, which require the reservation of large tracts of land for single-family housing regardless of actual market forces, suburb demand would decrease even more dramatically.
Im not sure I follow your point. What does demand have to do with zoning?
I agree that if you remove zoning, many areas of single family homes would be built up if they are in and around urban cores. That isnt new demand, but existing demand, not able to be expressed by current law.
However, my point is that if your [random small town] job paid the same as NY or SF, you would see a flux out of those cities to the small towns.
WE are describing two different situations.
You appear to be asserting that the demand for suburban-style low-density housing is naturally quite high, and that many people who live in cities are merely settling for less-desirable dense urban housing, as a sacrifice they must make for a higher income. I counter that if this were the case there would be no need for single-family zoning, because people would naturally choose such housing whenever possible, and the market would respond.
> you would see a flux out of those cities to the small towns
Having actually tried this, hated it, and moved back, I am skeptical.
>I counter that if this were the case there would be no need for single-family zoning, because people would naturally choose such housing whenever possible, and the market would respond.
This mistakes the price one person can pay for a piece of land with the price many people can pay to to use the same land. A single family home does rent for more money than a condo if they are on the same block in the city.
> I counter that if this were the case there would be no need for single-family zoning, because people would naturally choose such housing whenever possible, and the market would respond.
A major reason zoning exists is because with out it you'd have developers and investors out-bidding the homeowners to redevelop plots of land as they became available.
It's a collective response to the power of $$$ in a free market.
Even if all of those condo purchaser who would buy a unit in the building that replaced a single home would've preferred a single home, they didn't have a direct say in that lot being turned into condos. The person with the most money did.
And of course, they couldn't have all fit there. But I am skeptical of "enough people with money want to live in your area now" as being a sufficient justification to say that local control has to be eliminated. Why favor the future richer potential-resident over the current resident? (I would extend this broadly, for incumbency protections for renters and owners alike - why is it an inherent good for an existing area to get denser forever? Why not encourage less centralized development? Why would "the people with the most money should get to decide how this area is developed?" the best plan?)
I think you've got causality twisted here. People prefer having a job, the higher paying the better. High paying jobs exist mostly in metro areas, so folks move there for work. Preference for the suburbs is just folks exercising their perfectly natural tendency to want as much space/land/house as they can afford while maintaining access to services and proximity to work. I'm quite confident the majority of suburbanites would strongly prefer living on 20 acres if they could still get to work in 20 minutes and the grocery store in 10.
> People prefer having a job, the higher paying the better. High paying jobs exist mostly in metro areas, so folks move there for work.
People work minimum-wage jobs and choose to live in cities. These individuals are not preferencing a city for the wage, but rather the lifestyle, access to amenities, the lower cost options it offers, car-free life, etc.
I think it's super disingenuous to claim that people only live in cities for work. There are tons of social options in cities, tons of civic amenities, and tons of lifestyle differences that draw people to a city.
> their perfectly natural tendency to want as much space/land/house as they can afford
Is this a natural tendency? I don't think this "natural" tendency holds true globally, and I'm even skeptical it actually holds true in America, where suburbs are unusually popular.
> I'm quite confident the majority of suburbanites would strongly prefer living on 20 acres if they could still get to work in 20 minutes and the grocery store in 10.
I'm quite confident that the majority of people (ie city dwellers, which are the majority of humans) would preferentially prefer the access and amenities of a city home at the expense of 20 acres. Which is the reality we see globally.
But it's of course a ridiculously illogical claim that people would prefer rural living if only it had all the benefits of city living. What are the benefits people derive from the hypothetical 20 acres? What does it even mean in this context, because it's incompatible the whole premise of this argument. People prefer "grocery store in 10 [minutes]" more than 20 acres, and that's why cities exist.
Cities are not just where the jobs are, cities are where everything is. You'd likely have to offer double my salary before I'd consider exchanging my life here in the heart of it all for the lonely, empty, car-dependent barrenness of the suburbs.
I guess it depends on your idea of the suburbs. I can walk to a major grocery store, coffee shops, restaurants, and breweries, but have a quarter acre with fruit trees and gardens.
Im happy to trade that for having to spend an hour in car/train a few times a year to see a show or museum.
I would take a pay cut to work closer to home.
Like many in the suburbs have convinced themselves they're rural as a result of oil company propaganda (rural identity sells big mall crawler trucks), it sounds to me like you live in a central, quite urban area that's otherwise sparse on local options and have convinced yourself it's your extra special private enclave in the hills, completely separated from the economic center, despite it literally being your economic center.
Ditch the suburbanite identity politics and start advocating for the development of shows and museums in your local area that you could walk to, instead of taking your money away from your economic center at the benefit of oil companies (bc let's be real, suburban identity sells car dependence and even if you take the train, all the cultural momentum from the propaganda shaped your life decisions to move there and what's that train run on?).
Nah what living outside the city really buys me is more of my preferences of freedom. I have no government maintained roads, basically no police, I can build what I want without an inspector telling me what to do rather than some narrowly constrained window of options set by a city planning board. If I want to keep cows to feed my family fresh meat I can do so. There is no sound ordnance, no regulation on gunfire, you can ride dirtbikes all around, your kids can explore without encountering hordes of junkies or karen callin CPS for childhood independence. My taxes are near zero. I depend on myself and my neighbors not through violence of law and taxation but through mutual voluntary cooperation.
It's not for everybody but it's not an oil scam either.
I find it amusing that so many activists in US believe that the sole reason why people like the suburbs over the cities is some kind of "propaganda". I'm from a country where suburbs are far less common and I grew up in a city of 300k and then lived in a megapolis for several years. And yes, we did have public transportation etc.
When I moved to US, I chose to live pretty much as far as I can from the nearest large city that wouldn't be considered straight up "rural" (although we do have a bunch of farms around here). And the reason is because I don't want to live in what is, in effect, a giant human anthill.
It really depends on how you draw the lines between urban and suburban.
For this conversation, we're talking about the cores of tier 1 cities where the high paying jobs are most abundant. I considers a location suburban if they are predominantly single-family homes and if many of them commute into the Metro for work.
I'm going to ignore all that identity politics stuff because frankly I don't understand what you were trying to say there
Age of the suburbs has a significant impact on their character. A New Jersey burb established in 1880 can be far more pleasant and walkable than a Florida McMansion neighborhood built in 1980.
Haha, cities are where everything is if you want everything and experiences delivered up to you in a one stop mall like package and don't have personality enough to organically find things.
Personally I find city people the most boring and socially/culturally stunted because they think a cultivated/curated 'mall like setting of stuff' = culture. They also tend to think buying access to art/culture because they have money = having artist style/culture. The music scenes/art scenes are overly (often self) curated pap.
Lots of cities 'diverse' districts are just... suburbs... that the cities absorbed.
Even for things like 'exotic' foods I routinely find bombed out suburban strip mall restaurants to be superior and less 'catered' to American Paletes than places in cities that have to be more generic because they serve such a large population.
I also have personally found when I have been lonely in life, being lonely in the city is the worst kind of loneliness.
It's obviously fine if that's your preference. But many jobs are in the suburbs and you can access many city amenities pretty conveniently without living in the wilds.
Jeez, you'd hate it here then :-)
Looking out my window, I can't even see another house. If I twist my neck, I can see a neighbor's barn about half a mile away, though.
I strongly suspect that had remote work remained a bigger trend post-COVID peak, you'd be seeing a lot less core urban residential demand (and all that would imply). After all, a lot of large US cities were seeing urban flight of both residents and companies in the late 1990s. When I graduated from grad school--other than NYC finance--pretty much none of my classmates went to live in a city or worked there. Urban living/working is hardly an immutable law of nature.
> Given the choice of equal pay, most people would pick a cheap suburban 2000sqft house with a garden for 10% the price of a SF condo.
This already happened during Covid, and no country substantially de-urbanized. In fact, urban real estate prices skyrocketed.
The only cities where prices stayed flat or went down were highly over-priced places that people hated living anyway (like the Bay Area).
If we are talking about Tier 1 cities, those are the ones that de-urbanized. Interest rates had a huge impact on prices, but my understanding is that suburban real-estate, especially ones with outdoor attractions skyrocketed as much or more.
If this were true, we wouldn’t need to enforce the single family home through zoning.
The fact that you can build 200 condos on the same acre as 1 ranch house does not negate the fact that most people would choose the ranchouse over the condo if presented a choice between the two.
It is numbers game. Its not about what any single wants best, but how many times you can sell people their 2nd choice using the same land.
"most people"? Genuine question – do you have any data to back this up?
While I would much rather have a nice downtown condo in a major city over a ranch house in the sticks. I would rather have the ranch house in the sticks than a condo in the same location as that ranch house.
Some dream of living in a condo in the city, some of a rural ranch house. I don't think anybody dreams of a rural condo.
The ones that like living out in the country but don't want to/can't mow lawns and shovel snow do.
'If this were true, we wouldn't need to protect our water bodies with EPA laws. Obviously people prefer polluted bodies of water, and it's the artificial EPA laws that prevent it.'
What this analogy says is that people don't want other people living at high density near them. This is expected, since those other people are going to be poor and often dark skinned. Needless to say "other people are pollution, yuck" is not a good argument for zoning.
I think the argument would be much stronger if it just stopped at poor. While Im sure that type of racist exists, I have never met someone who would object to a rich dark doctor moving in next door. To the extent I encounter racism, it almost always follows the logic that dark = poor = crime & dysfunction
People prefer cities due to access to stuff, but most people also would prefer a 3000 sqft home with a pool. During different phases of life, your ability and your relative importance given to either of those two poles will vary.
As you get older, especially if you are married and have kids, usually the trade-off skews strongly towards having a big house, and then you will balance the distance side of the equation.
Also, not all suburbs are created equal, and this is even more true outside the US.
> most people also would prefer a 3000 sqft home with a pool
If someone else does all the maintenance, dusting and vacuum cleaning, maybe. Other then that, actual swimming pool for doing laps or actual water park with slides is kind of better in most cases. There are some people who would use that large house or would be using their backyard swimming pool often ... but most just dont.
> As you get older, especially if you are married and have kids, usually the trade-off skews strongly towards having a big house, and then you will balance the distance side of the equation.
Someone with kids appreciates not having long drive to and from work, those take away from time with kids. And someone with kids over 7 years including kids themselves appreciates presence ability to do go to sport clubs, music clubs, libraries, school or whatever else without parent having to drive them each time.
There is some advantage to big house in remote place with kids, but it also causes you and the kids to be more isolated from everything else.
Compromise is the key. You cannot have everything. There are times I wish I lived downtown. There are times I wished I lived in the mountains. There are times I wish I lived on the beach. If you live in the city that enables some lifestyles and makes some impossible. If you live on a rural area you get a different life, and suburbs again different.
I know farmers who think nothing about hunting off their back porch - and why not their gun doesn't have the range to kill a neighbor so they don't have to worry about missing their shot. I know people who shoot guns in the suburbs, but they have done extra work to create a safe range in their house (and generally only safe for the lowest power rounds). The denser your living the less viable having a safe space to shoot is.
There are things that are only possible in a dense city. You need a lot of people to have enough interest to support a symphony orchestra. There are a lot of niche stores that can only make it in a dense city because that is the only way to get enough people interested in that niche to support a store.
Sure, but overlap also exists.
If you live in LA or San Diego, you can live close to the beach and go there all the time. Most people there don't, but if that's important to you, you can achieve it.
If you live in Vancouver, BC or Seattle, you can ski in the winter and hike in mountains outside of cell phone reception in the summer AFTER WORK, never mind every weekend.
I assume most american cities have gun clubs. If the attraction to shooting a gun can be satiated with target practice, that can be a decent compromise. (Of course if the attraction is feeling like a frontiersman by shooting straight off your porch, that's a different thing. I can understand it even if I don't share it)
This is not possible with every city and every hobby, but that ends up kind of becoming the point. The cities that have this overlap become even more in-demand. It's why housing is so expensive in places like YVR and SFO.
Some but I gake just a tiny list. You wilL have more than one thing from the complete list but no matter where you choose to live you can't have everything.
I think the opposite is true. It's easier to find a job in a city other than your own with the internet, and big cities pay the most
> big cities pay the most
Big cities pay top performers the most, by far, but median incomes tend to be quite a bit lower than small town/rural areas. If you are a professional sports star or F500 CEO, the city is unquestionably the place to be†, but for the normal person who will end up in a drab job the money often isn't there. Many will accept the low pay due to being temporarily embarrassed CEOs, of course.
† Although knowing some of these people, they tend to live rurally as well, having the means to be able to live in both settings. The rich rarely live in just one place.
Pay is lower in small/rural towns for the cheap jobs - but your cost of living is also lower. The trick is finding the best compromise for your situation - dense enough to have the higher pay of a city while not so dense that your cost of living is too high.
Where I live in the Suburbs of Des Moines, McDonalds starts at $16/hour. There are rural towns not far away where they start at $14, and I know rural towns farther out where you start at $10 (McDonalds isn't in these towns so it isn't a full comparison but that is the closest I can give). Where I live apartments can be had for under $1000/month so it is feasible for someone working at McDonalds to live on that wage. In the more rural areas apartments might be $500/month but you are making less plus the local grocery stores are more expesnive than the Aldi you could walk to from the apartment (thus meaning you don't need a car though crossing the highways isn't exactly safe).
Of course the real issue is people pick where to live based on factors other than cost of living. They care where their families live.
> Pay is lower in small/rural towns for the cheap jobs
I expect the median income is often higher in rural areas because, while there is little on the high end, there is more mid-tier opportunity. In the big city if you don't make it into the big leagues, only the dregs are left. Cities amplify the extremes. In rural areas, the $30 per hour jobs are willing to hire any warm body that shows up.
Of course, rural is a difficult categorization as it is a catchall for everything that is left. A rural area with a strong agricultural sector, for example, is nothing like a rural area that is not much more than barren wilderness. In the former, there is a lot of money to be made, comparatively, while in the latter the McDonalds at the highway rest stop may be the only business there is for hundreds of miles. We are definitely talking about a certain kind of rural here.
That ignores that plenty of people are in cities because of the amenities that concentration allows. If you want niche/specialty restaurants, grocery options, entertainment, medical care etc. you will have to be in a large metropolitan area
That means you have to be in driving distance of a metro with several hundred thousand.
That is very different than a Tier 1 city.
The opportunities you get in a city of 3million is different from 600k is different from 250k. I've lived in all of the above over my life. You can find niches in each. However the larger the city the more options. The smallest city had great Thai food - some family from Thailand moved there and opened a restaurant, but there was no Vietnamese, the next largest city has both, and the 3 million city more options than I was ever able to check out. (there are cities > 10 million around with even more options).
You can be in a broader metropolitan area without actually living in a city.
Yeah big cities provide a one stop mall like experience for 'experiences and culture' for people who need that curated for them. To me it's the most boring, non-organic, empty experience, but I've always preferred non-mainstream scenes or to hunt out my own entertainment/style/beauty. I can see the draw for people that doesn't work for though.
It's funny that cities various 'interesting districts' are normally just suburbs that the city absorbed. But yeah, suburbs are just awful places without their own culture or interest (unless absorbed, then they are a distinct interesting district).
IMO, the internet and residential real estate are complements, not substitutes. The less people leave their homes, the more they're inclined to pay for bigger, nicer ones.
What's interesting is how high interest rates couldn't do it.
The internet has actively _boosted_ real-estate prices. Real estate prices were suppressed pre-internet because transaction costs were high and there was nearly zero utility of an unoccupied space.
