"It's always been bad, it's always been completely against the promoter. But as the years go by, more obstacles emerge. It's not right, the way it is at the moment. Dance music culture was never supposed to be this commodified. It doesn't create a good atmosphere for anyone."George Patrick co-runs Bigfoot's Tea Party, a small house and techno night with regular events in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. In the eight years he's been promoting the night, he's found things getting harder.DJ fees have risen much faster than inflation, meaning an artist's fee often doesn't equate to their draw on the door. The boom in festivals in the UK and abroad means that small club nights have slipped down the priority list for DJs and their agents. It can be difficult to secure a DJ for a reasonable fee, particularly for Patrick's nights in the less international Aberdeen. "If you do manage to get them booked, you have to pay so much—you get prices that are ridiculous on the door. And that just creates a flat atmosphere, I think. Clubbers are the ones that pay for it."Patrick isn't alone: promoters across the UK have similar complaints."Some of these fees that I'm getting quoted are ridiculous," says Lukas Cole, whose Wigflex party in Nottingham turned ten last year. "People I've been booking since the beginning, when I would get them for like £500, are asking £8,000 now. It's a 500-person venue—we wouldn't even make that if we sold all of our tickets."Graeme Stewart, the booker for Ibiza's Zoo Project, has been running a night in his hometown, Middlesbrough, for 13 years. "When we first started doing moderately sized bookings at Riffraff, ten years ago maybe, we could get the same kind of artist that we can now for about half the price. Which, when you're talking about clubs of 200-350 people, is not much margin for error."The situation is similar in Manchester, according to Alexander Taber, one of the organisers of the nine-year-old meandyou party. "There a lot of promoters now and new venues. The scene is oversaturated in some respects, with programs that mirror one another. Everyone seems to be booking the same acts."In fact, the problem isn't limited to the UK. Over the past few months I spoke to dozens of promoters, bookers and club owners involved in running small and medium-sized events across dance music's major territories. The overwhelming majority agreed that it was getting more difficult for them to operate.The symptoms of the problem are by no means evenly distributed. Places where dance music is well established tend to be worse affected than those where it's a novelty. Some hotspots, like Ibiza and Berlin, have unique industry microclimates that shelter them from the problem. Others, like London, face more urgent local threats But the symptoms are certainly there. At times, promoters from such distinct places as Dublin, Istanbul, Lisbon and Los Angeles seemed to be reading from an identical cue sheet of complaints: rising fees; a fixation with a small elite of in-demand DJs; ever-fiercer competition, both between local promoters and with an international network of festivals and other large events; and a large-scale professionalisation of the underground, meaning more middlemen, more incidental costs, and less flexibility for those operating on a tight margin.Among these promoters, the mood of frustration, if not outright pessimism, was fairly uniform. Not all had a doomsday prediction, but some did. As New York promoter Ric Leichtung put it: "There's certainly a bubble and I think it may burst."What's behind all this? In a word: growth.According to the International Music Summit's annual Business Report, the global dance music industry had almost doubled in value this decade, from around $4 billion per year in 2011 to $7.1 billion in 2016. Electronic music has flourished as a recorded medium—in the early '10s it dominated the charts in both the US and the UK, and it has thrived in the emergent streaming market. But the biggest change has been in events.In the US, where EDM propelled dance music into the mainstream, the total capacity of the country's electronic music festivals shot up by 50% per year between 2007 and 2013. A 2016 Ticketmaster study found that the number of dance music festivals in the UK increased by 500% between 2000 and 2015, and that "demand in live dance events continues to rise." Across Europe, the IMS estimated that at least one in seven people had recently attended a dance music event.You might ask what all this has to do with the underground. After all, these eye-popping figures are driven by the big fish—your Guettas, your Electric Daisy Carnivals—next to which Wigflex or meandyou are mere minnows. But both swim in the same ocean, and are affected by the same currents. Dance music is currently a mainstream pursuit in a way that it hasn't been since the late '90s, and young people attuned to its norms are more likely to engage with the culture in all its forms. You only need to browse's listings for one of dance music's key cities, or ask a jobbing mid-tier DJ how their bank balance is looking, to get a sense that the global underground is riding a historic high."I feel that there was a generational shift," says Ben Turner, cofounder of the International Music Summit. "Young kids in America and all over Europe, all over the world, were reaching