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They almost all look the same. A name vaguely combining techno, culture, sound, rave or underground. Techno/Deep/Culture/Sound/Tech + “insert cool word here.” A generic visual identity, a few English words in the bio and the promise of covering the global electronic music scene.
They publish the same viral Reels, use the same vocabulary and sometimes give the impression that dozens of independent media outlets are observing the culture from dozens of different perspectives.
Well, no. This diversity is far more limited than it appears.
Article en français.
Manufacturing and Multiplying Virality
Some of these pages belong to the same groups and circulate between the same owners. They are integrated into companies that also own booking or PR agencies, events, artists, clubs or other services connected to the music industry.
The audience sees several accounts. Behind them, there may be the same machine, operating through multiple shop windows with a single business model.
This structure makes it possible to artificially multiply the number of times people encounter the same content. A video may appear on one account, be reposted a few hours or days later by another, and then return on a third page with a different caption.
Through repetition, an artist, festival or clip begins to look as though it is suddenly everywhere. These pages manufacture or amplify the virality of a video and, by extension, of its subject.
This omnipresence resembles a spontaneous movement within the scene, even though it may result from a coordinated campaign, a commercial partnership or simply a network of pages controlled by the same interests.
The mechanism is even more effective because these accounts cultivate an editorial appearance. They talk about community, culture and musical discovery. They share viral videos, report news and occasionally publish content that resembles the work of a conventional media outlet.
Then, in the middle of this flow, artists, clubs and festivals appear whose visibility may have been purchased. The audience is generally given no clear way of distinguishing a spontaneous recommendation from a commercial placement.
An unknown DJ appears between two international headliners with a caption announcing an extraordinary crowd reaction — spoiler: the camera is moving more than the audience. An event is presented as unmissable several weeks before it opens. An artist returns across several pages within a few days, always accompanied by the same enthusiastic phrases.
This eventually creates an impression of collective recognition. The culture has not necessarily endorsed anything. Sometimes, a communication campaign has simply been distributed effectively.
A large part of these pages’ business depends on this ambiguity. They sell views and the appearance of organic discovery. They sell the impression that an artist is already buzzing and that an event naturally occupies the centre of the conversation.
Advertising then adopts the appearance of a cultural recommendation, without always displaying its price or even acknowledging its existence.
An Audience Built With Other People’s Images
Many of these accounts have built their audiences by aggregating content produced elsewhere. They repost videos filmed by festivalgoers, artists, photographers, videographers and event teams. Their approaches to credit and permission vary considerably.
These pages rarely create anything themselves. They are mostly distribution channels. When they do produce “original” content, it often involves superstar DJs or paid-for projects.
Once the audience has been established, the reach accumulated through other people’s work becomes a commercial product.
Offers are then made to artists, agencies, clubs and festivals, whether for a single post, a Reel, a Story, a package across several accounts, a premium placement or a cross-platform campaign. In some cases, the price list arrives before anyone has genuinely watched the project, listened to the music or looked at the event.
Advertising Disguised as Cultural Validation
A paid publication will often reproduce exactly the same codes as an editorial post, using the same tone, graphic style and superlatives.
Nothing on screen consistently allows the audience to know whether a page is sharing an artist because it finds their work interesting or because an invoice has been paid.
As these operations multiply, they also alter the wider perception of the electronic music scene. The feed no longer reflects only what audiences enjoy or what editorial teams choose to support. It also reflects communication budgets, relationships between groups and the ability of certain players to occupy several channels at once.
Repetition then does the rest. The more often a name appears, the more legitimate it seems. The more widely a video circulates, the more important it appears. When several pages publish the same artist, the audience may begin to believe that a consensus is forming.
That consensus can be entirely manufactured — and very often is.
A Scene Narrated Through Promotional Budgets
Artists with a solid team or a significant promotional budget can occupy the feed almost continuously. Their presence eventually appears to be the natural consequence of their importance.
By contrast, a lack of visibility can be interpreted as a lack of activity or relevance.
Producers continue to release tracks that circulate widely among DJs without ever generating a viral Reel. Artists fill clubs without dedicating their daily lives to feeding Instagram. Collectives build lasting local communities with limited resources, while certain labels shape entire genres without receiving spectacular exposure.
These different forms of participation in electronic music take time and generate relatively little content that can be monetised immediately. They struggle within a feed that prioritises the quickest and most easily understood signs of success. They are also poorly suited to the priorities of current algorithms.