Airbnb, easy and cheap travel, remote work, property management firms, remote surveillance and access control, etc. And also declining household sizes (many more people living alone) which is seemingly a result of internet/social media/mobile devices.
Maybe Ricardo was onto something.
Land value tax baby!
Reference to Ricardo's law of rent: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent
Montalban?
Covid did that, just not in the way we thought.
The thing is, the managerial class is pushing for a return to the office, trying to reinstate the former balance.
The internet facilitates people moving to the big cities in various ways.
It has caused the prices to plummet in small towns and lowest tier cities. It's big cities that saw the internet grow their real estate prices because the Internet made it easier to research large cities before moving there
yeah i think the internet is helping speculators to increase prices. I think they manipulate prices by using their market power to increase prices by asking high price for example online for 1/3 of their houses so price inflates.
in my opinion is the same with every price augmentation in the last 20 years. The Internet helped make fake offers that drove price high.
snd yes blablabla the invisible hand of the market…
the invisible hand of the markt is if all speculators work for the same goal on a market with scarcity they dont compete. See prices of Art. its all fake
> It's shocking how often the answer to "How come X changed?" is either the creation of the internet or the cost of real estate.
Why is it shocking? The Internet is the current Big Thing that's upending everything the way previous Big Things (steam engine, movable type, etc) did. And real estate prices are one of the central coordination mechanisms for arranging things in the physical world.
It's shocking how often the answer to real estate issues is "land value tax would fix this!"
I'll bite, how would land value tax fix raves not being profitable enough to afford their venues? It seems to me like it make things worse.
The theory is that (a) the tax would be paid by the property owner and not the venue (it is assumed rent follows an econ 102 inelastic supply model) and (b) property would be less attractive as a store of wealth so prices would drop.
Seems like that would guarantee that only the most profitable uses of a given property would be contemplated by the owner.
exactly, so those people who own an old empty warehouse, a large basement, or whatever, now have a huge incentive to find uses for them. or they have to sell them which pushes prices down for everything
But what good does it do to push prices down, if even more money has to be paid in taxes for as long as they own the property?
lower value, lower tax. lower value, lower rent.
Sorry, but a "land value tax" is one of the worst political propositions I've ever heard. This is a great way to further erode the middle class, ensure that owning is always prohibitively out-of-reach for anyone born after 1980, and to promote corporate consolidation of land by BlackRock and other corporations.
I assume the parent comment proposes land value tax as a replacement for existing property tax schemes. In other words, instead of taxing the value of the land + whatever is built on it (current system in most parts of the world), you only tax based on the value of the land, regardless of what is built. Such a system would incentivize using the land as efficiently as possible, as that part is not taxed.
If you have prime real estate in the center of a city but that is undeveloped, currently developing it increases your tax. In a land value tax system, that land would presumably be taxed higher, but tax would not increase if it is developed, therefore incentivizing the owner to actually use it.
So what happens when someone owns land, and then has a bunch of neighborhoods and developments pop up around them? I know a lot of poorer people who bought their home when the area wasn't developed, only for things to spring up around them. That would increase their land value, sure, but also their tax, and I don't think that's fair.
It feels like a way to force these people out of the towns and family homes they've grown up in, in favor of some rich guy or corporation. They can be strong-armed out by increasing their property value around them past a point they can afford the taxes.
Since people keep trying to draw the connection, I’ll try my hand.
The Internet is the most recent technology that is enabled a small number of individuals to become vastly wealthy alongside, of course, a certain lax style of government. As wealth inequality increases, more of the money in the economy becomes tied up in wealthy people’s investments and savings, which inflates asset prices.
This is the housing theory of everything
More like "How come the younger generations aren't doing <Fun thing>?"
Because they can't afford it.
Also my belief is that people don't do anything anymore because nobody gets really bored anymore. Boredom is a powerful motivator to make plans, set up clubs, find interests, meet people etc.
Now you just swipe through instagram for a few minutes and boom, no more boredom.
I don't buy it.
Going to a club is cheap, in most you only pay for drinks which a bit more expensive than in a pub, but it's not breaking the bank.
Here in Italy you can go to a club and spend less than 10€s for the night if you don't have to eat.
I'll say what the issue with clubs are: plenty of people never got there to have fun but to meet people and get laid. Now dating apps have removed the need for youth to go to clubs.
Obviously we live in different places, but I finished uni in Canada not too long ago and going to the club during uni was expensive. There was often a cover, if you want drinks at the bar, they'll be like 10-15$ each, if you drink at home, it's much cheaper. So usually we'd pre and then make our way to the club. But often , we'd get a little too drunk/high at home or enjoy one another's company enough that we never made it to the bar! Or if the idea was to meet new people there were often house parties where they played music, people were dancing etc anyway, they were free, didn't require lining up/id checks and often enough we're close enough to where we lived that walking home would've been easy.
Right, but rave culture used to be the antithesis of cover prices and fancy drinks. Rave culture was very much the domain of the transient, the semi-homeless, the youth that had left their parents houses without much money. (Plus some trust-fund kids of course, but they really weren't the majority.)
So "can't afford it" isn't an explanation for the decline in rave culture, even if it might be a reason kids don't go out to clubs today.
> rave culture used to be the antithesis of cover prices and fancy drinks...the domain of the transient, the semi-homeless, the youth that had left their parents houses without much money
And before that, it was grunge rock. But now, check out the prices for Pearl Jam tickets!
Boredom might’ve been underrated all along.
I was going to say "when I was a kid, raves happened out in the woods where there is no real estate cost", but then I realized the lack of socializing or risky behaviours pretty much eliminates this form of partying today, haha. It's also impossible for kids living in most population centres. I guess it was just a weird rural-kid thing here in Western Canada.
I wasn't a raver but I went to a couple, and wow, what a time. There's nothing quite like the smell of a diesel generator and the sound of earth-shaking bass surrounded by dancing zombies inventing dance moves on each beat, deep in a pacific north west forest. I had a few of friends who were into that scene.
These kind of parties are still happening. At least in Europe this is still a thing.
I’m in my thirties and have been involved with these kind of parties for at least ten years.
A general trend that I have been observing for years though is what usually is being referred to as „TikTok Guys“. This involves guys and girls in their early twenties wearing fetish outfits and doing lots of drugs.
I don’t care about people coming in fetish outfits to our parties but I don’t want some young guy overdose on one our parties. In practice this means that we have been much more careful about who knows when and where a party is happening.
These parties existed in England in the late 2000s. I went to a few, and they usually resembled a zombie apocalypse.
No idea what the UK rave scene is like these days.
Gen≠Z here, and that does sound like the best party ever.
I think we could say that covid killed a lot of these activities (some were already in decline, but covid delivered the final blow). GenZ just happened to be coming of age during the pandemic years and thus prefers to stay home as they see that as normative. Millennials are past the rave stage as they're getting into their 40s.
As a Gen Z who was a shut in long before COVID, I disagree. I knew plenty of people who loved going out before, during, and after lockdown. I'd guess only a fraction of people who liked going out before found the joy of staying home. But likewise I'm sure there were some who found it miserable at home and after lockdown vowed to be more outgoing.
I hesitate to write a lot of things off to COVID because, if you look at some presentations/papers from early on in the pandemic, a lot of things probably changed less than the "experts" thought they would. That said, I also see various things that were on a downward trajectory or cruising on momentum being given a downward shove by COVID.
A friend who used to run big late-night parties in San Francisco said the big change started after the 2008 recession. Many of the twentysomethings who were laid off left town, and the ones who remained were working longer hours.
I was on the scene in the Bay Area in the 2000s. I went to warehouse parties and secret raves that required calling a number to find out where to get picked up to keep the location secret. It was vibrant and a lot of fun.
There were at least two sites that I knew of for keeping track of parties (bayraves.com was one, I don’t recall the other). The scene was dying at the same time that I was aging out, but I sure miss it.
When I lived in the Midwest, the scene died when ecstasy became a known quantity in mainstream news media. The last rave that I went to (there) was loaded with a million cops. An org that offered free testing for purity / adulterants was told they’d be arrested for testing any pills. What a backward and unhelpful position to take when people may be at risk of an OD. Ecstasy was still generally clean at the time. I’d be afraid to take an unknown pill today, what with fentanyl and the like.
My wife, who has been a raver since the 90's, is currently out collecting free Narcan doses to deliver to people throwing raves in Southern California. Party organizers need to really step up and have Narcan on hand, but most don't.
I'm a millennial (38) who never participated in the "risky behaviour" that is raving, clubbing, hooking up, etc.
What I do do though is travel for swing dance events [1], which often involves live music, bluesy late night parties, etc. I also have friends who do similar for salsa dancing and board game / anime / nerd conventions. So I wonder if part of this is that "staying up late doing fun thing with semi-strangers" has expanded to more domains than freestyle dancing to electronic music?
[1]: eg https://dclx.org/ https://www.instagram.com/bal_moment/ https://www.balweek.com/about
Swing dance is down overall compared to ten+ years ago in NA. There are way less events. The events don't go as late either. It used to be that almost every event would go to 5am. The crowd at these events is much older now too. It used to be primarily under 30 and now it's well over 30.
Losing all the campus clubs for two years really impacted things, and I think there was also a big loss in mid-sized events, but hopefully things do still continue to recover. Certainly there is still loads of enthusiasm, especially in the Balboa world, where the flow aesthetics and high skill ceiling really appeal to obsessive types.
It appeals to old people. Young people aren’t coming back. It’s been on a downward trend for longer than the pandemic started.
Online dating.
I guarantee that only about one in five male clubbers were truly "only there for the music". Maybe fewer than that.
Women went along with it because, well, what was the alternative, and the contemporary culture encouraged it.
Online dating has its problems, certainly, but the risks people took in the 70s, 80s, 90s were kind of insane by today's standards. And also the amount of unwanted attention women had to put up with. Sure, some of the attention was wanted, but surely not most of it.
The risks are called living your life – there is a inherent risk with traveling, hiking, wandering around as a kid, and almost any activity outside of staring at a screen.
I said by today's standards.. women going home with some random guy without anyone even having a phone number for them. No mobiles, no net, no nothing.
And in most cases that worked out fine, but today people would think it insane to even suggest that.
The enormous amount of fear that has been injected into society, seemingly permanently, disguised as "safety" (i.e. framing a negative as a positive) is one of, or perhaps THE, the most detrimental factors to the health of that society, and is actively harming the development of people growing up within it.
Life is much safer now so mundane relative risks look much worse. When illness or famine lurks a every corner, no one is questioning a kid venturing 3 miles on his bike to buy mom a pack of smokes and buy himself some Cracker Jacks. Now you're considered Satan if you allow that and some prosecutor will ramble about predators and kidnapping at your trial.
That's for a few reasons.
999 good or OK outcomes and 1 bad one can still be overall pretty damn bad, when scaled up to the level of a society. It becomes a Something Must Be Done scenario pretty quick.
And I suspect in this specific case, the ratio of bad experiences.. maybe not terrible, but just bad.. was a lot higher than 1 in 1000.
I mean, the flip side of that is, going home with a stranger in a big city is pretty much a total historical anomaly before the 60s sexual revolution (because of smaller communities as well as more conservative sexual attitudes), maybe some of it is just the pendulum swinging back.
I disagree. A few of those 999 hookups will result in marriages and families. Others in relationships. This is arguably the whole point of society, to engage with other people, to be in relationships, to reproduce. What we see now, largely due to unrelenting fear (again, disguised as "safety"), is unhappiness, isolation, loneliness, depression and mental illness all dramatically increasing. This is not a coincidence.
Having been to raves, another issue you run into if you go there to meet people is that the kind of people who will hook up at raves probably don't want anything serious. It's a super hedonistic environment. If you want more than a one night stand any other form of dating is better.
Yes - sitting at home and looking for companionship on an app is better than leaving the house, interacting with other people, dancing, laughing, singing, making lifelong memories ::eyeroll::
>I guarantee that only about one in five male clubbers were truly "only there for the music". Maybe fewer than that.
Clubs aren't really raves though. Yes, most single people going to clubs are looking to hook up - all a "club" really is, is a bar with a DJ. A real rave typically doesn't even sell alcohol. But I'd wager that most single people going to actual raves (in warehouses or outdoors) are either too high to even think about hooking up, or really are there for the music and to dance - at least through the 1990's and early 2000s. I'm in the latter group, I'm a guy who went to raves (in warehouses and outdoors) for the music, as did everyone else I knew. Nobody was trying to hook up, it was definitely about getting our dance on.
RE prices were zero in my rave days : https://technotarek.com/shows/richie-hawtin
Exactly. People used to organize stuff in the middle of some forest and miraculously hundreds of people showed up.
the best raves these days have great anti-phone measures: - stickers on cameras - you can’t even take your phone out of your pocket on the dance floor
Some places I visited in Berlin even required checking in your phone at coat check. These were the best-organized coat checks I’d seen in my life.
I actually think those are not the main factors. What really happened was for the first time in history, there was competition on how you could talk and "hang" with friends. Mobile phones and then social media made it so people would go out, then check their phones, socials and not even be present there and then ultimately the next time theyd opt-to to stay home and do what they were gonna do at the club at home.
This seems like mostly a case of competition for activity than anything.
This is it. The phone scrolling has become so addicting that people just go on their phones. And audio quality. You can enjoy the music sometimes at better quality in your own home and scrolling all the same.
> Mobile internet & smartphones seem to be killing all forms of live in person interaction.
Right, most types of social gatherings have decreased over the past 15 years. Events that haven't fallen off are the noteworthy ones.
There is still a vast web of international niche electronic music scenes and artists, and elements of electronic music as well as the instruments used to produce it have been used in popular music for many decades (Donna Summer, 80s new wave bands, Madonna, etc).
Late night raves might be in the decline but day raves are increasing in popularity.
I think the biggest factor for the decline of night raves is just that people are more health conscious and night raves takes a lot of toll on the body.
> GenZ studies have found a lower participation in "risky behavior" which late night clubbing may or not be considered.
I think they just do different risk-taking behavior. Sports betting seems way more prevalent, and Gamblers Anonymous is reporting way more younger people attending meetings.
I would add that ravers grew up. Kids don’t want to do what their parents did.
My guess is: the pandemic and online dating.
The pandemic killed off a lot of social structures. The casual carpool going from various East Bay locations to downtown San Francisco is gone. The reward for the driver picking people up (express lane, lower toll) is the same. The people are largely the same. But the institution didn't magically restart after COVID.
> Tier 1 city RE prices have made live entertainment venues harder to run profitably.
Which, in turn, makes events that do happen more expensive, decreasing turnout. If there's a Friday night event for CA$15 with CA$5 drinks, I'm much more likely to go than if it costs CA$50 with CA$15 drinks.
And that makes the city less desirable, so fewer people live there, and RE prices find an equilibrium.
No, it makes it more desirable for older people who don't want raves down the block, and who also have more money, increasing the RE prices. The average age goes up, the number of interesting energetic people goes down, and the city becomes a cultural desert with high RE prices. Yes, that's an equilibrium, but Adam Smith's invisible hand just gave you a shitty city and undercut cultural innovation.
Real life does not behave like an econ 101 class. Real estate in particular does not allow for perfect competition - there are significant entry and exit costs, and demand/supply tend toward inelasticity.
not when the majority of real estate is being bought by investors just looking for a place to throw money regardless of price. That's the main issue in Canada and in tier 1 cities in the US. The people owning the RE don't live there
> In the 90s/00s my consumption of electronic music was mp3 downloads of BBC late night recordings.
'This. is. Radio. One. Essential... Essential...'
