Forty- and fifty-somethings are filling the dancefloors — and club culture is ceasing to be a youth culture

The club scene, which has put a cult of youth on a pedestal since its very beginnings, will soon belong to people in their prime. While most promoters fight for a Gen Z presence at their parties, a phenomenon of far greater scale is growing at the other pole.

Muno wrote about it.

The argument is simple and demographic: according to Poland’s statistics office, the average Pole is now 44. Yet the club industry, from clubs to festivals, builds its offer and its messaging as though the room were full of 24-year-olds — who are not there, and certainly not in anything like the numbers of today’s forty- and fifty-somethings, who can simply afford to go out.

European club culture bloomed on a broad scale after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The twenty- and thirty-somethings who were then the dominant group on the floor are now reaching fifty or are already past it. Many of them appeared in clubs less and less over the following decades, as work, family, children and other duties took priority.

Now their children are grown and their professional and financial situations are settled. And today’s fifty-year-olds, in looks and in behaviour, are closer to the thirty-year-olds of the 1990s — which, the piece argues, changes the very idea of who a clubgoer is, something part of the industry seems not to see, or not to want to see.

There is another argument too: generations X and Y were the ones most captivated by club culture as something new and, in its way, exotic against the grey of post-transition Poland. They shaped that culture on the Vistula — the first DJs, journalists, bookers, promoters, club owners and festival organisers came from among them.

And internalised ageism — the question “is it still appropriate for him or her?”, and more self-consciously “is it still appropriate for me?” — is on its way out. There is nothing surprising or wrong about forty- and fifty-somethings dominating the floor: it is the natural order of things.

Researchers see it too. Beate Peter and Lisa Williams, in ‘One Foot in the Rave’, argue that the return of generations X and Y to dancefloors is also a longing for the years of youth, a fragment of which can be recovered; going out becomes a substitute for time travel, especially when the DJ plays something familiar. And Andy Bennett and Paul Hodkinson, in ‘Ageing and Youth Cultures’, show the same happening in rock, punk and goth scenes: the share of people closer to fifty than to twenty keeps growing there.