The magazine was called Platform. It operated out of a decrepit pattern-cutting warehouse in Dalston, London, where 25-year-old Blaise Bellville and his friends tapped out vaguely edgy articles about youth culture. The mag didn’t last, but the group made history when they set up turntables and a cheap Logitech webcam in the building’s dingy boiler room and started streaming online.

Boiler Room launched in April 2010, broadcasting almost every week. Working their contacts in the London music scene, Bellville and his crew would invite DJs down to spin records on camera while friends and acquaintances milled in the background, drinking and dancing. Cool and punky, it became one of the hottest invitations in town, taken up early on by emerging names like Floating Points and Four Tet, who last month played to tens of thousands of fans in Sydney and Melbourne.

Fifteen years on, this simple format has grown into a global events brand and five-million-strong Youtube channel acquired for £25 million ($50 million) in March. From Irish duo Bicep to stadium-packing sensation Fred Again, Boiler Room’s ability to make the stars of tomorrow is unmatched. That tiny little room and its cheap webcam have been replaced by extravagant light shows, full production crews and cavernous spaces in Berlin, Ibiza and beyond, where hordes of dancers jostle for 15 minutes of fame in the DJ booth, a space typically off-limits at clubs and festivals.

Even before 2020, Boiler Room’s particular format was profoundly reshaping dance culture, bringing it further into the open while homogenising its look and feel. Then came Tiktok, Instagram’s Reels clone and a once-in-a-century pandemic that locked the next generation out of clubs and onto their screens. Short clips from Boiler Room and its imitators ran rampant, presenting a thrilling peek through the keyhole and into a then-forbidden world. When the clubs finally reopened, the old initiation rites had been all but erased.

Pandemic aside, has gen Z’s healthier lifestyle really killed the club? Do people still go to clubs regularly? Can they afford to? What goes on there? We interviewed more than 20 club owners, DJs, promoters and regular Gen Z punters in Sydney and Melbourne to piece together the story.

The great divide

In 2025, the midweek uni club, with its cheap drinks and accessible music, is still a pipeline to the world of more serious nightclubs, but increasingly it’s being supplanted by the aforementioned clips from Boiler Room, Tiktok and Reels.

These short-form highlights prime under-18s and often direct them to larger, one-off spectacles with high production values that don’t necessarily represent a community-driven club experience. These channels have dramatically altered the Australian clubbing ecosystem, for better and for worse.

“People are chasing those big thrills,” says Sydney DJ Barney “Kato” Hodgson, who’s been playing for 25 years. “They’re attracted to venues that can provide that kind of atmosphere. If you get a whole bunch of 18-year-old kids who go into a room for the first time, they have that expectation of ‘We need the big lights, the blah blah blah.’”

“They all want to be behind the DJ,” says Dane Gorrel, music director at Club 77, one of Sydney’s longest-running clubs.

“When I was growing up, you didn’t really have much of an idea of what clubbing was going to be like,” says Tim Fennell, co-owner of four-year-old Melbourne club Miscellania. “Now you have what seems quite authentic but actually isn’t really representing what a dance floor looks like. It’s this odd, on-camera view and bit of a simulacrum.”

This has been good business for big-ticket camping festivals like Lost Paradise, Pitch and Beyond the Valley. Ditto for high-capacity venues like Carriageworks and Munro Warehouse in Sydney, and The Wool Store and Pica (Port Melbourne Industrial Centre for the Arts) in Melbourne, which regularly sell out shows headlined by global Tiktok stars like Peggy Gou and Fish 56. But it’s been a disaster for the ritual of the weekly club night, with its local DJs and comparatively low-key vibe, already in decline since the 2000s.

“It’s easy to look at young people and go, ‘Why don’t you get it?’ But what have they been given to get?” says Dave Abram, co-owner of Sydney institution Freda’s. “Part of any kind of culture is elders. Gatekeepers. People who pass the knowledge down. When Covid happened, some people who had made that a part of their livelihood, they didn’t pick the energy back up. Because it wasn’t two years; it was five. We’re still feeling the effects of that.”

Weekly no more

Covid didn’t just decimate clubs financially – it kept an entire cohort of young people from discovering clubs and learning to love them. Some have skipped out entirely.