an age where they're old enough to go to clubs. This is a generation brought up with technology at their fingertips. The pulse of the music that they listen to is computerised and electronic. And it just clicks."How might this change the way things work? Do my interviewees' complaints simply reflect the growing pains of an expanding industry? Or perhaps, as Ric Leichtung suggested, we're in a bubble which, as with the '90s and its superstar DJs, will eventually burst?Or maybe we're seeing the industry slowly but inexorably take on a new shape. One run from the top down by global entertainment companies and lucrative brand partnerships. One in which dance music's heartlands are carved up between a handful of large promotion groups, and elsewhere the logic of the festival predominates. One in which every level of the scene is rigorously professionalised.If so, this new world might not be all bad. It might bring with it exciting new possibilities. But it could also mean the decline of a certain kind of dance music event."You used to open the doors and hope that you had a relatively busy party and a good event," says Graeme Stewart. "Whereas now, kids are buying tickets so, so far in advance… There's a whole experience around clubbing now. You know, everyone books their tickets, then, 'OK, now we're gonna look for an apartment… I'm gonna take the Monday off...' Almost like a festival mentality."This distinguishes British clubbing in the 2010s from past eras. James Barton, cofounder of Liverpool super-club Cream, wrote in a 2015 Ticketmaster report: "If I take you back to 1996, at the height of Cream and club culture, kids were going out every Saturday night... That's not the norm any more, that's the exception. The norm is that kids now want to invest in big experiences, big moments in their year. This generation wants to be impressed. They want big productions, they want the biggest lineups…"Barton is now President Of Electronic Music at Live Nation, which, as part of a string of dance music-related acquisitions, recently bought a majority stake in Manchester's Warehouse Project. With its heavy-hitting lineups and pre-announced seasons, the Warehouse Project is part of a new generation of events supplying these "big experiences." These venues reflect, or perhaps shape, the habits of young clubbers. The Ticketmaster report found that "over two in three attendees" of dance music events in the UK "purchase tickets at least two months before the event.""Listings are available to people so far in advance now," says Stewart. "Travel links are so easy, and people can get an Airbnb, and they can buy cheap train tickets. And kids living in Barnsley or Colchester or wherever can get to a bigger city with much more ease than they could even ten years ago. So the smaller underground nights, which were pushing music into those places, now have to compete with the bigger cities. In Middlesbrough, we check the Warehouse Project lineups when they come out knowing that something two hours down the road still might affect our party."The booker for one mid-sized club in The North said that he has been forced to adapt to this model, announcing lineups in seasons rather than on the fly, and favouring impressive lineups over creatively interesting ones. Clubgoers now have a consumer mentality shaped by festivals; what Pedro Fradique of Lux Frágil, complaining of the same problem in Lisbon, characterises as: "I've paid this amount and I'll see this number of things."And then of course there's the effect that these large events can have on DJ fees. "If promoters are putting on events for 2000 people, charging £40 a ticket, and they're taking the bar also, I see no reason why the artist fee shouldn't reflect that," says Stewart. "It wouldn't be fair that the promoter took all of that. It's like saying a footballer shouldn't get paid high wages when the football clubs are getting paid all the Sky money. But the difference is, a footballer playing for Manchester United doesn't go play for Shrewsbury the next week and expect the same wages."Across the Atlantic, festivals have changed things even more dramatically, though in a different way. When EDM exploded towards the end of the '00s, it was mainly a festival phenomenon, with little connection to the existing US club scene. But its shockwaves have since rippled through every level of popular culture, and the country is experiencing a dance music awakening on a scale perhaps not seen since disco."There is an old saying that goes, 'Bad music leads to good music,' and I think that's true," says John Barera, a Boston musician and promoter now based in New York. "The electronic music scene is definitely growing here. With that you have more DJs, more new promoters, more competition."Perhaps the clearest evidence of this growth is in LA. The city has long had a notable dance music scene, but in the last half-decade an influx of young enthusiasts has given it a new lease of life."I feel [EDM has] served as a gateway for people to dig deeper into electronic music, and that's how the scene has grown," says Nik Wilson. "When the whole EDM bubble grew and crossed over into the mainstream here five years ago, people got into electronic music en masse and the ones who have stuck with it, their tastes have matured. As a result, a few years down the line the market here is now