That’s right
chills
Narcotics and alcohol use is also down in this generation, and I wonder if that’s the risky behavior aspect vs marijuana legalization. I’d like to see a study that broke down by state to see if there’s any correlation there.
The forbidden fruit is sweetest. If you can go get THC gummies whenever then you don’t need to grab whatever is available right now.
But I think too that Covid is a huge problem. Rave age now is people who were at a delicate phase of interpersonal development five years ago. And just hanging out in crowded places is now risky behavior.
Living in a world freshly built to cater specifically to them did strange things to Baby Boomer’s heads. COVID is going to do something equally bad to GenZ (and A) in more or less the opposite direction and I worry what it will be.
It’s wild to think how much smartphones and social media have changed things...
> And finally electronic music of various forms used to be a niche, and now it's mainstream.
I think this is definitely the biggest reason.
The average YouTube video probably has serious electronic music going for it.
Back in the '80s and '90s you felt rebellious listening to that stuff. Now it's so common it borders on proverbial.
I'd probably go to a public venue that plays 90s and 2000s electronic music but for me it would be the equivalent of my boomer mom going to a Fleetwood Mac concert in the '90s. Just more nostalgia than a desire to relive the rave days. There's no way I could dance the way I used to in the '90s. There would need to be seating there for my old Xennial butt.
> Tier 1 city RE prices have made live entertainment venues harder to run profitably.
Abandoned warehouses and other commercial building you could host a rave were once plenty in NYC. No more. Hell when I was a kid there were three abandoned factory buildings in my neighborhood we'd break into and become our "club house" in grade school. You just had to watch for squatters and neighbors calling the cops. Now you're lucky if there are even lots around - most have been built on already.
The craziest thing happened this NYE. I live in the country, more or less Bay Area, at the end of a long (2-3mi) dead end road. My neighbor's house is empty and posted for sale. Someone broke in and threw a rave there. The party was advertised online and they were selling tickets:
https://monosnap.com/direct/YxtOr5VARRXTAIr2Ej9ae5KCjAjRfn
The owners (who live across the street) confronted them immediately. Bouncers dressed in "security" shirts forced them away. It took 1.5 hours for the sheriffs to show up.
The whole neighborhood is traumatized.
Sounds like a house party. Though I guess it could be a rave as well, just a small one. Better than squatters I guess.
Exactly. All the places I went to 30 years ago for a rave are now nice areas.
Someone would call the cops for the amount of noise now before the party even started.
Then factor in fentanyl.
Maybe most of all though, in the mid 90s electronic music was a new thing in the US.
The first rave I went to , I really didn't even know what I was going to. The reason I stopped going was the novelty had completely worn off. Amazing times but the falloff was rather steep.
The quality of today's electronic music has gone way down too, it's just not really appealing at all. My wife who was very much a raver in the 90's calls the new music "alarm clock sounds" - something designed to annoy instead of make you dance. It's just so abrasive and lacking any funkiness or danceability at all. It's no wonder kids these days are turning towards other forms of entertainment. My niece who is her early 20s is into Pearl Jam. At least their music has some kind of soul to it.
none of these seem to resonate based on what I see anecdotally
Seems like rent is so high in big cities that so many businesses are no longer possible.
I think one solution to lower rent is a rule that for every month a rental property is vacant its book value declines by 10 times the rent.
> I think one solution to lower rent is a rule that for every month a rental property is vacant its book value declines by 10 times the rent.
Wouldn't that just lower its property tax, thereby making it more profitable for owners to leave venues unrented (compared to the status quo)?
Right now commercial real estate owners are incentivized to never lower rent even if a property is vacant for a long time because the book value of the property is tied to its rental rate even if it is vacant.
My fantasy solution is that ALL businesses near expensive areas must pay a minimum wage high enough to rent a place (or a room) there.
If the barista must be paid $109k to afford to live there, then let Starbucks jack the price of a plain black coffee to $17 for a small. Fewer people will be willing to pay this, Starbucks will go out of business and virtually nothing will fill its place. Suddenly these multimillion dollar homes will be in barren wastelands and, gee, maybe they won't be worth so much anymore. A softer solution is to pay the low wage workers from the time they leave the front door, if the wages are insufficient to live nearby.
I've had the same idea. 1 week of after tax wages must be enough to pay 1 month's rent within x miles on a y sq ft apartment.
And people should be paid for commuting. Unpaid commutes to work are a huge hidden subsidy for businesses. They use tax funded roads to allow workers to live farther away in cheaper locations and don't have to compensate them for the time needed to get to their jobs.
Exactly, let the business owners argue with the landlords instead of the tenants. This existing system just forces the dirty work on the weakest and most vulnerable person in the chain: the employee/tenant. Let the two powerful stakeholders battle it out.
Not sure I understand - is your goal to live in a barren wasteland? Because you can do that today, very cheaply.
Sort of. In the US if you don't have running water and power soon enough the teacher or some 'concerned citizen' will rat you to CPS and get your kids taken or at least badly hassled. As soon as you connect to water or power the grips of regulation force you into an expensive treadmill.
The goal is to avoid having the working poor subsiding the property values of the rich. One reason some property is more "desirable" than others is its proximity to amenities. I'm pointing out an inefficiency in the market, and that the amenities shouldn't exist at subsidized rates.
I find it really hard to believe this and am questioning the data.
I raved back in the early 2000s and I still rave now and the popularity is absolutely booming in a way I've never seen before and in more parts of the world.
15 years ago there was zero electronic music events in Dubai, now there are huge electronic music festivals there and it's clear a ton of people at those events are taking "something" that isn't just booze. Even Saudi has had its first big EDM festivals, albeit I think they were no alcohol allowed.
EDM artists are more popular than ever and more and more of my friends are getting into EDM and going to EDM festivals like Tomorrowland, Mysteryland, ADE, etc.
I feel like they're conflating "rave" with "clubbing."
Friday, Saturday club attendance has been dropping across the world, and many electronic music focused club venues have shut down (at least in Australia and the UK).
My word association of "rave" is "festival" though. Festivals feel like they're still booming, or at least not in dramatic decline.
From a small personal sampling: Coachella, Portola, Outside Lands, Proper, Lightning in a Bottle, festivals are still going strong. For some (Coachella, Lightning in a Bottle) attendance felt like it dropped 2023 -> 2024, but perhaps 10-20%, and this is likely economically correlated (inflation, etc). Late 2024- festivals (Portola, Proper) were packed.
> My word association of "rave" is "festival" though.
hehe, my definition of a rave is a temporary venue where at least 2 people have asked if you need help finding Molly.
There is a bisect of "festival" goers and "ravers", but many ravers are priced out of festivals, but may attend raves weekly or monthly.
Both of these imho, are different than your traditional licensed club that primarily serves alcohol and is 21+ exclusive.
The UAE is a microcosm and not representative of general trends imo.
I believe that, 15 years ago was peak deadmau5, skrillex, dubstep explosion, EDC expanding everywhere. No way globally its more popular now then it was in the 2010s
I mean music festivals in the US are booming as well. EDC attendance more than doubled last year.
Dubai is a little behind
Interesting. My experience in NYC even with folks in the 20s is they prefer going out BEFORE it gets super late, with the super late nights only happening for shows (where the DJ/main act doesn't come on till 1:30 AM).
I've also anecdotally seen more day parties which might be driven by demand from the former rave crews who are aging out.
NYC as well. I thought that too and then realized it was just who I was surrounded by. You can find some extremely late night shows throughout the city that get packed with young people. Hop from Paragon to H0L0 to Nowadays and be out from 10pm until 10am, grab some pancakes at a diner, and take the train home.
Did that journey recently with a Canadian friend who moved here as his welcome party :) On nothing stronger than booze, too!
For sure, I think this does however line up with even younger folks who aren't going to generic clubs for a late night. They would just start earlier, bars/etc. and then end earlier. The full night bangers are definitely still very viable (and as crowded as you would like them) in NYC
I live in NYC as well, and I find the post COVID Berlin-esque Bushwick only scene to be terrible. It's filled with the most dull repetitive music that AI can replicate with a god awful sound system and no atmospherics whatsoever, and while I do appreciate the lack of dress code / door policy / bouncer aggressiveness, it feels like a brutal slog to endure without drugs, and a miserable long ass train ride on the L train back to the city.
I miss the pre COVID Vegas style nightclubs in the Meatpacking District. Yes, crowded and aggressive bouncers who make up the door policy on the spot, but once you're in there's mesmerizing lighting and visual effects, top notch sound systems, the glitziness of bottle service, and the euphoric albeit predictable drops of EDM.
That all predates COVID... circa 2017 you could catch me in some Ridgewood DIY with no atmospherics most weekends. My favorite nights are the ones where the only light is the exit sign and it's me and 15 other people dancing all night in an uncrowded dance floor until the sun comes up.
Different strokes!
I'm not sure if stuff changed or maybe i'm just older. A lot of those parties seemed so mysterious and exciting a couple years back for me. Now it seems like the same old stuff month in and month out. Most DJs kind of have their shtick, and there's also this kind of standard left field rave sound that a lot have seemed to adopt. Kind of like the Resolute roster.
it's also very hard for me to rationalize staying up until the main act comes on at 3-5am, getting home at 6am minimum. You waste most or all of the next day.
The main act starting at 1:30 AM while (thinking of the US) a lot of people work weekends or even if they don't, their weekly schedule is 9-5 and so their sleep schedule is / should be like 12-7 is mad, it makes sense that going out matches more with that schedule so you don't get cicadean whiplash from doing night shifts over the weekend.
That said, in the UK for a good while now a lot of places are closed at midnight, on paper to prevent excessive drinking and nighttime troubles. In practice people just drink more and earlier in the day.
NPR did a recent expose about a local renegade spot & the shows it supports in my scene:
https://www.kuow.org/stories/under-the-bridge-a-portrait-of-...
With mixed results, it kind of burned the spot by virtue of being talked about in too wide an audience but I think it's also important to make it known to the mainstream that this kind of stuff is happening.
All that's needed to make a rave happen is music & speakers, scale and quality is all configurable. Humans will always find spaces to congregate: whether it's their own houses, local parks, abandoned warehouses, industrial districts, or deep in the woods. I hope we're not losing our drive to be around eachother and dance, it's been such a integral part of my life story (as a fairly young person!) and has let me find my people.
Was a favorite spot of mine. A shame that the NPR coverage burned it.
At least we still have plenty of forest areas to renegade in.
It was burned years ago.
Give it two years or so to fade. There’s just not enough low cost big spaces to hold shit in.
> Humans will always find spaces to congregate ... I hope we're not losing our drive to be around each other and dance, it's been such a integral part of my life story (as a fairly young person!) and has let me find my people.
I'm gonna dump a little bit with the blind hope that someone can explain what I'm feeling. Not meaning to disrespect you mjsir, but this thread just has the right context:
I'm in my 30s and I have never danced, I don't dance, I think of myself as not having the brain lobe for dancing. I've done choreographed dancing like tap dancing and pole dancing, but I don't dance dance. I don't want to dance, but people keep saying it's essential to the human experience. So I would prefer either dancing or knowing for sure that I don't need it, over my current state of anxious uncertainty.
I don't find places to congregate, I don't know if I've found my people at all, and I feel like my life story is incomplete when I come to these threads on the nerd computer-touching website and see people say that raves are so important. I'm a nerd's nerd, one of my fondest memories is staying up all night alone in my room playing with threads and sockets in Java as a teen. I've had 3 romantic partners, 1 asked me out, 2 I met on a dating site. I do not approach people in real life. I barely live in real life.
This feeling that I'm missing out on something and unsure if I want it, peaked earlier this year when I dated a girl who was just a hundred times cooler than me. A chill go-with-the-flow hippie literal surfer type. When I think about her I have to wonder what the fuck is wrong with me. She did not stick around, and I've been left with the sense that I'm living my entire life wrong.
Can anyone relate?
Yes, but I'll just speak to the part about dancing: it is true that (a) many people find it fun and rewarding and (b) many people don't find it easy and/or natural a priori. However, given the right style, music, AND a few (or possibly many) months of deliberate practice to make it "click" in your brain, many people could move from category (b) to (a). Searching through this parameter space requires time and effort. This is a thread about EDM, and I spent some time trying to like EDM because it was cool, until I realized that it's not for me, and I have zero inclination to dance to it unless I'm on MDMA. On the other hand, swing, salsa, bachata ended up being absolutely my jam -- after months of deliberate practice, as none of these musical styles were super familiar to me at the outset.
For a lot folks, partnered dance forms are nothing short of life changing, and they tend to appeal to analytical introverts; if you haven't tried already, go sign up for your local lindy hop lessons, and keep your expectations low. There's no downside, at the very least you'll get some exercise.
There’s nothing wrong with you if you’re not into dancing. It’s 100% okay to be introverted and happy. Many people are. The only thing I would say is it might be worth the effort to try to get out and find some of your people, whoever they are. Feeling uncomfortable doing things like that is also totally normal, and imo sometimes feeling uncomfortable is an essential part of the human experience. I’m fairly extroverted and still feel awkward, anxious, or uncomfortable pretty regularly.
I would highly recommend talking this through with a therapist! I don't think anyone on the internet has the time/understanding/or context to tell you either way in any satisfying manner that would settle your confusion. It is never too late to introspect and learn about who you are as a person, and a therapist is a great sounding board at the very minimum.
> Can anyone relate?
I can relate with everything you have said and my life experience seems to be similar to yours. When I was younger in the 90s I forced myself to go clubbing a few times. I hated everything about it, frankly. Even so, I can't help but feel like I'm missing out on important life experiences when I read comments here.
But I think it's important to keep in mind that threads like these suffer from selection bias because, objectively speaking, most people in real life do not go clubbing or raving in their adulthood...
Tons of people just go and imbibe in various things and just sway to the music or the beat. It really is a blank slate to make it what you want, and i think that's why its popular - many types of people all go to them for many different reasons.
I'm curious where they got their data (or I should say I'm suspicious of their analysis). My cousin is a raver and she sends me Snaps of the events all the time. They're just as crowded as ever and happening just as often as a decade ago.
There was obviously a pause during COVID and a slow ramp after, but it's been back to normal for about 1.5 years now.
I totally doubt this is true personally. I started raving myself in university in 2002 and see more raves happening now and have more friends who are ravers than back then...
I also see more electronic artists playing gigs all over the world, more people getting into DJ'ing or electronic music production, and there are more EDM artists getting hugely popular in the mainstream, see acts like Fred Again.
I love electronic music. Been listening to it for 30 years. Mostly drumbass, dubstep, some house. Groups like subfocus. I used to listen to tiesto, bt, etc.
One, I hated the term "raving". I was thought raves were finding an abandoned house, playing music and drugs. I just like the music and don't need the dance clubs or the drugs.
But with the said, I think the "club" scene has dropped off. Expensive drinks. Expensive covers. Who wants that.
Has the music droppped off? I think it kind of merged into more mainstream music.
This exactly. I've been to "raves", they were just giant parties with $3 beers in an abandoned or semi-legal building somewhere in Brooklyn. I was surprised when I started hearing people call giant corporate venues with dancing "raves".
I went out to one of those giant clubs in Brooklyn not too long ago to see a friend DJ (Brooklyn Mirage). I was on guestlist, but the cover would have been $50. I bought a round of drinks to say thanks, and for three drinks I paid $75. Plus they made me load a credit card on some stupid wristband to even get the drinks. What 20-something can afford to do that with any regularity? Their rent is already 2-3x what I paid when I moved to Brooklyn nearly 20 years ago.