“If it’s not for a special occasion, I try not to go to a club,” says Xavier, a gen Z Melburnian. “I save it for special occasions where you get to do it with everyone. I don’t even have the stamina. I’m 24 years old … the thought of going out every week scares me. My immune system wouldn’t hold up. After Covid I’m like, ‘Ok, I’m a grandma now.’”

““I’ll go to a club maybe once every three months. Mostly it’s all event-based. Clubs aren’t really on our radar. It’s kind of a kick-on thing,” says 26-year-old Frazer, from Melbourne. “But otherwise, no one I know is going there. I truly don’t know the music that plays in a lot of the clubs around here.”

“During Covid people found other ways to socialise, and those things kind of stuck,” says Miah, a 25-year-old who lives in Sydney. “I do go out quite a bit, but more to warehouse parties or beach parties or things that are organised outside of the club space but are still electronic music.”

“I feel like our generation is just not doing [weekly clubs] … because of the internet, everyone develops their taste quite quickly,” says Suze Anthony, 26-year-old co-founder of Melbourne party crew Final Girl. “They already know what they want to experience, so they’ll either convince their friends to come, or they might just come by themselves. We see that quite a bit at our parties.”

“People are more connected virtually now. They don’t need to rely on the somewhat old-fashioned ways of communicating and creating networks. So they kind of skip that step and they’re more like tourists,” says Danny “Rants” Grant, veteran Melbourne promoter and content creator. “They participate, they go visit, they experience what a nightclub is like. But what made a nightclub special back in those days was that they had a heart and they had a community.”

Clubs are also contending with the rise of Lines, a four-year-old app born in Sydney with a presence in Australia’s five biggest cities. In addition to compiling what’s-on guides, the 11-strong team posts footage from dance floors in near real-time, helping punters find busy, peak-time vibes – if that’s what they’re looking for.

Dozens of clubs are on board and supply Lines with nightly videos that augment the reams of user-submitted content. But not everyone is interested in collaborating.

“We’ve asked not to be featured on Lines,” Fennell says of Miscellania. “We just don’t like the idea of people knowing what’s going on beforehand. We’d rather keep a sense of mystery.”

“We don’t really want to be on there, just because it feels very trend-based,” says James Keogh, co-founder of 11-month-old Melbourne club Solace. “I think that absorbs a lot of energy, and it also brings people in who probably use the space only for that one night and might never come back.”

“To their generation and the people they market to, it’s the best thing in the world. They want to know before they go that this club is busy, that they can just walk into a party,” says Club 77’s Gorrel. “But they’ve helped destroy this culture of actual clubbing – that’s how I see it.”

“We’d like to think we get more people going out,” says Lines co-founder Josh Stewart. “People don’t want to risk rocking up somewhere shit. We’re giving people the confidence and the assurance that it’s going to be good by checking what we’re covering, and therefore they go out more.”

While it’s easy to point the finger at these online players, real-world trends share as much, or more, responsibility for clubs’ current woes. Rental prices have surged 44 per cent in the past five years. The real value of the minimum wage fell by 4.8 per cent during the pandemic, hurting Australia’s youngest, lowest-paid workers. And booze prices, which go up every six months due to government excise ratcheting, have sobered a generation already drinking less alcohol overall than any prior.

“When I used to go out, it was always [Smirnoff] Double Blacks and Jaegerbombs and stuff. That’s changed completely,” says Solace’s Keogh. “For us, house-made cocktails, natural wine and trendy seltzers that actually taste good are the key stuff that sells. There are still some nights that vodka Red Bull still reigns supreme, but it’s more suited towards nice drinks.”

“Clubs have all become a little bit more bar-like,” Kato says. “You could say maybe a part of that is to appease the NSW Police, who are notoriously anti-clubs.”

But as high tobacco prices have led to a well-publicised black market for cheap cigarettes, the high cost of alcohol has also had unintended effects. It’s driven people towards drinking better quality drinks in smaller amounts, but also towards illicit drugs. Nationwide samples of wastewater indicate that after a dip during the pandemic, drug use rebounded to record highs in all states and territories last year.