A visible artist appears to be moving forward. A less visible artist may appear to be standing still, even when the reality of their bookings, productions or cultural influence tells the opposite story.
Why Everyone Eventually Plays the Game
Artists and their teams are not always paying to purchase an importance they do not possess. Claiming otherwise would be dishonest.
Many are simply trying to survive in an environment where attention has become difficult to obtain, both online and in real life. Managers need their work to be visible. Agencies want to demonstrate concrete results that can stimulate bookings. Festivals need to reassure partners and sell tickets.
When a page promises several hundred thousand views, the offer can appear safer than a press campaign whose results remain uncertain.
The pressure also comes from constant comparison. Every day, artists see other profiles announced as the newest essential figures in the scene. The new this. The new that.
They generally have no idea how many of these publications were paid for. They only see the appearance of success that those posts produce.
Some eventually purchase the same service to avoid disappearing from the conversation. The next campaign then becomes necessary to maintain the perception created by the previous one.
This race guarantees neither a loyal community nor a lasting career. It mainly allows artists to remain visible in a feed where forgetting happens extremely quickly.
Misleading Numbers
It is important to remember that the figures and reach associated with these pages do not necessarily reflect what professionals are being sold. Their overall reach includes viral videos, often reposted without proper credit, as well as posts about superstar DJs that naturally attract high levels of engagement. When an artist pays for a video, a track or another piece of content to be promoted, it is unlikely to perform in the same way.
Some pages therefore include paid boosting within the fee so that the sponsored Reel can display respectable numbers. This creates an endless cycle of selling inflated visibility, unless an artist has enough money to pay for this kind of promotion repeatedly and maintain a constant presence.
Once again, those with the most financial resources are best positioned to benefit from the system.
The Superlative as an Official Language
Captions play an essential role in manufacturing importance. Every video must resemble an extraordinary event, even when the clip shows something completely ordinary.
A camera swings rapidly from left to right, the DJ turns towards it and suddenly the crowd is supposed to have completely lost control — spoiler: the audience was barely moving.
This vocabulary is not designed to describe a situation accurately. It exists to stop people from swiping away. A publication has only a few seconds to convince the viewer that something incredible is happening.
By presenting every clip as a historic or iconic moment, these pages make any meaningful hierarchy almost impossible. A few minutes of scrolling through a single account are enough to see it. Everything is exceptional, revolutionary or unmissable.
The music becomes secondary to the way its reception is staged.
Artists and their teams quickly understand which gestures and moments can be transformed into content. The search for a viral clip begins to influence the way sets are filmed, drops are constructed and, sometimes, the way DJs behave behind the decks.
Sexism as an Engagement Engine
These pages also know which kinds of content are likely to provoke the strongest reactions.
Videos of women DJs frequently attract comments about their bodies, clothing, gestures or legitimacy, even when the publication is supposed to be about their music.
This hostility produces numbers. The comments increase, users argue with one another, the video circulates further and the algorithm interprets the agitation as a positive signal.
The targeted person is then left to deal with hundreds of humiliating remarks while the page benefits from the attention they generate.
Moderating these spaces seriously requires time and can reduce the visible engagement statistics. Some pages therefore allow the comments to accumulate, including when they clearly cross into harassment or misogyny.
Presenting an artist as an important member of the scene while turning her body into algorithmic fuel cannot seriously be described as support.
The post feeds on her visibility and then leaves her to deal with the consequences.
Audiences Turned Into Content
People on dancefloors are also increasingly treated as raw material. This is something we have already discussed at Clubbing TV.
Festivalgoers who are visibly under the influence of substances, exhausted, disoriented or simply filmed during an intimate moment become memes distributed to millions of strangers.
The video is generally presented as an amusing scene or as something representative of rave culture. The person being filmed may have no idea that the images exist until they go viral.
Club culture was built around a form of freedom made possible by the setting of the night. Dancing strangely, temporarily losing control or behaving with less self-consciousness than during the day should remain compatible with a basic level of respect.
The permanent presence of phones has already weakened that freedom. Pages that transform people’s most vulnerable moments into global entertainment complete the transformation of the dancefloor into a place where anyone can become content without their knowledge. Discussions about safer spaces lose much of their meaning when audience vulnerability remains monetisable.