I don't buy the "young kids don't want to go out late anymore". They just never encountered scenes that were consistently relaxed, fun, and cheap.
A lot of entertainment is priced in and the powers that be lament that young people aren't falling for it anymore.
You like sports? Well, you need a subscription to see their away games, a subscription to see their home games, and a separate subscription to see their games in season, and a subscription to see their off season. You want to see them in person? well.....
You like music? Well, the cost of a ticket to see your favorite artist is $80 + $60 in fees. Online purchase fee. Printing fee. Seat Reservation fee. etc.
Wanna go out for a few drinks? That'll be $8 for shitty beer on tap
Want to go anywhere? Time to reserve your parking spot, or pay your parking ticket. Public transport outside NY? lol. Can't really get drunk or high now either since you need to kinda be sober enough to get back. Or fuck it! Uber and pay an extra $50 in surge charge fees!
Want to go to the museum on the weekend while you visit a city? Well, too bad, it's very congested so the museum has surge charged the price of the ticket to $70 (the Shedd Aquarium special in Chicago).
I'm good I think I'll just stay home and jerk off
> I'm good I think I'll just stay home and jerk off
Exactly. There's a fine line between convenience and the cost of doing it yourself, like getting a decent smash burger or firing half of the devops team.
The most ridiculous thing is having venues trying to casually extort you at every possible opportunity, without the implicit advantage of a few very subtle but 'approved' dealers lurking around while making sure everybody is having a safe but very fun time.
It's like an escalator to nowhere
> What 20-something can afford to do that with any regularity?
Practically every 20-something (and just as many 30+ somethings) I know in NYC DO do this very regularly, especially if they already live in wburg/bushwick. If they're not there, they're mixing it up at nowadays.
I guess the 20-somethings I know (and knew when I was also 20-something) are broke artists and models. They don't have $200 to spend on a night out every weekend. Nowadays certainly is affordable and there are others of course. People make it work.
There were definitely expensive clubs that kids with money went to when I was young -- a friend ran sound at The Box and that was always wildly priced. But there was no shortage of illegal parties in warehouses with cheap drinks and no cover on the williamsburg waterfront and out in Bushwick in the early 2000s for the weirdos. Even met my wife at one.
I think a lot of those illegal warehouse parties died with the DeBlasio administration. At least, that's when I stopped hearing about them so I am open to the possibility that I'm no longer plugged in to the right scene.
The DeBlasio administration was the first to add a "night mayor", and they made it easier to open legit venues in the same neighborhoods that used to host the illegal warehouse parties, like that triangle just west of Flushing avenue centered around the Morgan L train stop, where Elsewhere and The Brooklyn Mirage among a few other big, high priced venues are now.
In exchange for making it easier to open more venues and have more legal dance parties, they cracked down on the illegal parties pretty hard. This had the effect of pushing the prices up, changing the scene and crowd, and introducing more regulations. Before, you had to be a little more plugged in to know when and where the parties were because they were "underground" (but only a little). You could also reliably dance until 6 or 7am and buy all the alcohol you wanted whenever.
Now, these parties are way more mainstream so people who are less enthusiastic about dancing show up because it's something accessible to do, and everything must legally shut down at 4.
I remember being excited that things were going legit because I thought it would make the parties that I frequented better, but now with the benefit of hindsight over the past 8 or so years, I think it's had a negative impact on the scene, along with all the other issues related to the ubiquity of cell phones and the changing gen z tastes.
I still long fondly for Bushwick circa 2012, but it might just be more "Back in my day..." nostalgia.
I think pervasive (invasive?) social media and the "always-potentially-on-camera" reality, paired with cancel culture, has also killed a lot of "underground" scenes (and counter-culture in general but that's a whole other topic).
If you haven't read it, you might like Emily Witt's recent book Health & Safety. She writes about her experiences raving in Brooklyn (and Berlin) from roughly 2015 to present day and many of the changes that have occurred (as well as dropping in her own personal story which may or may not be interesting to you).
Fair, my circles were a lot more the tech/finance/rich parents type. But yeah there's obviously a market for it.
Those underground parties still exist for the most part. I've aged way out of all this, like you have, but I'm aware of their existence through many friends in the music scene in NYC. If you're enterprising and skilled at navigating Instagram and similar platforms as they rise and fall you wouldn't have too much trouble figuring out where they are.
This so much. As a gen z living in new york city, the first question people ask me when I pitch a night out is how much it'll cost.
With insane ticket, cover and drink costs. People would rather stay in and do something cheaper.
I will say the underground scene is thriving because of this though.
I can tell you living in south america that this is true. Three drinks esp. caiprinhas even at the expensive places would be about $13, $8 or $9 on promo. Cover for the fancy place is $17. Bottle service is $34.
Plus the bombed out building post war Berlin industrial feel is 1. Real, and 2. free for the promoter and the drinks are cheaper there. Yes, that's real barbed wire, and yes, its really electrified.
Yep, "back in my time", you could go to parties with then relatively famous DJ's (from gigi d'agostino, gabry ponte, etc., to our locals like Umek and Sylvain) for the entry fee equivalent of then ~2 street kebabs, and "club dj's" (local dj, playing other peoples popular music) for a price of ~1 kebab.
Drinks were a lot cheaper, but for most of us, it was drinking store bought drinks outside, then going in and having one or two drinks inside.
Now, an event like this, 60eur+ (~15 kebabs) for less known DJs, and you can't even sit down at a table/booth, you need to reserve those in advance and pay like 300eur (+ tickets.. but you get a bottle of cheap vodka and like 4 redbulls in the price). And it's a night club, a few tables and benches were always a must for those who either drank a bit too much or took a bit too much of the happy pills.
Brooklyn Mirage is hardly a rave place, just a club. Went last year it was pretty terrible. The sound was so quiet I could talk with my gf without yelling. There was also a food vendor inside the venue for whatever weird reason. Paid $300 for tickets and 2 drinks. I heard basement is a good place but never been. Europe's techno parties and raves are still going strong and no food vendors inside ofcourse we are not that lame.
My understanding is that Brooklyn Mirage was engineered specifically to be both loud and at the same time permit a conversation with the people next to you, so your experience is a feature, not a bug. I think we’re all just not used to having that level of thoughtful engineering with that design criteria, so we just associate “too loud to talk” with “good.” I found the experience to be remarkable.
There were clubs in lower Manhattan and Midtown before 9/11 that had those kind of sound systems. The kind of THD that costs money. Jungly kind of beats were still exotic.
Its definitely not a feature. This sound system would be laughable in europe, where the techno culture is thriving. The point is to get lost to the music dancing. Not much talking should be going on. I think they designed it that way so as to not be noisy to the surrounding area since its an open space. Also, having a food vendor inside the club is extremely lame. Can't americans go a few hours without food? Do they have to eat everywhere they go? Its so weird every cocktail bar in NYC also serves food, this is not the case in europe. You go to a bar to drink, food is eaten at a restaurant.
Oh for sure, Brooklyn Mirage is the worst. And there are definitely great parties still happening all across NYC that are reasonable -- I literally just bought tickets a few minutes ago to see Dlala Thukzin [1] spin at Silo in Brooklyn for $25. Perfectly fine cost to pay the artists.
> One, I hated the term "raving"
Completely agreed on the terminology. When I got into the scene (late 90s, Philly and Baltimore), everyone legit totally avoided saying "rave" or "raving" when talking with other folks in the scene. We all just said "party", and it was clear what you were talking about based on context (and, for better or worse, clothing style). No one said "ravers" either, it was always "party kids" instead, at least among the younger end of the crowd.
"Party" could interchangeably refer to either a "one-off" event or a club weekly/monthly, and similarly made no connotations as to whether or not the venue was licensed/above-board. Unlicensed one-offs were referred to as "outlaw", "warehouse party", etc. There were also unlicensed venues which threw regular weekly/monthly parties and these were absolutely amazing, so I'm a bit perplexed by the folks here saying a "real" rave is only an unlicensed one-off.
In any case, in my area, as a term "rave" was largely only used by news media, law enforcement, and outsiders who completely misunderstood what the scene was about. The only major exception was internet discussions – web sites like ravelinks.com, newsgroups like alt.rave. But even there, "rave" in the name just helped people find the sites, and still wasn't a term thrown around much in actual discussions.
> Has the music droppped off?
No, it's better than ever in my opinion, especially for non-mainstream house-adjacent music. There are a ton of talented producers who are seamlessly merging many genres and influences... folks are combining classic UK rave synths (well, really from Belgian New Beat originally) with Italo-disco, or taking trance and adding in happy hardcore elements, etc. Many classic samples and sounds, but given a new twist, it's great.
That said, I used to be a major drum and bass head back in the day, but largely lost interest in that genre as it became less danceable over the years. Not to mention my knees aren't what they used to be...
>No one said "ravers" either, it was always "party kids" instead, at least among the younger end of the crowd.
Over in Japan the term was party people which slurred into pary people and finally paripi which is the term today.
Just some interesting culture from the other side of the pond.
That's especially interesting since Joi Ito is often credited with introducing the scene to Japan, and prior to that he was very involved in the US scene in Chicago. I wonder if he brought the terminology over too!
thanks for that piece of trope :)
Exactly, the organized events are just too expensive; when I think of "someone who goes to raves", they have the means to do so every weekend or at least once a month, but who can afford that kind of thing nowadays when prices have gone way up while income has stagnated?
Electronic underground is still well and alive. Sure there is lots of mainstream electronica now but if you look a bit you’ll find tons of new fresh stuff.
Sure you can organise raves in illegal locations but a club can still be about the music and can be a more sustainable “home” for the music.
Sure it’s a lot more expensive but then again everything is - the clubs just need to survive somehow.
Tbh I live in Berlin, where rave culture is most alive probably
Some of the best events I've ever been to have been where a collective has organized the Nth annual event etc. which has taken over an entire location or venue and brought in a really diverse but very friendly crowd with them from all over the place.
But yes, every other day of the week, it's like a restaurant that serves music, the machine must go on, rent gets paid, food in bellies etc.
> Has the music droppped off? I think it kind of merged into more mainstream music.
There’s still plenty of “underground” dance music and events going on.
The main stream stuff is just another sub genre of electronic music.
Nitpick, but it's Sub Focus and he is one person
amen to BT
Enshittification
Glad you brought up some of the musicians (Tiesto).
Looking back on "Trance" and "House" as genres they seem really vapid, vain, and dare I say it, decadent. Reading about the "mecca" of these genres, Ibiza, makes me wish I'd never listened to this stuff growing up.
Virtue signaling your dislike of music because of the environment it is played in is asinine.
Do you wish you’d never listened to Mozart? He was a serial misogynist after all.
I can understand parents not wanting their children to listen to music with explicit lyrics, but for an adult to feel this way?
Music is not decadent.
Greed, aka promoters, killed the rave scene when they started charging absurd prices and pivoting to festivals where they could command 100's of dollars for entry.
Because the author uses Berlin as an example. As a millenial that grew up in Berlin, I just think that the hype about, what used to be alternative, mainstream clubs is flattening. Especially techno and electro clubs. They are just not as great as social media wants you think they are.
People who love the music will go their for the music and will keep going. Social media folks that go there for the drugs and epic party will lose interest, because it's not as epic as they think it is.
Apart from that other alternative clubs are just doing fine (I am going mostly to drum and bass parties). Even though they got less. But I think the club dying there was because of other reasons, not the missing audience
Too expensive? I see illegal dance parties in the countryside more than ever. And people drive far for them and sleep it off in the sun the next day (or so). Big bags of drugs (if you buy in bulk, drugs are those things that come with very large discounts) and wholesale energydrinks etc. So those are cheap, but I can see legal places would have issues maybe? High entry fees, super expensive drinks etc.
Despite the headline, the article makes it clear that it is talking about legal nightclubs, primarily in large cities. The younger generation just isn't into clubbing every weekend in that way, don't want to spend (or even have) that sort of money on going out, and the costs of running a club have skyrocketed.
At the same time, according to the article, it seems that larger one off events or festivals are still very popular. So the kids still want to dance.
I see illegal dance parties in the countryside more than ever
Who's attending these? Is it mainly the old timers or are they attracting a strong following from new generations?
> Despite the headline, the article makes it clear that it is talking about legal nightclubs, primarily in large cities.
I guess since they used "rave", people assume they use the commonly understood definition of the word, not just "dancing at a random dance-club in the city", which I don't think many would consider "raving".
> Who's attending these? Is it mainly the old timers or are they attracting a strong following from new generations?
Here in Spain there is a wide range of folks attending dance parties both the ones in/around big cities, and the ones out on the country-side. Obviously, the ones out on the country-side tend to have a crowd that is more "hippie" for the lack of better words, but otherwise I see all types of ranges and people from different walks of life. Mostly skew around my own age I think though, around 30 or so.
I guess since they used "rave", people assume they use the commonly understood definition of the word
yea, this article has unfortunately fallen foul of the 'headline doesn't match the article' problem. Seems to be a common problem these days when the headline writer is judged by how many clicks their headline gets, rather than if it's actually relevant to the article.
> Who's attending these? Is it mainly the old timers or are they attracting a strong following from new generations?
Mostly 20somethings as far as I have seen; invites are word of mouth (aka Whatsapp) and we stumble on them because we hike around a lot and then have a chat. This is during the day when the partygoers are chilling out usually.
Oldtimers are mostly dancing in local bars to small cover bands. Also until the early morning usually and no coke/speed, but just beer/spirits.
It's just the same force that's killing almost everything else in sight like a plague of locusts:
the rent
On the one hand millennials are getting older so it's totally reasonable to expect they wouldn't want to party into the early AM anymore.
On the other hand real raves don't happen in legal venues. I've partied in warehouses, upscale restaurants, artist studios, roller skating rinks, movie theaters, hotels, apartments. I threw parties on the lightship Nantucket (LV-112), although those were day parties. But none of these events would be factored into the financial times reporting.
Some of the evidence presented by the article is compelling but just don't think they can draw real conclusions about the state of nightlife with such a limited perspective.
The article also mentions that earlier ending events made to accommodate aging millennials have seen an unexpected and huge interest from Gen Z
But yeah, the decline of the nightlife and hospitality sector is what this article is about, as the regulated rave experience is very mainstream and has been for a long time now
The production value is quite high now and still improving so I don't see why the illicit rave experience would be so interesting when the facilities would be so lacking in comparison. There are lots of electronic dance music events on boats, cruiseliners, retired battleships and more.
Music festivals are bigger than ever though, and they are so frequent and numerous that you can go as frequently as people were going to clubs. I have multiple friend groups where that’s all they do and it is far more intense than just being out passed 3am, although many do officially end their main programming at 1am, many don’t.
> The production value is quite high now and still improving so I don't see why the illicit rave experience would be so interesting when the facilities would be so lacking in comparison
A few reasons:
1. security at official music events are often complete arseholes and can totally destroy the vibe. Think of all the row rent chip on their shoulder wannabe cops, then place them in a field of drunk partying adults with complete power and almost zero oversight (+)
2. Advertising everywhere
3. Massively overpriced food and drink
(+) While I fully understand that once you've got multiple thousands of humans in a field, you do need security, at small illegal raves - say a few hundred people - there's no need and the vibe without feeling like you're being watched is spectacular.
> (+) While I fully understand that once you've got multiple thousands of humans in a field, you do need security, at small illegal raves - say a few hundred people - there's no need and the vibe without feeling like you're being watched is spectacular.