“I have to laugh when I see the government health people go, ‘Oh, drinking’s down and people are drinking less,’” says Andy Sumpter, co-owner of Melbourne institution Onesixone. “Yeah, but they’re doing a lot more drugs than you think.”

“K’s the killer,” he continues, referring to ketamine, a sedative with mild hallucinogenic properties. “DJs tell me, ‘We play to a fucking floor full of zombies.’ I don’t understand it. If you’re into music that much, why would you take an anaesthetic instead of something that’s going to make you dance?

“In our cloakroom, we used to have sets of high heels checked in – the girls would bring their runners to dance for six hours. They don’t check their high heels anymore.”

The slow death of the resident

Clubs are in a real bind, then. On the one hand, people are coming less often and spending less money. On the other, the club’s hard costs like wages, rent, alcohol and insurance are rising just as dauntingly as the cost of rent and groceries are for the average person.

Onesixone’s operating costs have gone up by 45 per cent since the end of Covid, Sumpter says, including public liability insurance jumping from $40,000 to $100,000 a year for the medium-sized, 320-capacity venue.

“We have drinking and we have dancing. They’re two just no-no areas for the insurance industry, apparently,” he says. “There’s only a half a dozen that will do it and that’s shrinking every year. Most of them are underwritten by Lloyds, but it’s just very difficult to get. With the market being so narrow, they just go, ‘Oh, well, yeah, it’s $120,000 to $130,000 just to open your doors, mate.’ We’ve even explored the legalities of people signing a waiver as they come in and pay their entry.”

“Certain costs have gone up astronomically,” Gorrel confirms. “My insurance premium now is about $130,000 a year. It’s nuts.” He’s gotten creative and started booking film shoots, music videos and other private events at Club 77 in the early evening, to offset these costs.

A quarter of Australia’s nightclubs closed between 2020 and 2025. Those that remain are dealing with the aforementioned fickleness of the new generation, who aren’t particularly interested in visiting the same place week in, week out, the way many millennials and gen Xers did. This is gradually erasing the concept of a residency, where a DJ plays the same club at the same time each week, building a rapport with a returning audience.

“There’s something to be said about residencies because you can form a relationship with the space, with the people that go there … I don’t find that exists as much now,” says Melbourne DJ Janette “JNETT” Pitruzzello, who got her start in 1994.

“The first time I was professionally paid to DJ was probably 1998,” says Melbourne DJ Luke “McD” Kirdy. “At one stage I was doing 20 residencies a week. Now I find clubs are rotating so many DJs. You come in one week, it’s really good. The next week it’s good, but it’s different. And how do you build a community around that when it’s changing so rapidly?”

Some notable exceptions to this trend are Club 77 in Sydney and Onesixone and Revolver in Melbourne, which have held onto the same residents for 20-plus years. New player Solace, also in Melbourne, is building towards that model. In contrast, Miscellania and the new 24-hour incarnation of Sydney mainstay Freda’s are pursuing more dynamic programs with overlapping networks of third-party promoters.

“Our residents come in, they know exactly what to do, what track to play when, because they know what’s going on in there with the room and the crowd. It’s a proven formula,” says 77’s Gorrel. “It’s why we always program long sets, too – a minimum of four hours, or even just one DJ for the night. It’s not out of lack of creativity. It’s because, in my eyes, that’s how a club should be programmed.”

“We’ve built up the loyalty over the years and people know what they’re getting, and it’s the one thing that we don't compromise on,” says Sumpter of Onesixone. “Occasionally, we have to make changes to the line-up to accommodate touring and things like that, but yeah, it’s the consistency.”

“We’ve got about 10 or so local residents. We haven’t marketed them as such, but you’ll see the names pop up quite a bit,” Keogh says of Solace’s program. “And then we also do around two international DJs per month. I had a look at our POS data, and we’re sitting around 30 per cent return customers every Friday and Saturday. And sometimes for the techno events, that can be up to 40 or 50 per cent. I’d probably say 20 to 30 per cent of regulars come at least once every two, three weeks.”

