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All you have to do is look at the touring schedules of European and North American DJs. Mexico City, São Paulo, Bogotá, Lima, Johannesburg, Mumbai, Tbilisi. Cities once considered peripheral to the dominant narrative of electronic music have become important stops in an international career. The photos follow. Sunrise on a rooftop, unusual venues, sometimes enormous crowds, a few words about the country’s “energy” and, quite regularly, a caption explaining how inspiring the whole experience has been.
Article en français.
This circulation is obviously a good thing. Every country should benefit from the same access to music. But travelling to a country and helping its scene circulate are not the same thing.
Local promoters sometimes spend years building audiences, taking considerable financial risks to bring in foreign artists and contributing to the international reputation of their city. Resident Advisor reported again in 2025 on the specific difficulties faced by promoters in India, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa and Morocco: weak currencies, fragile cash flows and payments sometimes delayed by several months.
The recognition they get in return is, in reality, mostly smoke and mirrors.
When nationality almost becomes a musical genre
This international opening-up has also created some fairly disturbing language.
“The Brazilian.”
“The Palestinian.”
“The South African DJ.”
“The new Colombian artist.”
Nationality used as an artistic adjective.
Of course, where someone comes from can have an enormous influence on their work as a DJ. But what becomes particularly obvious is that not everyone receives the same treatment.
A producer based in Berlin can simply be introduced as a techno producer. Their German passport does not necessarily precede their name every time they appear somewhere. A London artist can completely change their sound without constantly being expected to represent the United Kingdom.
For someone coming from a scene perceived as more “exotic”, their origin much more easily becomes part of the product. They become the Brazil on the line-up, the Palestine on the line-up, the East Africa on the line-up.
And that sometimes enables a particularly easy form of diversity: one person symbolically represents an entire scene.
You can book one Brazilian artist without actually starting to follow Brazilian labels. You can book a Palestinian DJ without it opening the door to other Palestinian artists — or resulting in any kind of position being taken against the genocide.
It is tokenism by country.
This is also one of the longstanding risks of applying geographical categories to music. Artists have repeatedly explained how labels such as “world music” can end up trapping completely different forms of music inside one supposedly exotic identity. In electronic music, the vocabulary may have changed, but in practice, colonialism remains very, very present.
Being excellent is not always enough. You also have to fit the right boxes for the right network
Look at the trajectories of certain international artists.
They can have been excellent for years. Producing music, organising parties, playing in front of thousands of people at home, having a genuine influence on their local scene — and still remain virtually unknown in Europe.
Then comes a booking agent in London, Berlin or Amsterdam. A Boiler Room. A few dates with the right people.
Suddenly, the artist becomes “unmissable”.
But their talent did not suddenly appear when they were signed.
What changed was their access to the network. They became easier for bookers to identify and, sometimes, commercially more reassuring. Their name starts circulating in conversations between agents and buyers that independent artists simply do not have direct access to.
There is a huge difference between discovering an artist and being willing to book them before someone from your own ecosystem has confirmed that they are worth paying attention to.
That is also why sentences such as “we’d love to book more artists from that region, but we don’t know any” are getting increasingly difficult to hear in 2026.
Mixes, radios, labels, platforms and musical archives have never been this immediately accessible.
What is missing is increasingly the willingness to actually dig for artists.
And fewer and fewer people own these circuits
We often talk about programming as if it were the result of an enormous collection of individual tastes: every festival has its artistic director, every club its own sensibility and every media platform its own discoveries.
But we also need to look at the economic structures behind brands that audiences still perceive as completely separate.
Superstruct Entertainment (KKR) currently claims 80 festival brands, 7 million annual visitors and 34 operating businesses within its network. The group includes Sónar, Awakenings and many other major European live entertainment brands. Superstruct was acquired in 2024 by KKR, with CVC subsequently joining the investment.
In January 2025, Superstruct also acquired Boiler Room from DICE. Boiler Room states that its ownership has no influence on its editorial direction and maintains that it remains independent.