On the other hand - saying this as a former tech guy for illegal raves - even in small raves below 100 people in attendance there's so much potential for shit to go seriously wrong. Obviously substance consumption related issues ranging from ODs over contaminants to mixture effect amplifications, that's the most pressing issue, but you also have your fair share of travel accidents aka someone tripping over tree branches, and you will always have a few people (mostly male, but also a few female) who won't understand borders in all possible ways if they're not sober.
Back then a lot of that dark shit was swept under the rug, let us be very clear here. That's the sad price to pay for fly-by-night events without proper security, EMS and whatnot else that is required for licensed events.
All of these except for the last require medical staff, not security. In my experience, the medical staff at festivals of all sizes are amazing people. I don't see how an illegal rave could ever have medical staff though so it's a personal risk that people can choose to take.
As for people not understanding boundaries, small groups of adults, up to a couple of hundred, are generally self policing. I've witnessed a couple of guys being forceably ejected from gatherings, but over the hundred or so I've probably attended in my life (raves I mean) I've only seen this being required a couple of times.
And I would say the large festival audiences are wholly unfamiliar with that, given that the option of the bigger elaborate event was always in their face. There was nothing they needed to find or be in the know about, and to them, the festivals are that same journey.
Regarding expense: not everyone is broke. And many people have shifted their budget to exclusively going to music festivals. I know lots of people that scoff at the idea of going to a nightclub or “going out” at all, but praise and prioritize going to music festivals. Even more are on payment plans for festival tickets far in advance, they are confident they can sell them at a premium if they don't go.
I’m just reporting what I’m seeing and applying market dynamics to it.
Given the tension with “wooks” that bum their way to the bigger festivals and have little to support themselves or any integration into society, I see intentional segregation with the current generation of festivals goers that supports an intentional interest in paying a premium for the exclusion it comes with. Event groups found that pool of wealth and demand, and are capitalizing on it to its extreme. But this crowd is really not trying to be around the other budget conscious crowd at the warehouse and barnyard, and there are plenty of good vibes to be had - you just choose which festival has the vibe you like. if one is too fratty for you, or has too many influencers, then you can still go to the “PLUR” one.
We go for the vibe not the facilities
I agree, I was surprised to read "real raves don't happen in legal venues" - first time I've heard that line of thinking. Been raving for 20 years and here is what a rave means to me: very dancy music, electronic of some type (doesn't need to be pure edm), no judgements, kindness, love, good energy. I'd argue this is unsurprising given where the idea of a rave came from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_Tests
to me, rave is about PLUR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLUR
And more people are satisfied with the vibes at the better facilities
Those are the people that would not be satisfied with the vibe and would actually detract from it, if they didn't like the facilities.
But sure you go mass appeal and you get a manufactured mass appeal vibe, which on the scale of rave vibes is a 3 or 4 and the scale is exponential.
If you don't know you don't know but it's worth checking it out if you can.
Above & Beyond throw some pretty huge weekenders and the vibe in those giant expensive festivals is pretty good. Swiffer guy not withstanding.
Have you ever been to a rave? I've never seen a fight break out at a rave, but I've seen plenty in clubs. The levels of self-absorbed, inconsiderate, and assholish behavior are usually excruciatingly high at clubs, and tolerably low at raves.
I've never seen a fight at a club. At this one big (80k) festival in northeast lake region Germany neither. In my experience, fighting and aggression are caused mainly by, in decreasing order of importance, alcohol, cocaine, crammed+overfilled spaces. Then a very long gap before bullies and such appear on the list.
Almost like ecstasy and cocaine/alcohol mix have different effects on the human brain and body...
[Citation Needed]
> The article also mentions that earlier ending events made to accommodate aging millennials have seen an unexpected and huge interest from Gen Z
As a millennial in Belgium, my parties started no earlier than 23:00 and ended at 05:00. But maybe it makes sense that this is disappearing? My parents started partying at 19:00
> The production value is quite high now and still improving so I don't see why the illicit rave experience would be so interesting when the facilities would be so lacking in comparison. There are lots of electronic dance music events on boats, cruiseliners, retired battleships and more.
There will always be people attracted to the underground scene where the production value doesn't rank higher than the energy on the dancefloor.
It's good to have both options but they are very different experiences, the mainstream stuff with high production value is a show, it's meant for people who are going to parties to see specific artists and their shows.
That experience is quite opposite of what a good underground rave is, it's much more raw, less concerned about the surface-level showmanship; artists are there to provide a journey to the ones on the dancefloor but not to be the main star, the main star is supposed to be the party itself.
I really enjoy much more the experience of the underground scene, I don't see phones up in the air recording, I don't see people staring at a light show/screens with AV, the experience of getting lost with a crowd of people, all dancing, interacting among each other.
Personally I think it's quite good to have the mainstream scene, it filters out quite a lot of people who wouldn't belong in an underground rave.
> I don't see why the illicit rave experience would be so interesting when the facilities would be so lacking in comparison.
I swear if you strip away legal pot and LGBTQ rights (not saying those are bad) we have culturally returned to the 1950s. This is a very conservative period with little interest in or tolerance for actual outside-the-lines culture or experience.
I don’t get that impression here in California
I have noticed that after normalizing anything, counterculture areas of California will always have something even more unfamiliar trying to get tolerated and representation
But I don’t see what you’re referring to
I think there is a disinterest in illicit raves because the market has reached parity and beyond for the experience that the market actually enjoyed. If it fails to do that or the illegal raves are better again, I think there is still interest in that, far bigger than whatever was happening in the 90s
To me the giveaway is the decline in sexual experience among young people. This is like a top line KPI for youth culture and socialization since when people have a lot of positive social interaction and mutual bonding experiences they tend to have sex.
Loads of people have commented on these trends. I’m not pointing out anything new, but I do think a lot of people don’t see it because it’s hidden behind a facade of very visible socially liberal movements that garner attention out of proportion to their numbers. These folks do not represent the mean or the median of the culture.
If you are in the Bay Area or LA or really any metro California city that isn’t a deep suburb your experience might be different. These areas have always been more liberal than the average and enduringly so. The SF Bay was where gay people could go back when there was not just a strong taboo but in many cases real persecution.
Edit: with the last election I think the conservative zeitgeist is going to finally crest, and probably inspire a backlash that will start the pendulum going the other way. Things like politics are the lagging end. There’s also a backlash brewing against social media including dating apps, which are one of the drivers for both youth alienation and promulgation of reactionary attitudes. Right wing cultural fear mongering has excellent memetic fitness on social media.
> the decline in sexual experience among young people
Can I push back just a bit. I'm the parent of a teenager and we've had the talk. The kids are alright. When I was a teen I felt everyone felt pressure to be sexually active. While the boys carried the brunt of peer pressure it was the girls who had to deal with the actual fallout. Todays teens are dealing with a lot right now. And my impression is they have a healthier relationship with sex then our generation ever did. Girls have agency, and outside of the social media chucklefucks it's taboo to be serial sexual harasser and be treated with any sort of respect.
Sex happens in private (mostly, and I'm not judging those who prefer otherwise) and people lie about it. A lot.
But a more publicly observable and, obviously, very adjacent indicator is kissing.
Time was, you'd see a lot of people kissing in public. Not just quick ones either. Pretty normal to walk past bars and there'd be a couple (or more than one) making out by the smoking area. Same in bars beyond a certain time of night, same in a lot of city parks. Sometimes even on the subway. Teenagers walking home from nights out or drinking in the park. (Legal here in the UK and not frowned upon like in the US). In the middle of club or festival crowds.
And whether you think that's cool or gross, there's notably less of it around, and that's been a trend for quite some time.
Maybe the 70s through 90s was an anomaly, it would have been heavily frowned upon before that, but something certainly changed in the mid/late 00s.
> the giveaway is the decline in sexual experience among young people
Do we have statistics on sex from the age of opium? (Gen Z is the first smartphone-with-unregulated-social generation.)
I suspect the conservative backlash is being driven by economics, and this driver will only get stronger, perhaps much stronger.
Bring back teenage pregnancies, drug addiction and overdoses.
Okay this is an interesting topic but I think you are conflating several things.
The decline in sexual experience is occurring in California metros too. Its really interesting how the behaviors have shifted and surprising to me. But people are bonding, social, far less exclusionary, inclusive to things they’ve never heard of - unless you’re the wrong star sign, ironically, or political party.
I date 20-somethings, it’s just different than what I see with people I grew up with. I would say chronic anxiety and demisexuality are common, the most notable to me, and drive a lot of these shifts. But the libidos are there, their age-peers don’t know what they’re doing with really offputting habits or aren’t as interested either. I just cant extrapolate a real exclusionary streak from conservative leanings. Your algorithm is just cooked right now.
You say people are bonding in a less exclusionary manner, but that doesnt mean they aren't bonding less as well.
The chronic anxiety you mention, as well as the pervasive loneliness and depression I observe, seems to indicate a lack of healthy and supportive social bonds.
Good point. The subset of 20-something year old women I date are social and have lots of anxieties, but it doesn’t really inhibit their ability to have a support system.
I can see that there are plenty of other people who would have more difficult doing this by nature of not attracting positive attention and interest by default.
> unless you’re the wrong star sign, ironically, or political party.
These things are very different and do not belong in the same list, and I've noticed that when people do put them together, they're often trying to make the point that political party is just another arbitrary inherent attribute like race, rather than a serious reflection of someone's character. Can you explain why you think they belong together?
Because they are just arbitrary attributes rather than a serious reflection of someone's character?
Just because certain media outlets brainwashed you into thinking that Republican == Nazi (they all backpedaled after the election ended by the way) doesn't mean it's true. Go talk to actual people with blue collar jobs. You'll find that their character is quite all right actually.
Just because certain media outlets brainwashed you into thinking that Blue Collar == Republican (they all backpedaled after the election ended by the way) doesn't mean it's true. Go talk to actual people with blue collar jobs. You'll find that their character is quite all right actually.
You don't even believe this yourself, and are just trying to come up with a pithy comeback. Sorry, this one fell flat. The celebration of the Republican triumph definitely does not look like backpedaling. To pretend otherwise is to ignore reality.
I don't think this is entirely true. Most people are normal, but if I'm a woman dating a young conservative man. That conservative has a non-zero chance to actually believe shit like "your body, my choice." Probably don't want to be dating that guy. It's not a guarantee, but a danger signal.
Upvoted you, because opinions should be safe to voice even if one disagrees with them. This does appear to be a common concern. I also happen to know many families that vote Republican where the woman also happens to "wear the pants".
100% of modern misogynistic rhetoric and all the new erosion of women’s rights is coming from the right. Ignoring that fact is just stupid. “Wearing the pants” doesn’t mean shit when they also vote a rapist into office.
Whatever you think political party association is, it's not arbitrary. It tells you something about someone's character. People choose political parties based on their personality type to a significant degree, which is not the case for star signs. You don't have to believe that the parties are different, but surely you believe that people don't choose a party by flipping a coin.
The Republicans didn't backpedal, Trump is talking about liebensraum
Young people don't have any political power at all, so "political party" doesn't say very much about them as a person.
Tell that to their former friend the same age, who happened to pick the other party.
When I was young, people had different political opinions and would still be friends and party and do things together. Only some odd fellows would make a fuzz and try to exclude somebody for politics, usually the opposite happened.
When we're older, then political affiliation starts reflecting more on a persons character. Then we've all been through (or should have been through) the different situations where politics have a real world impact on our lives that we can understand and relate to.
When you were young, political differences were more likely about how much tax rich people should pay. Now, political differences are more like who should go in the gas chambers. You can respectfully disagree with people who think the tax rate should be 20% instead of 30%. You cannot respectfully disagree with people who think you belong in a gas chamber.
If that's the response you get from people when discussing politics, then you'll probably get better results with a different approach.
those are the notable examples of how people are exclusionary, as it says. That is the common attribute. It wasn’t as deep as you made it, this time.
Yeah I agree. Internet puritanism, some might call it. Turns out the possibility of being recorded all the time and having your life upended based on some 15 second clip of you makes people conservative and wary of risks
> The article also mentions that earlier ending events made to accommodate aging millennials have seen an unexpected and huge interest from Gen Z
I do not find it surprising. When I was younger (college age and soon after), I wanted events to start sooner and late events oftentimes discouraged me. It sucked even at that age. It is one thing to start dancing at 8pm and have endurance till the early morning, because you feel like it and have nothing to do the next day. And something completely different if you have to wait till 1am till the event starts. You get tired and dumber the next day, but the amount of dancing you got in exchange is just lower.
I was not using stimulants or anything like that and frankly, dropping amount of stimulants use among young people would explain larger younger crowd at earlier events.
I was really confused until I realized they're talking about nightclubs, not raves
There are a lot more cool Techno festivals going on though, e.g: https://youtu.be/OCyJNS8frn8
A clubbing lifestyle where you're out every weekend isn't healthy, but festivals on weekends every other month are doable. Society seems much more health aware these days due to social media and the web in general.
wow, what a set. thank you.
I haven't been to a club in a long time, but I am quite confident that if there's a hell for me, it's being forced to be in a club+rave for eternity.
I've never done any kind of "party drug" [1], and I think that party drugs have to be a requirement for me to enjoy something like that (at least for someone as awkward as me). Repetitive music that's so loud it hurts, not being able to talk to people, close contact to strangers of questionable hygiene; it's hard for me to even imagine how anyone could enjoy it.
I suspect that there are a lot of people like me who are finally being honest with themselves and acknowledging that they don't actually enjoy the entire club scene. Obviously if you like it, don't let me take it away from you, but one of the best parts of reaching age 30 for me was that no one expects or wants me to go to a club with them now.
[1] The only "recreational drugs" I've ever done are alcohol and caffeine, and I haven't had alcohol in quite awhile.
> people like me who are finally being honest with themselves and acknowledging that they don't actually enjoy the entire club scene.
What was it that was keeping you from being honest with yourself about that? I figured out pretty quickly that the whole club/dance/nightlife scene was just not compatible with my particular personality and haven't had any trouble simply avoiding it.
In regards to clubs for me personally, nothing, I was honest with myself almost immediately after I went the first time and have only gone a few times since then, both times making it clear to my friends that I really didn't enjoy it at all.
I have some friends who have stopped going, and while they won't come out an admit it, I think they were lying to themselves about enjoying it. I kind of got the impression that nothing about them "changed" to where they don't enjoy it anymore, just that they finally realized that they're not "missing something", and that they simply don't enjoy it.
Closest personal analog I can think of: It took me about ten years to realize that I don't actually enjoy living in NYC, and that I never enjoyed it. I had been trying to convince myself that it was fun, and I don't think I ever actually liked living here.
ETA:
I forgot to actually state my main point.
I think a lot of people want to like going to clubs, because their friends say they like going. I have some friends that I think actually enjoy it (though they always took a drug before going), and the few times I've gone I've tried my best to keep an open mind.
Used to do at least a line of coke before raves but with the way fent is laced into everything these days, no more
Get some test kits or test strips.
You can get them for free and/or low cost, https://endoverdose.net
Yeah, that's what terrifies me now especially. As far as I'm aware, "cutting" drugs with other drugs is hardly new, but the fact that fentanyl can be made so cheaply and easily and added to everything means that all this stuff is a hard-pass for me now.
Honestly, I'm in my mid-30's, I think that I'm too old to "start" doing this stuff. In a lot of cases (and this is still something I'm not 100% used to), people look to me as the "grown up" in the room, for better or worse.
On the flipside, it's also easily detected using a test kit or test strips you can throw into your pocket.
>Honestly, I'm in my mid-30's, I think that I'm too old to "start" doing this stuff.