“There’s been a huge shift this decade, where people aren’t going out as frequently and dependably as they did. I think people are also really hungry for a unique experience. They don’t want to experience what they have before, in the same way,” says Miscellania co-owner Sasha Logan. “We find that promoters have a very short arc, where they have a sustained audience that will dependably come for a few months and then start to drop off.”

Green shoots: A DIY resurgence

Dance culture, originally a refuge for Black and Latinx queer communities, has always staked its place in the underground – moving with traveller communities in 1980s Britain, squatting in abandoned real estate on the border of East and West Berlin and throwing parties in Sydney and Melbourne’s derelict warehouses in the ’90s.

Despite stiff opposition from governments and frequent police raids, these early organisers kept on organising – often because there were few options if you wanted to dance to this new-fangled thing called techno in relative peace. In 2025, with festivals charging as much as $500, club numbers shrinking and regular nights out becoming prohibitively expensive, we’ve reached a similar point, where DIY parties are often the most attractive option.

The internet, for all its drawbacks, has made organising these things easier than ever before. “Social media is great for private events,” Luke McD says. “I’m going to a bush party this weekend, it’s just 150 people. You can’t buy a ticket for it unless you know someone. That’s what it used to be about.”

In addition to usually being cheaper to run and attend, DIY events also offer more room for experimentation. And Sydney, the city that suffered under six ruinous years of lockouts and venue closures before the pandemic even hit, is leading the charge nationally. There’s a smaller DIY scene in Melbourne, plus younger clubs in Miscellania and Solace.

“When the lockout laws happened, it became imperative. There was nothing else that we could do. I didn’t intend on throwing warehouse parties,” says Andy Garvey, who’s been DJing around Sydney since 2010.

“Some of the younger crews that are doing illegal or less legal events, come to me and say, ‘Andy, how do you work with clubs? We’ve never done that before. And I’m like, ‘That’s crazy – you guys have been throwing parties for five years. How have you never considered doing that?’ It’s because they never went to clubs, ever. They just don’t go.”

“It is hard sometimes to find a club venue, even for me, who’s pretty experienced. Most clubs now want a minimum bar spend, which I think is pretty predatory towards young promoters,” Kato, the DJ, says. “There are probably as many regular warehouses as there are regular clubs. They’re very rewarding, and it’s a super important part of the culture in Sydney.”

“The DIY space is this blank canvas where you can come in and do what you want,” says 27-year-old Sydney DJ Mimi Rahman, aka Galiba. “It’s become an opportunity for cross disciplines to come together. Installation artists come and put on this amazing display, and so many different people from different parts of the music, art and theatre worlds come together. It’s this whole performance and an integration of everything.”

“People don’t want to pay cover charges or spend lots of money on drinks like you would in a club,” says Miah, the Sydney partygoer. “You’re still buying tickets to these [DIY events], but you know that [the money is] going directly to the artist. It’s a culture shift into more grassroots stuff. A lot of these events have a fundraising element as well.”

“In the DIY world, it definitely feels the healthiest it’s been in ages,” Garvey says. “I think there’s a lot of different people using those spaces. They’re feeling more accessible.”

“Warehouses are great. They’re an important part of the ecosystem. But they shouldn’t be the only part that thrives,” says Freda’s Dave Abram. “We need venues to thrive as well. At a club you actually meet people you wouldn’t have otherwise met. A warehouse party is very cliquey. Not all, but it’s one or two degrees of separation.”

Phones away

Boiler Room effect aside, these DIY events aren’t the kind of places where DJ booths are surrounded by a sea of phones. And nor are any of the clubs highlighted in this story, where crowds tend to be older and more music-driven. Still, the possibility of being surveilled has changed the vibe in many spaces – and led to policies to bring back a true sense of abandon.

“We cover all cameras with stickers, and we’ve done it since day one,” Solace co-owner Keogh says. “I think that really helps transform the space into a place where people can let their hair down a little bit. People aren’t filming – you can’t film the dance floor. Because of that, people dance. They actually dance.”

“Final Girl has a really, really young audience, anywhere between 20 to 26,” Anthony, the promoter, says. “People at our parties are aware of ... how having phones out at concerts and clubs can really diminish the sense of community. We see a lot less people being on their phones, and more experiencing the moment.”

