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Music

Las Vegas Club Owners Have Decided EDM Is Dead

Some Vegas megaclubs have stopped hiring big name DJs.

It looks like another needle has now poked the EDM bubble. Las Vegas club owners are reportedly looking to curb the saturation of EDM DJs in their establishments.

According to Page Six, Vegas's new nightclub Intrigue, which is set to open on April 28, won't be dishing out the dough to bring big name DJs onto their payroll. Intrigue is among the first clubs to flat out refuse to pay DJs the rate some of them have grown accustomed to in Vegas. Sean Christie, the chief operating officer for the Wynn Las Vegas where the Intrigue will be located, told Page Six that the new club will feature a new VIP room, and will place emphasis on conversation over cellphone usage among its patrons. "The DJ," says Christie, "is no longer the most important part of the recipe."

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An unnamed source told Page Six that when most hotels renew their contracts with DJs who have multi-year contracts "offers are expected to go down, some by as much as 50 percent."

Part of the blame, according to the club owners, is on the clientele high-profile DJs attract: "People who just want to see DJs don't dress up, they don't have style, they don't even want to be in a nightclub—they want to see a concert," club manager Jesse Waits told Page Six: "They're not cool. Nightclubs are cool-people clubs. [I'm] creating a club for the cool people."

It's another sign that end of the EDM's domination of the electronic music sphere could be nigh, a topic of debate exacerbated in the wake of EDM conglomerate SFX's collapse earlier this year. According to the Miami Herald, several VIP liquor companies that sponsor the Ultra Music Festival dropped out this year, and more than one of the city's nightclubs have shuttered it's doors. One of the EDM festival's SFX owns, TomorrowWorld, held annually in rural Georgia, won't be coming back this year due to what its organizers are calling "the current environment."

If you think the loss of EDM is a bunch of hot air, watch a video from the infamous 1979 Disco Demolition Night that attempted to kill a genre in a single evening.