Certainly not, you are still young :)
I mean, let's suppose I had a guarantee that I have the purest coke to ever exist, with no adulterants added, straight from the factory...it's still bad for me. I probably shouldn't be ingesting it regardless.
I've been reducing my caffeine intake, and I don't drink alcohol. I don't even eat sweets anymore. I'm basically a square now; too old to do this stuff.
Don’t do coke. E on the other hand…
Never too late to find out what a flood of serotonin feels like.
It's probably still bad for me. Again, I'm a square. This isn't a judgment for people who enjoy it, but I'm too boring for that stuff.
> > E on the other hand…
Yeah but don't take pressed pills, take M crystals as they are the pure form.
It’s not that bad.
Yeah no wonder you don't like raves. You might be the first person who went to one without taking drugs. Same for clubs tbh. That kind of music is made by people on particular drugs and it's meant to be listened to by people on those same drugs. And dancing is just a way to shake off the stimulants.
Howdy! I've been huge into electronic music since I was 12 (currently 38). Literally fell in love with the music for the sake of the music. Started going out at 18, didn't try drugs until my mid-20's. Enjoy drugs, sometimes I'll take them, but most of the time I'm either sober or just a bit stoned. But even the weed isn't a requirement for me. I can be out until 5AM, loving the whole experience, because the music is what I want.
In fact, I've been absolutely cranking this[1] crazy shit on repeat for weeks now and have been sober each time! The mixing, the flow, and the leftfield-weirdness of the whole thing hits my soul juuuuuuust right.
So, we're out there. Much of the people who regularly support the scene are also often sober, or don't regularly party hard. Check your preconceived notions and blanket generalizations at the door, please, and then try coming out to a show. We'd be happy to show you how things actually are. :)
[1]https://soundcloud.com/dkmntl/azu-tiwaline-at-lentekabinet-2...
I have friends who really like EDM, and as far as I am aware 95+% of the time that they're listening to it they're stark-raving sober, so I don't think that being stoned is a prerequisite for liking it.
That said, I think that a possible explanation for the decline in club popularity is that a lot of people don't actually like it unless they're on drugs. Not just the music, but the whole club scene. It might be an acquired taste, entirely possible, but it's not a taste I ever felt the need to acquire.
Not quite apples to apples, but similar, about a year ago I realized that I actually don't like living in NYC. Moreover, I realized that I never really liked it, and I had been trying to convince myself that I did for the last decade. I don't like how expensive it is, I don't like going to bars, I don't like hipster art stuff, I do like the train, but not having a car is still inconvenient, etc. There's a million things that I know a lot of people in NYC really like (and more power to them if they do), but I do think that if people were more honest with themselves there would be a lot fewer people living in this city.
Oh, it's definitely not for everyone. I love most of the broad spectrum of electronic music (sans the more mainstream "EDM" crap, but I digress...), so my wife gets exposed to all kinds of weird, repetitive shit. And she can't stand most of it, it makes her very anxious and over-stimulated. There's one particular kind of electronic music, called Deep House, which is heavily rooted in Funk, Soul, Disco and Jazz, that she absolutely loves to go out and dance to with me. It's got a four-to-the-floor kick, but it's got the soul and sound of the other genres I listed, just slightly repetitive.
This[1] is a good example of what that kinda music sounds like, he's one of my favorite DJs/producers out there. I suspect it might still not be for you, and that's totally fine! This shit deeeeeeefinitely isn't for everyone. :)
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYS3OUKKGqc
Edit: And as an aside, I'm with ya on NYC. Every time I visited, all of my NYC friends would just regale me, and themselves, with stories about finding places to live and what they have to deal with living there. I don't understand it.
I've kind of inadvertently gone down a rabbit hole for different types of electronic music already, because at a previous job the guy who was in charge of playing music was really big into it, and he played a pretty broad spectrum of stuff.
I liked some stuff more than others, but never really clicked with any of it.
Just to be clear, not claiming that the stuff I listen to is "objectively" better or anything. 90+% of what I listen to is garage-punk stuff like NOFX or Misfits, which is its own kind of trash. It's just jived better for me (doesn't hurt that I was exposed to it much younger).
I don't regret moving to NYC, when I did it was probably an economically-ok decision; a lot more high-paying tech jobs here than in Dallas (where I lived before), and there are parts I still like about it, but there were definitely other parts that I was lying to myself about for a long time.
Though I will admit, I think a good chunk of that is that I've just been here too long. I probably should move... I just need to convince my employer to let me go full-remote.
Thanks for sharing this. I have a similar wife it seems. Does not like most EDM, but Downtempo, ambient house & deep house she loves to dance to. That with a bit of Molly can be a ton of fun.
If you have SiriusXM their Chill station plays this type of music.
One of my favorite DJs is Nora En Pure.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nora_En_Pure
It is amusing to me that she was born after I graduated high school.
I’ll recommend Groove Salad from Soma FM (avail through TuneIn) for chill too, great station and no ads
For what it's worth -
I enjoy electronic music. I enjoy dancing. I absolutely hated the club scene every time I went. All the ones I went to were in dark and fairly disgusting venues, where people spent hours moving back and forth between sitting around getting drunk with music blasting so loud you couldn't have a conversation, and awkwardly moving around a crowded dance for floor. As the other person said, it was hard to see how anyone was actually enjoying the situation, particularly considering everyone was paying a good deal of money and screwing up their sleep schedule for it.
I can get enjoying electronic music and dancing to it, but the club scene always seemed immensely unappealing.
Yeah, that's the unfortunate part, the spaces are never comfortable and certainly unappealing to a lot of people.
For me personally, I've always found it kinda funny how much I love those spaces. I generally have a strong dislike of crowds, large masses of people, yadda yadda. My primary happy places are at home all cozy with my family, and out in the mountains backpacking in the wilderness far away from a single soul.
But my third happy place is something akin to a dilapidated warehouse or building that is being used as an unlicensed venue for incredibly loud, repetitive music. The room is packed, with just enough room for cutting a rug, there's sweat on the walls, it's pitch dark save for a single red light over the DJ booth and there's not a snowball's chance in hell that you'll be able to chat with the person next to you. You're stepping in something wet and sticky, who the fuck knows what's on your shoes.
Get the music just right and I'll lose myself in that crowd and cathartically dance my ass off all night long.
Edit: I think part of it is that I've always found the existence of such underground spaces to be super cool. I like to experience things like that that are just below the surface of "normal society".
I actually enjoy the music without taking any drugs, but my default state is quite hyperactive. The loud bass, the energy of the crowd, the people feeling comfortable and enjoying themselves makes me feel energized and allows me to relax and dance in an enjoyable anonymity. To your point, when I was photographing concerts (&clubs/raves) regularly I did quickly realize I'm an outlier, and most people and performers were in fact consuming copious amounts of drugs... The least enjoyable events were those where everybody was escaping something - consuming drugs, over-drinking alcohol, destroying property – while the best events had a tight-knit community, proper security, pop-up drug labs ( https://drugfoundation.org.nz/articles/checkit-out ) and most importantly a mature audience.
>You might be the first person who went to one without taking drugs
I also don't line raves, but that makes me dislike them even more. So the point of "raves" is to get drugged while doing something you don't enjoy? Would you allow your kids to go to one?
Fortunately I think you're exaggregating or your experience is an outlier and people actually go there to have fun listening to loud music (while sometimes, indeed, using drugs).
I'd happily hit the dance floor sober for years. But now it's too loud and I like my sleep :-). I also don't feel the music like I used to either, but damn it was good.
You're both wrong about raves not being great sober, and the latent prejudice against "drugs". Source, I went to many raves sober, and I work in psycare on them (psychiatric ambulance of sorts).
For a festival that's proper shit without drugs, try Oktoberfest here in Munich.
I'm honestly just a coward; I have no idea what's actually in drugs that people buy on the street, and if I get sick, what exactly am I going to do? Sue them?
My dad is an outlier who managed to never have any issues thankfully, but there is a pretty strong history of addiction (mostly alcoholism, but other stuff too) on my dad's side of the family, and as such I've always treated drugs pretty cautiously.
I think it’s a fair generalization but from my experience and my personal friend group I’d say 1/3 of ravers are on some serious mix of substances, 1/3 are keeping it more casual with some alcohol and cannabis, and the last 1/3 are as sober as can be. It really is a wide spectrum of folks who participate in raves
This is downvoted, but as someone who liked actual dancing and did not took drugs except alcohol, it is quite on spot. Imo, lower use of stimulants among young and young crowd choosing events that start sooner are correlated.
And while we are at it, alcohol use will be correlated to dancing itself. It helps to loose inhibitions a lot of us just would not overcome without it. Same deal.
I always thought the loud music, low lights and cramped quarters made it easier for awkward people. You can be totally anonymous if you want to. Just join in and feel the music and people will love you for it. You don't need to perform or meet any kind of expectation.
The thing about the drugs is it only heightens the experience. It's like salt on your food. The ingredients still have to be good. I found the drugs made it great but that's because I loved it anyway. I've never understood people who say "you have to be on drugs to enjoy it". The only drug like that is alcohol, the drug that numbs you enough to make deeply unpleasant situations tolerable.
For me the great thing about 30+ is not having to go to alcohol venues and do all the various pre-mating rituals. But I also don't go clubbing any more because I go to bed before midnight. Still love the music though (trance, as played by Oakenfold and Paul van Dyk).
The only appeal clubs ever really had to me was picking up women, which is irrelevant now since I'm married. Since I'm nothing terribly special in the looks department [1], and I really don't enjoy any kind of dancing, all I ever had going for me was being "kind of funny", which didn't really work in clubs.
I tend to make jokes when I'm nervous, so the awkwardness wasn't really a problem for doing that, but it wouldn't work if the jokes are inaudible.
It doesn't help that I have never really felt comfortably being physically close to strangers. I'll put up with it on the subway, but that's a purely utilitarian thing. I suspect alcohol would help with that, but I don't drink anymore (and never drank that much).
I certainly don't want to diminish your enjoyment for this, I'm just saying that every time I've gone to a club it's the worst moment of my life. I absolutely hate everything about it.
[1] This isn't meant as self-deprecating or fishing for compliments, I'm perfectly happy with my body. I just acknowledge that I was probably never going to be a male model.
You must be fun at parties, oh wait
It’s more alive than ever, I’d say. Just about any weekend in the Milwaukee/Chicago area has at least a couple parties. Proper underground shit. Not sure what it is, exactly, but it’s been feeling like a time portal back to the 90’s and I love it. Drop Bass Network and Chicago Redline will keep you plenty busy.
This rings in Minneapolis. The midwest definitely has a solid, consistent scene for house/techno/electronic with DJs bouncing between Minneapolis, Madison, Milwaukee, Chicago for sets.
The demographic is definitely millennial, with maybe ~25% being Gen Z.
It's also definitely not... popular. The biggest nights have a _way_ smaller turnout than college bars or city clubs. I'm not sure how strong the crowd actually was 10-20 years ago, but these clubs aren't in the mainstream appeal. Maybe from lack of marketing, maybe taste+preference.
Created an HN account just to ask... what are the entry ways to know what sets are going on in Minneapolis? The person you replied to mentioned Drop Bass Network and Chicago Redline, both of which have easily follow-able accounts. Anything like that in this area?
I'd recommend Backyard Boombox or House Proud for shows in Minneapolis.
Yeah, I'm in the UK and there are still regular late night dance / EDM nights in my city.
I was at one a couple of weekends ago, 11pm - 4am.
A good mix of ages too, people clearly in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s. Everyone having a great time, I would guess at least 70% of the people were on something too, (MDMA, Ecstasy etc).
Fixed venue clubs are definitely dying in the UK. Maybe being replaced by more subversive raves at temporary locations due to lower overheads.
(Neither really my scene).
MDMA and Ecstasy are the same thing afaik
"Ecstasy" traditionally contains MDMA - and potentially a host of other substances - in pressed tablet form.
MDMA is typically just that one substance in crystalline powder form.
That applies to most tablets too. Not sure why mdma tablets warrant a different when other drugs in tablet form that often come with other stuff don't.
I always thought calling it MDMA denoted more purity vs Ecstasy, but I was never a candy kid.
MDMA being the substance, Ecstacy being the delivery, you could simplify it as. Ecstacy always have MDMA in it, but typically also other stuff. MDMA is just MDMA, and in itself have different purity depending on how it was made.
I wonder if what's being called ecstacy is something else entirely now? I feel so out of the loop.
Last time I checked, ecstacy is usually how it is called when in pill form, with the idea that it is not pure MDMA. That is, it may be cut, a combination of drugs or something else entirely.
MDMA/molly is usually in crystal/powder form, with the idea that it is more pure.
But how drugs are called on the street and what they are in reality is constantly changing, there are countless myths, and dealers are not exactly a reliable source of information regarding what they sell.
In reality, that's essentially the same thing. If you look at https://www.drugsdata.org/ you will see that it is mostly just MDMA, the form doesn't matter much.
I used that word with a young lady who said she was going to a rave and she couldn't stop laughing. It was like I'd suggested a tea-dance.
PSA: Ebeneezer Goode by The Shamen was released 32 years ago in 1992.
In papers maybe, but in the streets, Ecstasy is the pill form of MDMA and is usually cut with other substances (e.g., speed, LSD, etc.). Therefore, when saying "Ecstasy," someone would expect a pill in a funny shape, whereas with "MDMA," they would expect powder.
I would never expect powder when I said MDMA, I would expect crystals or pills. Ecstasy is often said to be cut with other substances, but almost never is, because most other drugs are more expensive and less potent than MDMA. There are often impure batches containing meth or other amphetamines, often other "designer drugs" being pressed into pills and sold as ecstasy while not being MDMA, but rarely intentionally cutting the MDMA with other drugs.
Drug pro-tip: anything powder is garbage, crack comes in rocks (crack users aren't all that picky though, from beeswax to swiss cheese to chalk, from white as snow to bright yellow, usually off-white, it comes in a variety of appearances and textures and users savor the cut - the most favored stuff is usually not the purest), coke comes in chunks (white, off-white, even yellowish, good quality stuff has a flaky structure and pearlescent shine), heroin comes in chunks (from white to tan to black, occasionally gooey), weed comes in nuggets (but used to come in chunks, maybe still does if reggies/illegal weed still exists in your area), meth is long usually clear crystals, molly is shorter and more cuboid crystals, usually colored (pink, tan/brown, only very rarely clear).
You are right, I used the wrong wording here. I meant crystals, not powder. I used the word 'powder' unconsciously because when I was raving, I would break those crystals into powder form to control the dosage better.
Anyway, regarding the difference between ecstasy and MDMA, from personal experience, I cannot remember a time when the effects were the same. Every time I took a pill, the effect was totally different from MDMA. MDMA provided a more 'pure' experience, whereas with advertised 'ecstasy' pills, I experienced hallucinations, memory loss, and a very heavy hangover.
2CB, MMC3/4, synthetic Psylobin and others are fine in powder form
What's missing is GenZ isn't into it. The kids are the ones that go out all the time and they drive a lot of the revenue that big clubs need to stay alive. I'm not really sure what GenZ is into instead -- would've been cool if this article had tried asking them.
We may very well see a future judgy christian nationalist generation of youngsters who frown at grandma and grandpa millennial's tattoos and our nasty sexually explicit oldies music.
> I'm not really sure what GenZ is into instead
Things like this maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuddle_party
As for modern electronic music, it became very dumb compared to oldschool techno of 90s, who even listens to that crap nowadays? Why someone would pay for loud noise?
