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Electronic music is now worth nearly $13 billion.
If money isn’t a dirty word, it does raise questions about how techno has changed in nature. It has become a spectacle to be consumed rather than a moment to be lived. Clubs look like shop windows, festivals like companies, DJs like products. We keep reading that the underground is dissolving into marketing. Really?
For a long time, we believed the doors should be open to everyone. Today, we have to admit the door needs to be kept again. Not to exclude, but to protect. “Gatekeeping” has a bad reputation, yet here it means care: keeping a culture alive, demanding, and faithful to its founding values.
Techno wasn’t invented in a brand’s office or a VIP area. It was born in the margins, out of a meeting between Black, queer, working-class communities and the machine-obsessed nerds of early tech. Invisible people who turned night into a refuge and music into a language. The party, at its core, was not an escape but an act of resistance. A way to inhabit a world that didn’t want us.
What we see today is the opposite. A scene eager to please. An industry that capitalises on the aesthetics of transgression while stripping them of meaning. Sponsored parties pile up, influencers parade, the same headliners tour from country to country, paid tens of thousands to reproduce the same set. Most no longer DJ, they perform. Specialist media, strangled economically, swap editorial freedom for partnerships. Clubs that survive must seduce, artists must sell, and the audience pays more and more for less soul.
In this sanitised landscape, hard techno has become a symbol of the drift. Its rise could have been good news: a return to radical energy, sonic violence, a raw aesthetic. That isn’t what happened. During the latest Paris Electronic Week, a panel on hard techno exposed a collective blind spot. When racism and the visible presence of the far right in parties came up, the room fell silent. Artists on stage dodged, some saying it was “a French problem,” others throwing out “stop the hate” to drown the debate. One seemingly harmless phrase carried the weight of it all: “everyone is welcome.” Except, no. When “everyone” is welcome, that includes those who put others in danger. When neo-Nazi symbols circulate in clubs, when minorities stop coming because they no longer feel safe, refusing to take a stance becomes a betrayal. A recording of that debate was meant to be released. It probably never will. The audio exists, and it will eventually speak, because this discomfort says everything about a scene that prefers to lose nothing, even if it means betraying everything.
This neutrality is not innocent. It is the product of a system. In an economy where every post, every set, every word has a price, silence becomes profitable. Calling oneself “apolitical” is a luxury only the sheltered can afford. While they keep their deals and fees, the communities that created this music still have to fight to exist. The danger is set: a milieu that made resistance its mother tongue now prefers neutrality to solidarity. A scene born against racism, homophobia and sexism is today comfortable with silence, as long as the numbers add up.
A new figure has entered the club: the night influencer. Familiar faces from Instagram or TikTok who no longer come to dance but to exist. Their presence is bought with free invites, comped drinks and calibrated posts. For many, the party is no longer a space of freedom but a film set. That economy of display has introduced a massive bias into critique: because these creators depend on free access, they almost never say anything negative. Everything becomes “incredible,” “unforgettable,” “inclusive,” “authentic,” even when the dance floor is empty. Turning the night into a teaser product erases the symbolic and political value of clubs. The dance floor was never designed to generate content; it is a space of expression, not capture. Using it as a visual backdrop betrays its essence. Those who don’t know its history and don’t respect its codes confuse ecstasy with visibility. That confusion is precisely what kills culture.
Meanwhile, the base is moving. German clubs are reintroducing strict door policies, not to filter social class but to preserve respect and safety. Some collectives ban phones inside, others stop announcing lineups to restore mystery. In Cologne, Brussels, Lyon, queer parties reinvent the club as a political space. In Dortmund, Tresor West is testing free community nights, funded by a solidarity fund, to make nights accessible to those priced out. In Uganda, Senegal, Tunisia and Morocco, parties are organised the way they used to be. Small gestures, but they redraw the outlines of a fairer scene.
Gatekeeping in this context is not a step back. It is a necessary response. Refusing phones on dance floors, refusing complacency, refusing entry to those who come to consume without understanding isn’t exclusion, it is salvation. House and techno weren’t made for everyone, and that’s what makes them precious. We have to give them back to those who truly live them: the shadow DJs, the volunteers, the dancers, the tech crews, the organisers, the curious crowds. Those who still know why this music exists. Those who never confused freedom with indifference.
The audience has an enormous role to play. As long as people accept paying €120 for two days, applaud identical lineups, 45-minute sets, fleurs-de-lys and 88 flags, and look away from the drift, they will feed the very system they criticise. The power to transform lies not with brands but with those who dance. Returning to the original spirit of the party isn’t nostalgia for a mythical past; it is a refusal to let it become a product. Freedom isn’t sold; it is cultivated.
Coexistence of multiple scenes is not only possible, it is healthy. If you come for TikTok hits or radio edits, no one has the right to judge you. Class contempt through taste has no place here. Everyone evolves at their own pace.
Renewal will come from the margins again. Of those queer artists tired of being surrounded by people who deny their existence, of those collectives whose diversity isn’t limited to marketing campaigns but lived within their teams, values and decisions, and of those activists who refuse to look away from abusers. Hopefully with the help of still-independent media that continue to speak without fear. The future of techno will be communal, or it will not be.
Keeping the door is a reminder that the party was never meant to be filmed but to be lived. It is saying no to spectators and yes to participants. It is refusing neutrality and choosing meaning. Because what we defend is not a genre, but a vision of the world, a place where body, sound and freedom merge.
If techno is to become a refuge again, someone at the entrance will need the courage to say: Not this time.