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> This article is mostly discussing the second category, but I'm not sure how familiar American readers will be with this style of club [...] closer in concept to American raves, except at dedicated club venues. You're not wrong, especially since electronic music has always been more underground/niche in the US, relative to Europe. But despite that, this type of club was not uncommon in US cities, especially from the late '90s to mid '00s. For underground dance music (house, techno, dnb, etc) there was a nice mix of dedicated dance music venues, weekly/monthly nights at other venues, and a bunch of unlicensed/warehouse spaces as well. This wasn't just in the largest cities either. Growing up in the mid Atlantic, in addition to the venues in all the larger cities (NYC, Philly, DC, Baltimore) there were also dedicated electronic dance music venues in much smaller cities -- Allentown PA, Atlantic City NJ, and Ithaca NY are a few examples. Often these venues were either all-ages or 18+. These clubs all started to disappear around 2003-2005. The media had portrayed the rave scene exclusively as a teen sex/drug thing, which then brought in a lot of kids who weren't there for the music at all, and that led to government intervention both at the local and Federal level. Over the past decade, there's been a small resurgence of dedicated electronic dance music venues, at least here in NYC -- mostly Brooklyn, always 21+, more serious crowd. It's certainly waxed and waned over the years. The closure of Output a couple years back was a major blow, but other venues like Elsewhere helped filled the gap. The club owners and promoters always had to strike a delicate balance of trying to be popular enough to stay afloat, but not so popular that the crowd sucked. I don't know if any of these places will survive the pandemic, sadly. |