Once, the fans came by the busload from across the country to see superstar DJs, the "new rock stars" flown to oversized nightclubs at great expense.

But now dance music, the genre that revolutionised people's clothing, drinking, drug-taking and socialising habits beyond recognition, is battling for survival.

In the past year, the Liverpool superclub Cream - one of the biggest in the world - closed down and Gatecrasher, once one of the most hardcore dance clubs in the country, has downshifted to once a month rather than once a week.

Sales of Britain's most popular dance magazine, Mixmag, have declined by 30% and Ministry of Sound magazine recently closed when its circulation fell below 50,000.

Pronounced dead by many within the dance music industry, rock has become happening again, with people more interested in the Strokes, the White Stripes and the Darkness than the latest Pete Tong compilation. The slide guitar has been squeezing computer-generated music out of the charts.

In the wake of this decline, dance clubs, record producers, promoters and magazine publishers have all had to rethink their acts. Dance's once hardcore fans have grown older and bored listening to beeps and bass, and younger music lovers are looking for something far removed from what their parents listen to on chillout albums.

Tonight the original superclub, Ministry of Sound, relaunches itself to appeal to more upmarket clubbers, serving cocktails and allowing older ravers to book tables to pursue a more sedate form nightspot pleasure.

Other superclubs have tried to rebrand themselves, marking a movement away from the ecstasy culture that went hand in hand with dance.

Tom Whitwell, a former editor of Mixmag and now deputy editor of the Face said: "Dance is not dead, but it is resting. At one point it was enormous, with all the different dance magazine selling about 250,000 a month, but now many of those magazines have closed down. The problem is dance music didn't evolve in the mainstream as much as it could have done. It became strange having all these DJs on Radio 1 who were all over 40 and there is a big gap between those that are playing the music and those that are listening to them. It became very inward looking. People became very turned off by the superclubs and the super DJs.

"Dance was on top for so long and it was liked by everyone from the coolest people to the most uncool people for about 12 years. Compared to Britpop it was a hell of a lot longer lasting. It is going underground now, back to more of a niche thing."

Viv Craske, the editor of Mixmag, feels that despite its circulation drop his magazine is holding its own in a market which had become saturated with readers who saw dance as a genre encompassing everything from hardcore and trance to Kylie Minogue. Now, it is the hardcore dance fans who are buying it.

"It doesn't mean that the genre is dead, it's now a more specialist market," he said. "Through the mid-1990s these club promoters were global brands, doing big festivals and brand extensions. Now we are moving away from the overblown to the grassroots and the up and coming DJs. People no longer want to listen to cheesy anthems that are nothing to do with clubbing."

Mark Rodol, chief executive of Ministry of Sound, admits that the company has had to embark on a radical rethink. The clubs forced to close were those which relied on big-name DJs playing in cavernous rooms. "The super DJ and the superclub game is over," he said.