Every January, Martin Luther King Jr.’s words reappear — quoted, sampled, softened. They drift through timelines and playlists as proof of progress, detached from the economic and racial violence he spent his final years naming directly. In public memory, King is remembered for hope more than confrontation, for dreams more than systems.

In music culture, this flattening is especially visible. Radical Black thought becomes atmosphere. Protest becomes mood. History becomes heritage branding.

Dance music is not immune. In fact, it may be one of the most aggressively sanitized spaces of all. Often framed as escape — sound as release, the club as refuge — its political origins are routinely stripped away. But dance music did not begin as an escape from politics. It emerged from them.

In cities marked by segregation, disinvestment, and racialized neglect, electronic music functioned as infrastructure: a way to build futures where none were offered, to hold space where safety did not exist, to imagine worlds beyond racial capitalism.

This editorial isn’t about vibes or optimism. It’s about receipts. In 2025, harm became measurable, access became enforceable, and AI exposed how easily artists’ labor can be stripped of authorship and pay. From quantified hate to ADA enforcement to the AI royalty loophole, this is a line in the sand. Refusal, in 2026, is structural.

Suno and Udio are reshaping the landscape of intellectual property , without resolving who gets paid.
Read why mass information is masking mass erasure, from education to music to AI, and why preserving memory, credit, and ownership now demands collective resistance.

A policy analysis on why unregulated AI threatens cultural survival and why the music industry is already the proof.

Artificial intelligence is already transforming society for better and, without guardrails, for far worse. The real question is not whether AI will disrupt culture, labor, or truth. It already has. The question is whether laws, rights, and public protections will shape that transformation, or whether we will be left cleaning up the wreckage of cultural exploitation and economic collapse after it happens.

Thanksgiving isn’t a simple holiday. Especially for many Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island, it lands less like a celebration and more like a National Day of Mourning — a reminder of land theft, forced displacement, cultural erasure, and the ongoing violence that still shapes daily life. While the U.S. is trying to lean into gratitude, a lot of people are choosing “No Thanks, No Giving,” refusing to skip the genocide chapter just because the calendar says it is time to be festive.​

Oljato-Monument Valley, United States by Gerson Repreza

Instead of clinging to a mythologized origin story, this is a moment to lean into what nightlife teaches at its best: truth-telling, solidarity, and collective care. Our scenes do not exist in a vacuum; they sit on stolen land, in cities that still profit from histories of dispossession, policing, and extraction. Gratitude without accountability is empty, and any talk of “community” or “sustainability” has to start from that ground.​

On November 21, 2025, Olivia Dean, the fast-rising UK singer-songwriter, turned viral outrage into industry reckoning. Her North American tour tickets went on general sale that morning. Within hours, seats originally priced around $60 were snapped up and relisted for $900 on Ticketmaster and resale platforms.

Dean took action swiftly and decisively, posting on Instagram and directly naming Ticketmaster, Live Nation, and AEG for enabling these inflated resale prices. She called their service “disgusting” and “completely against our wishes,” pushing for live music to remain accessible. Her intervention forced Ticketmaster to cap reselling at face value, posting on X “We support artists' ability to set the terms of how their tickets are sold and resold. We're capping resale prices for Olivia Dean's tour on our site at face value and hope other resale sites will follow.” on the same platform they responded to one of the fans saying that the price was ‘a typo’.

In an industrial stretch of East Williamsburg, Avant Gardner emerged in 2017 under the vision of Jürgen “Billy” Bildstein. What began as a fleeting pop-up concept found permanence with the opening of the Brooklyn Mirage - a sprawling outdoor venue whose ambitious production and scale set it apart from the outset. Over the next two years, additional halls rose beside it: The Great Hall, cavernous and versatile, and Kings Hall, intimate and subterranean. Together, the complex offered a new blueprint for year-round nightlife. But the by early 2025 the venue saw its first needles in coffin and by August 4, Avant Gardner, LLC (“Avant Gardner”), the operator of Brooklyn Mirage, together with its affiliated entities filed for bankruptcy.

Electronic music was not only born as an avant-garde sound—it was, first and foremost, born as a stance. Before it became a global phenomenon and a lifestyle product, before “techno” and “rave” got absorbed by marketing and were turned into buzzwords and hashtags, the scene was a radical movement. A safe refuge for all those society pushed to the margins: Black, queer, trans, poor, non-privileged, migrants. A new social utopia was emerging in the sweaty warehouses of Detroit, Chicago, New York, Birmingham, Manchester, and Berlin, one that would soon spread with force across the planet.

Zohran Mamdani’s historic win as New York City’s first Muslim mayor marks a cultural realignment. With artist Rama Duwaji by his side, the new administration embodies a future where art, intellect, and civic imagination become infrastructure for everyone, not billionaires.

We can rethink the way we party - fun doesn’t have to depend on a headliner. The crowd itself can be the party, creating a unique collective energy.

It’s abnormal that only a few benefit from this industry: DJs, managers, promoters, club owners, while so many other contributors (technicians, performers, designers) are left undervalued.

The system as it stands drives exclusion: skyrocketing prices enrich a handful while pushing many people out of access to these cultural spaces.

At the Maccabi House showcase in New York City, we caught up with DJ/producer Saqib for a short backstage conversation before his set. In just a few minutes, he captured the energy of the night — from the tracks he was most excited to drop, to the ongoing question of how exclusivity shapes underground culture.

Earlier this year, we spoke with New York-based DJ and curator Sana, who unpacked what we called the “politics of presence” in dance music — the pressure to show up, be seen, and still somehow stay invisible. In a recent IG story, she doubled down on the exhaustion of performing identity while trying to push boundaries. “I personally struggle with ‘adapting’ my sets,” she wrote on her Instagram story, “to a more desi crowd and in the past have been a bit drained from doing this.”