The group had previously acquired ID&T, one of the historic heavyweights of European dance music. At the time of the acquisition, the ID&T ecosystem included not only events and brands such as Q-dance, Awakenings and Art of Dance, but also artist representation businesses including Platinum Agency. Platinum Agency still presents itself today as an agency representing international hard dance artists within the ID&T environment.
Obviously, none of this means that a large group secretly dictates every artist to every festival programmer. That would be far too simplistic a reading of how booking works.
But pretending these structures have no impact whatsoever on the circulation of opportunities would be equally naive.
When festivals, promoters, agencies, cultural platforms and other intermediaries operate inside increasingly concentrated networks, staying within the network becomes economically much easier than going outside it.
The music industry calls that synergy.
For the artist standing outside, it looks more like a door whose handle belongs to somebody else.
This concentration also goes beyond economics. Since Superstruct was acquired by KKR in 2024, several artists have boycotted events including Sónar and Field Day over the investment firm’s ties and investments linked to Israel. Sónar has since publicly distanced itself from KKR and condemned what it describes as the genocide in Gaza.
The contradiction is difficult to ignore: an industry can promote “the Palestinian DJ” as a symbol of openness while belonging to financial structures being challenged precisely over Palestine. The diversity of a line-up, on its own, therefore tells us very little about how power is actually distributed.
You can come to us. Maybe we’ll come to you.
This question had already erupted publicly around Dekmantel in 2019.
The Dutch festival had been developing events and collaborations in South America for several years. Yet its first Amsterdam line-up announcement that year featured more than 100 artists without a single artist based in Latin America.
Valesuchi, the Chilean artist then based in Rio who had played Dekmantel’s Brazilian editions, publicly questioned the contradiction: where exactly was the cultural exchange if the relationship mainly worked when the European festival came to South America?
Dekmantel acknowledged the imbalance and apologised, later stating that booking Latin American artists at its European events needed to be part of that exchange.
Seven years later, the question extends far beyond Dekmantel, because scenes across the Global South have become extremely useful to the international music industry.
They provide new audiences. They generate sounds that later circulate globally. They provide destinations for touring artists. They give Western artists new musical references and, sometimes, a new image.
Mixmag wrote about how electronic sounds from Africa, Latin America and other parts of the Global South had helped renew Western dancefloors. Ugandan DJ Kampire made an essential point: these scenes did not suddenly start producing interesting music because the West had just discovered them.
We love importing the sounds.
We become much more “cautious” when it comes to importing the power that comes with them.
It is colonisation all over again, dance music edition.
The local scene becomes international after international validation
An artist can be recognised in their own country for ten years and still be presented in Europe as a discovery.
Then a European agency signs them.
Six months later, the same festivals that had somehow never managed to find their phone number suddenly discover they exist.
You could argue that this is precisely what an agency is supposed to do. Of course.
But it still tells us where the power to transform a local reputation into an international career actually sits.
In far too many cases, the most powerful artistic passport belongs to the intermediary — the agent or manager.
The same phenomenon exists on much smaller geographical scales.
We saw it while working on our investigation into DJs based outside Paris. Artists can be extremely active in Lyon, Marseille, Lille, Nantes or elsewhere while remaining far less visible to certain Parisian bookers — until they join an agency, collective or network that is already recognised in the capital.
Sometimes the distance is only a few hundred kilometres.
It is still the same issue.
Cultural exchange also has to work on the way back
Nobody needs to stop touring Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Palestine, India or South Africa. Quite the opposite.
But after twenty years of talking about the globalisation of electronic music, we can start asking for a little more than a tour photo and a declaration of love for the local scene.
If a European festival develops a long-term presence in a country, which artists from that scene later appear on its European line-ups?
When a Western headliner discovers an exceptional local community while touring, how many of its artists will eventually end up beside them on a line-up?
When an international platform films an emerging scene, do the featured artists subsequently gain access to its global network, or is the video itself the end of the relationship?
And when an artist from outside these established circuits finally breaks through, why does it so often seem necessary to wait until a Western agency, recognised management company or European cultural institution has first certified their value?
As long as one part of the world can easily serve as a destination, source of inspiration, market and cultural credibility without receiving comparable access to the stages where international legitimacy is manufactured, simply calling it “cultural exchange” will remain a little generous.