“There are more and more events saying no phones,” Luke McD adds. JNETT agrees: “in the last few months I’m seeing a change again. Way, way less phones and a lot more interaction and just dancing on the dance floor.”

The inclusivity is real

Whether parties are DIY jobs or being hosted at clubs, nearly everyone agrees that the industry – from DJs and promoters to bar staff and patrons – has widened. Today’s events are more diverse, and better for it, with dance music better acquainted with its queer roots and far more porosity and exchange between traditionally straight and traditionally gay spaces.

“I once ran a club night with a woman and a non-binary person, and Raag [Bhatia, a programmer at Miscellania] was running another club night with a bunch of women and queer people,” Fennell says. “Both of us were being told, ‘You can’t book more than a couple of women on a line-up. It’s not even possible to book a woman every time, let alone 50 per cent of the time.’ Let alone all women line-ups, and that sort of stuff. Now, the amount of up-and-coming female promoters, the amount of up-and-coming female artists – it’s just exploded.”

“I think there’s been a very healthy change in people understanding boundaries, particularly with regard to how to treat women on a dance floor or how to respect people’s space,” Abram says. “If I went back to when I was growing up, it was a very different time. There were a lot of slimy places.”

“Dance floors, to me, feel more expressive than they did 15, 20 years ago,” Fennell says. I think there’s a lot more ability for people to express themselves without it being as much of a [danger]. The level of violence in clubs and the level of acceptance in the community, and the power dynamic, has shifted.”

“There used to be very queer nights, whereas now there are more events in the middle, as in the event isn’t exclusively a queer event. It’s just, you know, it happens to be run by one queer person, or the people that are playing regularly are queer. And the other way around as well. I think a lot of people who 20, 30 years ago would not have been wanting to go to queer spaces or queer nights are now quite happy to. In fact, they want to be let in. They want to be part of that.”

“The queer party scene in Sydney is iconic. People fly up from Melbourne to come. They’re known for this intergenerational flow, this feeling of older people and younger people and all the tribes coming together,” says Jonny Hawkins, who DJs around Sydney as Aunty Jonny. “[But] I think we’re trying to make sure that queer spaces aren’t overwhelmed so that they can be what they are – and people are safer to express themselves.”

Still, inclusive spaces aren't a given. “Some clubs in Sydney aren’t fully accessible for people who may have special needs or any physical needs,” DJ Galiba says. “And there’s a reputation with some venues [that] they aren’t really safe spaces for everyone.”

What next?

“From a support perspective, I don’t think it’s been better since before lockouts in 2014,” Gorrel says of the Sydney club scene. “There’s momentum building, specifically around the night-time economy, whether you're a club, a small bar, a pub, whatever. There's massive support to get this industry pumping again. “People like [Deputy Lord Mayor of Sydney] Jess Miller, Mick Gibb from the Nighttime Industries Association, they’re forward thinking, they’re progressive.”

“The state government’s trying to put on that whole ‘supporting the night-time economy’ thing, and local government has made more and more night-time precincts,” says Simon Caldwell, who’s been DJing in Sydney since 1993. “If anything, it’s probably really complicated for the cops to work out where to go now. It’s a swing back from a really strong period of over-policing. They probably realised they went too far.”

“Sydney’s quite a supportive scene between a lot of the smaller promoters around town,” Caldwell says. “If you go to the right places, you can still find super open-minded crowds and really open-minded music. Since Covid we’ve become even more dynamic and adaptable and innovative.”

Some aspects of club culture are thriving, but there are worrying signs for the institutions featured in this story, decreased visitation and an ageing clientele among them.

“I don’t think there’s a lot of younger people in them,” Grant says. “I think a lot of those nightclubs are still fuelled by the same people that were going to them 10, 20 years ago.”

But JNETT is optimistic: “Festivals have taken over at this time, but eventually I think clubs will make a comeback.”

“I have a pretty positive feeling about it. The clubs are good, and the warehouse parties are good,” Kato says. “I would say to people if they haven't been out clubbing in ages, if you look around, you'll find something that you can really relate to, you can find spaces with nice crowds. It just takes a bit more digging and research.”

This story is part of Broadsheet’s special At the Club Issue, presented by Up, exploring club culture in 2025.