better, with more refined sounds."Wilson is a talent buyer for Hollywood club Avalon, and co-runs the warehouse space Lot 613. He has observed the scene's rapid transformation since he moved to the city from London, where he'd worked at Ministry Of Sound. "[LA is] almost becoming a bit like London or NYC, in the fact that there's now lots of great parties on every weekend, with really high quality international acts. It wasn't like that when I moved here four years ago. There's a multitude of great choices every weekend."But it's not clear whether the city can sustain this flood of new events and promoters. Cooper Saver, the DJ and producer behind the Far Away parties, considers himself part of the younger generation that Wilson is talking about. "I feel like this kind of music bubble is more accessible now than it was years ago. Throwing parties is the best way to get involved and get a view of how this all works." But he worries that the scene is getting bloated. "I don't think that the crowd is big enough for so many parties. You see the same couple hundred people at every event, and if there's a lot going on in a night, nobody is gonna have a good night."This also increases the demand for popular DJs. Jeni Erickson of Making Shapes observes that "a scramble for certain artist bookings" can lead to "a bid war between LA promoters… Since you now have at least six popular party brands operating in the underground here, the agents and artists have strong options."Rising fees make the already harsh economics of illicit warehouse parties even less favourable. "With most places being secret and afterhours, you have to pay for literally everything," says Saver. "You have to rent the space, the sound, you gotta bring in the bar. That on top of talent doesn't leave you much headroom to make a profit. Basically if the artist fee is anything over $4000 or so, you're pretty much accepting the fact that you're just doing it for fun. For the most part, I don't think promoters are even making a profit."This problem persists due to, as one promoter who didn't want to be named put it, "the rise of the genteel promoter": people with preexisting wealth who are willing to lose money in order to be involved in the scene. This phenomenon has always existed, of course, but it worsens as dance music acquires more social cachet, as is happening across the world."There are people out there that seem to have access to a lot of money, and don't really seem to care if they lose £1000 on a show," says Casper Clark, who runs the London party and record label BleeD. "Because the more desirable this whole thing becomes, the more people want a piece of it. And let's face it, some people are wealthier than others, you know?"While an influx of young promoters squeezes the LA scene from the bottom, EDM's festival infrastructure applies pressure from the top. Many hailed the death of EDM when SFX Entertainment went bankrupt last year , but this may not have indicated a collapse so much as a transfer into a steadier state. The 2016 IMS report found "evidence that [EDM's] recent explosive growth is translating into sustainable wide-scale appeal." As Vivian Host, of New York party Trouble & Bass, says, in recent years the EDM festival has "proliferated, and had all these babies in different areas."Thanks to its weather, Southern California is a hotspot for these festivals. Live Nation is the "creative partner" of Insomniac Events, which runs Beyond Wonderland in March, Nocturnal Wonderland in September, and Escape Halloween. Live Nation also owns Hard, which typically throws two festivals in LA each year. Its competitor, AEG, owns Goldenvoice, the promoter behind Coachella and FYF Fest.These festivals offer larger fees than independent clubs and require artists to sign an exclusivity clause preventing them from performing in the area for as much as several months either side of an event. The exclusion zone spans several hundred kilometres, meaning that a booking at Insomniac's flagship event, Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas, has a bearing on LA. If an artist accepts two gigs from one of these promoters, they could be out of the LA market for most of the year.This is significant because these festivals are increasingly looking to the underground for booking ideas. Coachella's 2017 lineup features Ben UFO, Marcel Dettmann and Floating Points. Insomniac booked the likes of Four Tet, Rødhåd and Jackmaster for events in California last year. Some warehouse promoters worry that their core artists may soon be appearing on festivals' radars. "It could get bleak," one says.This reflects a broader dynamic, in which the mainstream and underground spheres, previously considered distinct, are slowly merging. On one side, commercial interests have a growing appetite for previously niche music; on the other, grassroots music culture is being slowly professionalised. Festivals are often a meeting place for these two worlds."The gap between what is mainstream or underground is reducing," says Pedro Fradique. In the earlier days of Lux Frágil, the club would book an artist once, "and then over the years they would become more well known, and they would go to a festival. These days, there are things [I've booked] that I've had 50 people to watch, or something like that, but next year, they can already be at a festival."