I think we could say that covid killed a lot of these things. GenZ just happened to be coming of age during the pandemic years and thus prefers to stay home as they see that as normative.
I think it’s health related, as the article mentions.
>One executive in the entertainment industry said younger people were less inclined to go out raving until 6am as they were more health conscious and less frivolous with money than previous generations
This is the same generation that has 12 step skincare routines, eats only organic food, chooses to vape or zyn rather than smoke because of secondhand smoke, everyone has an Apple watch on their wrist tracking calories, etc.
If anything I’m surprised that binge drinking and going out late as survived as long as it has.
And as far as the money comment, this generation is not less frivolous there’s just less money to go around haha.
I do find these kinds of articles funny. "Why are the younger generations not destroying their bodies like we did?" Maybe we just don't want to bro.
> Maybe we just don't want to bro.
There's nothing wrong with it (quite the opposite), but keep in mind that this is not a normal thing. Most generations didn't act like this.
There’s some recency bias to that for sure though - silent and greatest generations were not as big on partying like x or the boomers. Of course things like smoking were more common but the heath risks weren’t as well understood.
But most generations before us also didn't have the same awareness about the health risks associated with a lot of those acts unlike younger people today.
And the generation after us will probably think we were dumb about stuff as well (eg. social media, disinfo, Delta9, etc).
Maybe this is a dumb take, but how much of this is just demographics? Countries are getting older as birth rates decline, so you would expect a decline in things that skew younger in the audiences they attract.
I don't think it's a dumb take at all. It makes sense to me, especially together with housing unaffordability, which affects the disposable income of young people the worst.
Also the people who go to raves aren’t helping with this, as most of them aren’t family focused. They have to get outsiders to join their subculture.
Anyone go to cat head's parties in the early 90's. There were cat's head spray painted on the sidewalk leading to abandoned warehouses on the Brooklyn waterfront. The legend was they were worlwide. Some friend of mine knew to follow them.
or the pile of solo cups on the corner when you turn, for those of us or went to illegal beach bonfire parties in the outer banks!
Outer Banks like of NC? I spent some time down there, and didn't think there were enough people for something like that to happen.
It used to get a huge influx of Russians (illegally) working summer jobs there. I could write a book about one of those summers...
call a number on the card, use a phone booth, find the pickup point, 1am-2am was the appointed time, get on a schoolbus with everyone else, go to a warehouse, nobody knows where, dance until sunrise, somehow make it back more alive than you started. it must have worked because we were good people, there's no other explanation.
It's largely the same issue that every sector is experiencing. Everyone is trying for the same high end of the market crowd to extract as much prestige and profit as possible and pricing out the mass market.
Cinemas and concerts are in the same boats.
With the cost of essentials through the roof spending $$$ for a night out is now a periodic luxury rather than every Saturday night.
Gentrification of areas with music venues is a notable factor. It’s like a cycle. Very noticeable in London.
Place is cheap and kind of a shithole so it’s possible to open cool bars and late night music venues. People move there because it’s now a cool place. Prices go up. People complain about the noise from the venues. Venues close and are replaced with sterile overpriced crap. Place is now boring and expensive. See: Shoreditch as a fine example.
In my time night clubs were about hooking up, guess no need for that in the age of tinder?
Not if you're going to a rave-style event. That would be creepy and unwanted. At least back in my day (mid-90s).
Don't know what "rave" is, in normal night clubs not hitting on anyone all night would be considered creepy. And dances are an essential element helping to ... close the distance. Always were, since middle ages.
The key difference is: do you go there to hook up, or do you go there because you like the place, which as a second order effect is great common ground to meeting someone?
Anyone who reads this and knows, will understand... Sandwiches.
It probably depends on the type of club/event.
Back in the day, there were rave/dance type clubs which were all about the dancing. They'd typically have focused genres of music, well known or regular DJs, etc.
Then there were more generic nightclubs (usually in University towns) which were where people went to either get drunk or hook up. Those would typically not focus much on music (usually playing crowd pleasers, 50s/60s/70s/80s/ tunes etc.), and instead bringing people in with cheap drinks offers, foam parties, fancy dress nights, etc.
Also, as the comments will show you, we have a very negative attitude now towards anyone who wants to hookup with someone they just happened to see in person and tried to initiate with that person. So if that's the response you'll get, why go out? Stay in and play it safe with apps
What? That's kind of creepy.
Raves are and always have been about dancing. The creeps walking around looking for hookups are just that, a bunch of weird creeps that annoy people trying to dance.
Edit: To clarify, it's creepy becaucse a lot of people are on something and pretty vulnerable, they're there to dance and enjoy the music and now some creep is trying to get in their pants while they're rolling and drunk
"night clubs were about hooking up" - they weren't talking about raves. Night clubs were a different thing, and hooking up was definitely a big part of that. And for selling expensive liquor to people, but whatever.
It's creepy if you have bad vibes. If you can read the room and take rejection with a smile I think it's chill
This is exactly right. It's only creepy if you're creepy.
There is always someone looking to vibe with a positive-energy person they met that night. Sometimes it leads to more and sometimes you just dance all night, give a big hug, and never see each other again.
At same time this is pretty disingenuous calling people creeps. Yes you don't go to raves to look for hookups but at same time its social occasion and you can meet many people (in all kinds of states). And stuff wears off. So many people end up with new contacts if not straight up going with someone home. You know MDMA and sex match pretty well...
Don't find romantic partners at work, that's against company policy and you will get fired.
Don't find romantic partners at raves, that's creepy, people are there to dance.
Don't find romantic partners at night clubs, that's creepy, people are there to dance.
Don't find romantic partners at public places, that's creepy, people don't want to be bothered in public.
Don't find romantic partners among friends, now you're ruining all the friendships.
Do stay locked up inside and try to find romantic partners between advertisements, by swiping on a screen three thousand times. That's more efficient and won't risk you wasting any productive time that you in fact owe to the government, to shareholders and to pensioners. It's actually quite outrageous that some young people are trying to escape their productivity duties and even risk forming long term relationships and having children, which is literally taking food out of the mouths of the elderly. They need your tax dollar, stop wasting time!
The song, "Up all night to get lucky," would like a word with you.
Men will be men, sadly. Can't even feel safe when sober as a charming guy could decide to put roofies in your diet coke.
> Men will be men, sadly.
I don't think that's an appropriate way to frame it.
One more guess: Part of the reason why people would go late-night dancing was for hookups. Nowadays, people meet partners via dating apps, so the prospect of a random encounter in a dark club is less appealing.
I don't believe this is specific to Raves, but Bars & Nightclubs in general.
Younger people don't seem to be going to these places nearly as much as generations past. I think a lot of this drop off can be attributed to Social Media & Tinder.
You don't need to go out to see your friends or find a date. So why bother? It's easier and cheaper to stay home.
Cheaper being a big one. Here in Australia student allowance/minimum wage has hardly increased while everything else has gotten far more expensive, young people simply can't afford to drink out/attend events.
There was also a intensive effort to kill nightclubs with lockout laws
Also worth noting, and the article briefly alludes to this; college costs are higher, the difference between jobs that pay well and those that don't is wider, and everyone is very aware of all this. My guess is young people today are possibly less laissez-faire than in the past. People are worrying about their future earlier.
Burning Man's been dying slowly since about 2018, so pre-Covid. When I say dying, I don't mean "getting mainstream & EDMified" like all the old Burners have complained about since forever. I mean, the mainstream has stopped taking interest, and increasing portions of the tickets are getting taken by internationals because its passé in the USA, but still on some people's travel bucket lists. This year was the first year in a while with extra tickets available, but the writing has been on the wall for a while.
I'm sure raving will come back in 20 years like most fashion.
It's how all cool underground things go. Small groups build something new and awesome, new people come and join, the culture shifts, and at some point money is made, and the culture drifts off into a business. Very few places resist this, very few stay cool despite. The rave scene around Berlin is quite alright, but we learned to protect our safe spaces, and many will not mention details online anymore.
I wouldn't use Burning Man as a metric for the scene overall because among ravers Burning Man is considered to be one of the worst festivals.
How so? I saw a few vids about EDC and quite frankly it looked worse than tomorrowland (like, reminds me of mobile games patterns), quite the feat. Burning Man has a reputation, and it's definitely not a sharing economy to get there. I wouldn't fly half the globe to get there, I think it would be quite interesting though.
It’s more of an arts and community festival than a music event. There’s a smattering of respected DJs/producers each year and some good sets, but otherwise there’s a bunch of art cars roaming around thumping generic party music. Absolutely nothing against Donna summers, but I’m not shitting you when I say I heard her around a half a dozen times the first big party night, for instance. There is no curation there like a music festival.
That said, absolutely worth going to at least once, for everything else.
There are a couple of smaller burns here I have connections to, I like the participatory idea, as opposed to pure consumption like a holiday park. If burning man is (or was) like that I would find that pretty appealing. Not sure about August in the desert some 10000km away though : - D
In the two cities either side of me, a large portion of the organised events (on the DnB side at least) seem to be going daytime with a 10pm or 11pm finish on a weekend.
Great fun.
And there's still nighttime ones (also great fun) and illegal ones (which look to also be great fun).
I’d love to find DnB with 10-11pm finish time. Any tips on finding them in the SF bay area?
You can find pretty much any dance event in the bay at 19hz.info
Yeah, honestly after a while nobody has time or patience to stay all night "partying" anymore
The demographic that has that energy are also the ones that skip on a cover charge as much as possible and pregame
Related Berlin's beat goes quiet as techno clubs close their doors (3 points, 2 months ago, no comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42149813
(Better Watergate photos)
There was also a big thread -
Berlin's famed nightclubs, losing customers, face an uncertain future (300 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38151205
14 years ago - Berlins new techno beat. why international tech startups should move to berlin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2729524 (Article is gone so not sure if it's a play on techno)
The latter didn't age well for sure.
last article archived here: https://archive.ph/20121024051203/http://www.cnbcmagazine.co... Yeah, it's not really about techno music or rave scene, though it briefly mentions the Berlin nightlife. It is about tech work jobs and startups.
btw: Watergate (and Renate in a year (and Rummelsburger Bucht a few years ago)) are closing because some secretive Russian oligarch has decided the way he wants to throw his oligarch money around is to buy up left-wing spaces in Berlin and shut them down. Not just rave clubs or whatever they're properly called - he was also the reason for the tiny little squat Liebig 34 getting stormed by over 2000 armed police officer, and I don't remember whether he also had the same role with another squat, Køpi Wagenplatz, which got shut down in a very similar way (the police brought an actual tank to that one). He either has the right connections, or he knows exactly how to manipulate the legal system. Watergate actually tried to buy its own building at a fair market price, but this guy outbid it.
I think the owner of Watergate, felt it was a good time to retire from that anyway, but that isn't the case for the other spaces affected.
This page hasn't been updated in over 6 years but: https://padowatch.noblogs.org/
Documentary inspired by the Padowatch blog: https://archive.org/details/schattenwelten-berlin-miete-und-...
I remember the night when I knew clubbing (perhaps not raves per se) died.
Blackbird Ordinary, Miami. July 4th weekend.
Normal clubby kind of night. Then in comes a dude in bright ridiculous Uncle Sam gear, sparklers and all, making a spectacle of himself. All the phones come out.
Sigh. This is not the point of clubs/bars. You're mostly not supposed to be "seen" and certainly not like that.
Putting stickers onto phones, kicking out violators and fostering a culture around that does miracles to that kind of behavior. Once a majority enjoyes the moment and is very openly pissed off by any kind of filming we go back to being ourselves.
Do they put them on both sides of the phone, front and back?
Can't see the article but I imagine a big part of it is a combo of clubs continually being booted to new locations in cities to the point you kind of have to get tickets in advance for one place or run the risk of going there, being turned away and having absolutely nothing else to do in the area. To battle this there's loads of venues that seem to almost exclusively do shows that end near midnight and I've never been to one that wasn't completely devoid of atmosphere (hard to enjoy the music when the people next to you are talking at length about some work deadline they have).
Rapists. Originally it was music lovers loving music. That authentic fun attracted lots of women, which attracted lots of rapists.
Tangential discussion from a month ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42352825
Nightclub stickers over smartphone rule divides the dancefloor (91 comments)
"Rave" has become quite a vague umbrella term. Perhaps the closest modern equivalent (in Europe at least) are free parties: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_party#List_of_free_partie... .
A group of sound systems put the word out that they're going to get together illictly in a field in some remote location. There's a number that attendees ring to get the location on the (first) night. It carries on all weekend or until the police convince everyone to leave.
If I may respond only to the title: LiveNation
COVID + Middle Class Poverty
Who would ever want to stay up until 3 AM?
I'm already super sleepy by 23:00.
Will no one blame the banjolele? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xT2iP5Si-Ho
Just putting this out there for those who may be interested. If you are into making electronic music and want to get started performing, check out the EMOM movement. https://electronicmusicopenmic.com/how-to-start-your-own-emo...
I've been participating in Toronto version (TEMOM) and it's developed into a wonderful community.
Millenials are getting too old while Gen Z is too risk adverse and was generally shocked out of the habit of going out by the pandemic.
Another factor is why waste the effort going to get a dopamine rush by going out when you have dopamine in your pocket?
We're too overstimulated and numb to bother leaving the house. Why bother playing a game when you can watch someone play it for you on Youtube with less effort?
rave != club
IMHO, "raves" are, or were, underground, unsanctioned, and generally illegal, whereas "clubs" are typically licensed and legal - in other words, expensive and lame. I went to raves back in the early-90s, and I can tell you, it was nothing like dance clubs of the last 10 years.
I don't know what the big mystery is. Trends come and go, activities wax and wane in popularity.
Raves aren't special here.
It's not just raves, it's pretty much all "nightclub" type bars. The common nightclub has been replaced by expensive, high-end, bottle-service only type clubs.
Above & Beyond's label has a huge following. I have been to many events around the world. They do a big gathering each year e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEqySVgNkIA
It's going strong in Berlin, no one can kill raves, ppl can organize raves with friends outside :)
I live in a big US city. There are raves almost every week-end (like the real kind amateur stuff not the money grubbing ones). Sure they are not announced on RA and you need to know people but it is still alive and well. They are mostly in old abandonned industrial places and often literally underground.
For a long time I wondered why nightlife had cooled down so much. Then I realized that natality had sharply declined. Not evenly distributed, but around me it's pretty much the main cause. Every scene is just much less crowded.
Early dancing seems to be getting a bit of a boost though? Dayfever and Annie Mac's "Before Midnight" events seem to be v popular in Ireland and the UK
Yeah because public liability insurance has spiked beyond tolerable levels for post-watershed events, and the licensing board and constabulary are in lock-step for the granting of late licenses to bars and nightclubs to operate past 11.30pm
They use the most spurious justifications regarding newer commercial tenants and antisocial behaviour to deny the legacy cultural tenets their ability to operate as a late-night business from a licensing perspective.
Nothing at all to do with there being a demographic who loves to dance, but is no longer willing/able to stay up all night?
(a demographic that includes myself fwiw)
For as long as this is a thing, raves won't have widespread appeal.
If a rave is somewhere that your parents go, then it's naff.
It's also extremely expensive if it's legal. Everyone is brassic.
I realized that it's impossible to find clubs that serve alcohol till morning. The laws are more strict nowadays.
Most of the raves I attend now are on indigenous lands, it's definitely not mainstream, and I can party till morning.
There's a similar documentary (from 7 years ago, by Annie Mac - BBC) about the UK clubs closures https://youtu.be/n9zjNKQ-snI
Worth a watch!