At Clubbing TV, we have always been extremely careful about the images we broadcast. Even during live streams, people cannot imagine how many times I have said through the intercom: “too drunk”, “too high”, or “she doesn’t look like she wants to be filmed.”
Choosing not to ridicule someone, especially publicly, is a basic human principle when you operate a media outlet.
When Owners Also Own What They Recommend
The concentration of several pages within the same group also raises questions about conflicts of interest.
One structure may control accounts presented as cultural media while simultaneously operating in events, promotion, management or booking.
In this configuration, an artist connected to the group may receive regular exposure across pages that appear independent. An in-house event may appear naturally among viral content. A commercial partner may be presented as an essential player without the audience knowing about the economic links connecting the different parties.
These practices do not automatically mean that every publication is misleading — although many certainly are. They do, however, require a degree of transparency that is rarely provided.
When a company owns both the product and the channels recommending it, the audience should be able to know.
Without that information, an internal campaign can pass for spontaneous recognition coming from several independent sources.
The illusion of plurality then becomes a commercial advantage.
Media Reduced to Their View Counts
This economy also blurs the definition of music media, and we know something about that.
A page reposting viral videos can reach figures far beyond those achieved by an editorial team producing interviews, investigations and criticism.
For an agency or artist, the comparison is quickly made. On one side, there is an article whose readership remains uncertain and whose narrative cannot be fully controlled. On the other, there is a Reel capable of displaying several hundred thousand views, with the content selected and approved in advance.
Both are then grouped together under the word “media”, even though their methods, operations and responsibilities are not remotely comparable.
An editorial team normally selects the subjects it considers relevant. It may reject a project, ask difficult questions or publish a nuanced opinion.
A purchased placement offers much greater comfort. The client chooses the message, controls the image and receives a statistic that can immediately be used in a report.
This encourages the industry to treat the press as just another promotional channel, even though it should never function in that way.
Editorial interest becomes a source of frustration because it cannot be guaranteed or entirely controlled.
Over time, the distinction between advertising, recommendation and information becomes almost impossible to perceive. Commercial pages benefit from the credibility associated with the word “media”, while editorial teams are forced to explain why they do not simply sell the same packages.
Your Feed Shows Only a Small Part of the Scene
Looking at Instagram, the entire scene can sometimes appear to revolve around a few dozen names, giant festivals and moments filmed in the same destinations.
This image is repeated often enough to begin feeling real and sufficient.
It is not.
A vast scene continues to grow far away from this permanent spectacle. It includes clubs, independent radios, small labels, record shops, collectives, local artists and programmers whose work does not always translate easily into content.
Their activity may appear less impressive on a screen. It nevertheless creates relationships that survive far longer than a publication.
People return to these venues, follow the artists they discovered there and develop trust in those responsible for the programming.
This scene exists in real life before seeking validation online. It does not depend entirely on a viral moment to attract an audience because it is based on a community sharing tastes, values and experiences.
Rediscovering the Pleasure of Discovery
Accessing this part of the scene requires more curiosity than following the recommendations of a large page. It is not for the lazy.
Sometimes, it means buying a ticket without knowing half — or any — of the line-up, trusting a venue’s artistic direction or getting lost online while searching for music.
It also means listening to opening artists, researching the labels behind the tracks you enjoy and moving beyond the circuits most heavily documented by social media.
There is a risk that you will encounter something that does not match your taste. There is also a chance that you will be genuinely surprised.
This willingness to take a risk is one of the few ways to resist a system constantly trying to sell us what has already been validated, financed or made sufficiently familiar to be consumed without hesitation.
We cannot be too lazy to develop our own tastes — the same also applies to political news, by the way — or simply allow the biggest players in the industry to decide for us.
The scene never progressed because audiences already knew every name before entering a club. It grew because people placed their trust in those capable of showing them something different.
The Most Alive Part of the Scene Is Not the One Being Sold to You
Not everything on Instagram is fake, and fortunately so.
Artists discovered through Reels or posts can be excellent, while paid campaigns can support projects that genuinely deserve more attention.
The feed nevertheless remains a construction. It combines recommendations, commercial relationships, repurposed content and economic interests without always making it possible to distinguish between them.
The real scene is much larger than this extremely visible version of itself.
Your feed may be manipulated. The scene continues to live beyond what it chooses to show you.
It is up to us to stop allowing others to decide so easily what we are supposed to consume.