Come to the southern cone of south america (brazil, paraguay, argentina), late night dance is alive and well. Colombia too to a lesser degree.
in some places in Chile its gone down though https://www.emol.com/noticias/Economia/2025/01/03/1153139/lo...
Chile is awful (Santiago specifically). Sorry if you are from there. High prices, high crime, full of feminists, everything closes early. Might as well move back to the west.
GenZers are indulging in drugs at much lower rates than previous generations. That includes alcohol.
We've got kids and prefer to rave during the day now, back home for a sensible time ;0
Social media killed (real) social life.
It's probably the same mechanism that relegated the sock hop to a rare anachronism.
I don't have a subscription to ft.com.
Is it "tastes change" or a sexier and clickbaitier mound of bullshit?
Quoting the bits that take stabs at explaining it:
> [Night-time consultancy co-founder] Leichsenring said venue owners were often closing their doors earlier to save on costs, as revenue from drink sales tended to drop off in the early morning hours.
> More restrictive licensing rules after Covid-19 have also become an issue for clubs and promoters in cities across the globe
> The increased popularity of daytime events and festivals is another factor
> One executive in the entertainment industry said younger people were less inclined to go out raving until 6am as they were more health conscious and less frivolous with money than previous generations
1 makes sense, somewhat.
2 sounds like a bunch of bullshit. WHICH more restrictive licensing rules? WHERE were the rules made, everywhere? There are no new rules where I live. HOW did these mythical rules impact things? WHAT the fuck is this guy talking about?
3 and 4 are: tastes change. People don't like sock hops anymore the same way they don't like raves anymore.
I cannot comment on the article - it’s paywalled - but I can talk about the claim in the headline.
I can tell from my personal experience that I stopped going because most club shows start earliest at 10 pm, and even then headliner probably goes on at 1, and that’s just not sustainable for me, especially if I wanted to take a risk and see someone I was 50/50 on.
I’m aging, I’m 29, I enjoy the morning a lot more than I used to. It’s just too exhausting. And if the music isn’t perfect, you’re left bored and exhausted. The venues are also way too crowded, drinks are expensive, it’s just not as good of a time as in smaller underground venues.
I’d rather go to a show during the day, or early evening and HAVE and they’ve been GREAT but house and techno acts are compelled to start after midnight, and I will probably never go to one of those again.
I'm in my mid 40s and it's the same problem for me. I can push myself through an all-nighter if the music is really great, but most of the time it isn't, and then it's just tedious waiting around for something better to come on when I know I could go home and buy a couple dozen new tracks on Bandcamp that are exactly to my taste. Sure I wouldn't get to listen to them on a banging sound system or stomp my heart out amongst a couple hundred like-minded nutters, but if I'm honest half the time I'm going wild on the dancefloor these days the rest of the crowd is waiting around for a different style of music than the one I'm particularly into so it's not an especially communal event anyway.
I'm not sure if I have gotten more picky about music than I used to be - I certainly remember getting into ridiculous arguments over sub-sub-subgenres back in the 90s - but when I was younger perhaps I was simply a bit more tolerant of dancing to music that wasn't exactly what I liked? Or maybe I was so full of energy and excitement about going out in the first place that the music wasn't as make-or-break for me back then?
Last year I settled into a routine of going to a small outdoor rave once every few months or so, ones with daytime components so I could join at dawn. The music played at outdoor parties in my area is not exactly my favorite, but at least it's still electronic and because it's less exhausting to dance during my normal waking hours I don't mind so much.
I definitely miss being so sucked into the vibe that I can't pull myself away, but I've just accepted that that's not something you can really get everywhere all the time. In certain cities, at certain times, when there's a big enough local crew whose tastes exactly align with yours, you'll have a magical few years, but then the music changes, the people change, and it'll be another dry spell. I like to think, though, that my dry spells are someone else's peak years. Maybe it all balances out in the end?
It's probably what you've said. I think perception changes, all the different venues and different types of music were once exciting. Then your brain forms the patterns and isn't as excited by x,y and maybe only z elicits a reaction.
Then you become more and more a morning person, so in the evening you aren't even that hyped up and your brain is already trying to call it a night.
For me something like standard 4x4 techno has become so formulaic that it doesnt interest me as much
Yeah it's such a sacrifice. Many of the acts come on at 1am earliest, but usually 3am. That's getting home before 6 if you're lucky and then the whole next day is wasted.
This article is paywalled for me and I'm thankful because the title alone has the scent of bait, ie. the post might be about a narrow case like large venue/big name dj events rather than dance clubs in general
If there is a 'decline' it's likely because there's been a 20 year surge in DJ events -- like some clubs either going 50/50 between live performance events and dj dance nights or out right choosing DJ nights over live performance because it's cheaper (no sound check, no load-in/load-out, fewer drink comps for individuals and plus-ones ....) -- and the era is cycling down. But it hardly means nightclubbing or dance clubs are done for. Even if the activity were in decline, mobile phones would not be the cause. People go out even when their city is being bombed
Music volume these days is too loud for me.
Anything that relies on booze is dying. It’s too expensive.
Any tips if someone want to join in the Nordics?
Covid
These guys killed it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YS_7U0mDgA
I don't know but In Portland there's a ton of them, the venues are great, and in the summer we go do it in the forest. And now that the RA app has it's shit together, I no longer have to get on Instagram to find out about stuff.
https://archive.is/2025.01.01-212538/https://www.ft.com/cont...
Non paywalled link
Such an interesting mystery. Who killed the rave? In Berlin especially, a very interesting subject.
I don't think we can ever really know. It's complex and multifaceted.
Miami Beach is still partying at night, isn't it?
I really like day-time raves
my dumb italian government literally made them illegal. that's what
I mostly watch 90s and 00s movies and TV shows because you know why. Same here. All new things are shit. Could House be aired today?
It's very difficult to operate a moderate-sized event secretly. Raves used to be promoted locally (at record & clothing shops) , and then shared among friends. The venue was secret right up to the event, because you first had to drive to a number of secret waypoints that were revealed by phone. The final location was often hidden in the wilderness or at a condemned (or squatted) building.
Accidental and deliberate surveillance is so common and cheap that this is no longer viable.
People travel instead
At least here in Germany, NIMBYs and their foot-soldiers aka team 1312 is very much to blame, next to gentrification.
Clubs in cities that have existed for decades get yeeted out of their rental contracts as there is no renter protection for commercial rental contracts - once it expires or gets terminated under the provisions of the contract (usually because some hipster shithole is willing to pay even more money), that's it. Others lose their license because people moving from the countryside can't cope with the noise and call the police all the time.
Clubs in rural areas almost don't exist anymore because of rural flight eliminating a lot of the customer base and what remains gets taken off the road by DUI enforcement.
That leaves illegal outdoor raves, and team 1312 has been aggressively beating down on these even over a decade ago when I was the tech guy for a local rave group. It's not made easier by the fact that there will always be some dumbasses dragging their minor siblings with them and other people not caring whom they sell MDMA and whatnot to, so you'll inevitably get into trouble for that as well.
this sounds like a headline from Plague Inc
Maybe cell phone cameras killed the rave.
Nobody wants pics of them dancing like a spastic monkey
I want to dance like that though, so I don't go to places without a no picture policy (important: with stickers) anymore.
I dunno about globally but daylight music festivals killed them for me back around 2005. Raves are about staying up all night in a dark room with good friends, good EDM, flashy lights, suggestive clothing and questionable substances. Take away the 'dark room' part and and turf the rest out onto a sports field at 11am and it's ruined.
In the UK a hybrid is increasingly popular. Start the rave at 2pm, end it at midnight, but it's in a dark room so it might as well be 4am. Usually in some semi-temporary space (e.g. Printworks, now defunct and moved to Drumshed).
I agree this loses some of the spirit of the original rave scene, but as an older person now it fits better for me. If the original late-night scene is dying it's because the younger generation doesn't care very much for this kind of night out.
It's 5pm on Sunday
No one knows we're dancing
Outside the sun is blinding
No one knows we're dancing
Thanks tiktok.
UK had criminal justice bill [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Justice_and_Public_Or...
The smartphone imo.
Plenty of great raves still around. I don’t think the Financial Times is a great resource on free of charge illegal underground parties?
The kids don’t party and fuck like we used to? I guess we’re old.
Back in my day we had ASL on IRC and that was good enough for us
16/f/ca was the best 10 years of my life.
Why isnt the cause just trends, music and fads changing? EDM and raves have had a big moment early 2010s then every thing kind of evolved, there must be new music for the new generation.
Like why aren't we listening to guitar solos, or 80s metal bands or grunge anymore? No one killed it
Maybe the same person who killed the disco
Are you by chance referring to the time that "...a Chicago DJ named Steve Dahl detonated a dumpster filled with disco records between White Sox games at Comiskey Park, leading to a riot"?
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20230922-the-night-angry...
At the time, I was a punk working in a great record store in the Western suburbs of Chicago (shout out to Johnny B Goode Records & Stuff!). I sent a number of promo disco records we'd received to Disco Demolition Night. I still laugh about how it turned out... Those were the days.
Shrek killed the raves
There are many factors not mentioned in the article. In Berlin we simply talk about before and after the pandemic.
Prices have gone up like crazy after; this includes rent. Cheap airlines like Ryanair & Easyjet have canceled many flights to Berlin in the last year.
I can see this as I rent out my living room on Airbnb part time and 2024 was the lowest no. of bookings since I started, almost a decade ago (2022 was a brief surge as everyone went traveling 'again' but that was it).
Hotel prices are also crazy (I got a lot of guests in 2023 that choose a high-end Airbnb over a four star hotel for the first time because the latter was now outside their budget in my area).
Then we have the phenomenon of restaurants closing early. It was easy to get dinner at 11pm at a good restaurant in my neighborhood (central Berlin). Most such places would close at midnight/1am. Now the latest is 9pm with most places closing at 10pm.
There is a street next to mine that is full of restaurants and bars. It used to be lively until 1:30am, even during the week. Before the pandemic. Now it's dead and feels like a small town now around 10:30pm.
Talking to several patrons there, this is what happened: during the pandemic all service staff found other jobs. Places were closed because they had to (lock-downs).
At the same time there was turnover of tenants in the neighborhood. People fled the cities because remote work allowed them.
The empty flats got new tenants and these people moved in under the assumption their street would keep the same noise levels. Ofc the landlords, desperate to fill their emptying flats during the lock-downs, would not tell them of any caveats in this regard.
When the lock-downs ended restaurants initially couldn't open longer than 10pm anyway because they couldn't find enough staff. People had found other work and didn't return to these jobs.
When staffing rebounded and they tried to open longer, two things got in the way:
1. Customers had gotten used to eat early (we're talking two years here from end of the lock-downs to the staffing situation in the gastronomy 'kinda' normalizing).
2. The new tenants in the flats in a street with restaurants had lived for 2+ years under the assumption their street was quiet from 10:30pm. They called the police and got injunctions for noise nuisance etc. TL;DR it was legally not possible any more to open longer for these restaurants, all of a sudden.
As a social dancer (tango) I noticed the same things mentioned re. the clubs. Prices have gone up, as a result less well-off people simply can't afford going dancing more than once a week. Most of my friends used to go 2--3 times a week. I still do but I work in tech and so does my partner and we don't have kids or any mortgage to pay off. We're in the 1%.
To get you an idea: the average venue for social dancing charged 7 EUR during the week, in 2019.
It's was 10 EUR when places reopened after the pandemic in late 2021 (i.e. 43% more).
And this year some venues have raised prices to 10--13 EUR as of 1st of January. So we're talking a 43%--86% price increase for admission and drinks went along in pricing.
It's simply not affordable. As a result, the average age in the Berlin tango scene went from 30 to 50 in just five years. It's mostly old(er) people with very few younger ones that work in well paying jobs (lots of techies) or have other sources of wealth.
And because more older people make up the majority of the audience, venues close much earlier. It was easy to go dancing until 1--2am during the week and 4--5am on weekends. Now it's midnight during the week and 2--3am max on weekends.
And because of the issue with airlines and hotel/Airbnb prices we also have less social dance tourists. Berlin used to be a top destination for social dancers from abroad to come visit but its noticeable less in 2023/2024 than before the pandemic.
i know it's confusing but in English "patron" means paying customer
Joe Biden did. He as a senator introduced the RAVE Act, which didn’t pass, but got built into a later bill that did, as a rider.
This made promoters criminally liable for drug offenses committed by people unrelated to them at their events. Then, it was selectively enforced against club drugs at electronic events and not cocaine at rock shows, and boom, no more raves in the US.
Oversimplistic but basically correct.
phalates
I'm pretty sure the writers at FT just don't know where the cool shit is.
The author doesn't even seem to know what a rave is, most likely they aren't in decline at all. They're talking about formal, permanent dance clubs shutting down for economic reasons. Raves are mostly an underground - often illegal or questionably legal - impromptu one off event, organized through word of mouth and social media on an invite only basis. There is almost no way to get statistics on them because they are intentionally stealth.
In my younger years, I was active in the wearhouse and desert rave scene, and it was a lot of fun. Typically it would just be an empty wearhouse in a run down industrial district, or simply an empty lot far out in the desert far from any homes.
Different rave scenes had different groups of people- some were quite out of control and doing very dangerous things, others were much more organized and responsible. Although I haven't been in many years, I am certain the more organized and responsible ones with a strong culture of vetting who is invited, and having responsible sober regulars that are able to help those more inexperienced are still going strong, and I still get invites to them.
There is nothing like dancing all night until sunrise under the stars on a warm summer desert night... to excellent electronic music made/performed live by the artists. Usually people are very friendly, warm and welcoming- aided by certain phenylethylamine compounds no doubt.
I'm guessing your mention of desert raves places you in a different country to the author?
In the UK, where I believe the word originates when applied to late night electronic music events in the mid 80s, the term meant an often unauthorised event in a field or industrial site.
Perhaps it was the noise menace, or perhaps people dancing in a field fuelled by MDMA caused a big deal in alcohol duty revenue for the government, but raves became highly regulated with the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act. Illegal raves were clamped down on by police with a fierce intensity. This essentially pushed the music back into clubs, where people could be taxed more easily. This ended the original race scene. By the late 90s the term was anachronistic in the UK. In the 2010s certain dance subcultures, drum and bass springs to mind, started becoming known as raves again, but these were anything from club nights to outdoor festivals. Quite unlike the earlier usage
It appears that your usage mirrors the UK rave scene from the late 80s to early 90s that died out, and the author has a broader usage that is in use today in the UK.
That seems like important context that should have been in the article given they are talking globally.
I'm on the USA west coast, and we still have warehouse and outdoor raves here, and people wouldn't use the term rave to refer to a permanent dance club. Many are illegal, and the police do shut them down sometimes, but mostly just tell people to go home. I've also seen the police show up and not shut it down.
As someone from the U.S his language is perfectly correct for here. Everyone from the U.S thinks of Raves in the way he described.
This exactly. I was a dj and organized raves back in my 20s.
It seems to me that a lot depends on the country where the experience in this area was gained. The development of rave culture depends on cultural aspects of a country you are live in in many ways (it seems to me).
Yeah, it's always odd how "the number of raves happening in the world" seems tied to "how connected am I to a group of people who want to push the boundaries of a party".
Sometimes raves are happening every 3 days locally to me, sometimes the world has stopped all together. Very odd and polite that the world can tell when I am not interested in that level of (to be clear, often enjoyable) debauchery.
I presume that they will start up again once I get my warehouse finished on my off-grid property in the desert...
yea, yeah, everything sucks now... we know.