Beyond door policies: Cultural production as a form of spatial regulation in Amsterdam nightclubs

Abstract

Understanding regulation is key to identifying and understanding the mechanisms and patterns that (re)produce social inequalities in nightclub production. Roughly speaking, researchers have focused on two forms of regulation: governmental regulation and club-led regulation. First, city councils regulate nightlife through licensing, zoning laws, nightlife districts and urban redevelopment. Second, clubs have their own incentives to regulate spaces of consumption: to ensure safety, to increase middle-class audiences’ spending power and to attract audiences with high subcultural capital. Research in this vein has so far mainly focused on door policies. However, in analysing club-led regulation, a more nuanced, intricate understanding of cultural production is key. Using David Hesmondhalgh’s cultural industries framework, this research argues that existing work on regulation presupposes pre-existing demand, neglecting that nightclubs also actively create demand. First, it highlights that clubs employ other, less visible but nonetheless exclusionary, production practices that are in effect before audiences even reach the door: hiring external organisations, genre-based formatting, locational strategies and guest lists. Second, it decentralises the role of door policies. Understood in relation to other nightclub cultural production practices, door policy research does not account for nightclubs’ assessments of door policies, venues’ financial precarity, social networks and the need to constantly attract new audiences. By doing so, I examine the workings of power in urban cultural economies by understanding cultural production as a form of spatial regulation. The research is based on 29 interviews with 36 Amsterdam-based nightlife promoters and 111 hours of short-term ethnographies in clubs and at industry events.

Introduction

When it comes to researching social inequalities in audience participation in urban nightlife, roughly speaking, two approaches have been dominant. The first is the ‘experiential approach’ (Chatterton and Hollands, 2003): this strand of research emerged in the mid-1990s and mainly followed a consumer/clubber perspective (McRobbie, 1994; Thornton, 1996). Inspired by cultural studies’ focus on youth identities, style and (sub)cultural meaning, it assessed the social, cultural and political relevance of clubbing vis-à-vis hegemonic society (Malbon, 1999; Thornton, 1996). More recently, this has extended to an analysis of those nocturnal spaces where queerness occupies the centre rather than the margins (Buckland, 2002; Garcia, 2015; moore, 2018). The second is the urbanist approach. Here, the analytical focus is typically policy, urban regeneration and protest to explore how the city at night is shaped by political debates over the quality of life and the struggle over urban rights (Eldridge and Roberts, 2008; Füller et al., 2018; Hae, 2011a, 2011b; Liempt and Aalst, 2015; Luckman, 2000; Marsh, 2006; Talbot and Böse, 2007). To explain social inequalities in nightlife, these two approaches focus on regulation: the practices seeking to structure nightlife, often directed at ensuring safety, reducing noise and disorder and minimising health risks (Luckman, 2000).

Regulation comes in two forms. The first is government-led regulation. There is a substantial body of research that focuses on how (local) governmental bodies regulate nightlife through licensing, zoning laws, urban regeneration, and nightlife districts (Chatterton and Hollands, 2003; Eder and Öz, 2015; Füller et al., 2018; Hae, 2011a, 2011b; Marsh, 2006; Talbot, 2004). As these processes sanitise urban space, too often working-class, racialised and/or queer clubbers find their nocturnal hangouts of choice are disproportionally affected (Buckland, 2002; Chatterton and Hollands, 2003; Hae, 2011a, 2011b).

The second form is club-led regulation. Regulation is not limited to governmental bodies’ practices and strategies: organisers self-regulate night-time leisure spaces too (Luckman, 2000). The most prominently discussed example is door policies, which clubs use to increase the chance of a ‘trouble-free’ dancefloor. Researchers have pointed out that such policies are profit-oriented as safety increases middle-class spending power while regulating the club space by excluding audiences based on (a combination of) class, race/ethnicity and/or gender (Buford May and Chaplin, 2008; Chatterton and Hollands, 2003; Grazian, 2009; Hobbs et al., 2000, 2007). Since clubs perceive ‘the right crowd’ as crucial to a party’s success, more subtle, subcultural traits can also be reason to reject entry (Thornton, 1996). However, door policies can also function to increase a feeling of community and ‘special fantasy’ inside, especially for queer-oriented clubs (Garcia, 2011; moore, 2018).

This article contributes to the literature on club-led regulation by arguing door policies are not the central, but one among many, cultural production practices that shape inequalities in audience participation. Rather than taking clubbers (experiential approach) or cities/nightlife districts (urbanist approach) as units of analysis, I focus on nightclubs as cultural businesses. Since door policies are contested, nightclubs employ a range of cultural production practices that steer crowd composition in ways that regulate audiences before they reach the door (Böse, 2005). Based on interviews with 36 Amsterdam-based nightclub promoters and short-term ethnographies in nightclubs in the same city, all carried out in 2018 and 2019, I argue that experiential and urbanist approaches to nightclubs would benefit from more sustained theoretical engagement with cultural production.

To do so, I adopt the cultural industries framework to understand how clubs, like other cultural businesses, are primarily concerned with the production of social and cultural meaning (cultural production), but since they operate in an unpredictable market, they need to do so in ways that minimise financial risk (Hesmondhalgh, 2013). This informs cultural production practices that (re)produce social inequalities (Saha, 2018). After giving an overview of the literature on government-led regulation and club-led regulation, I apply the cultural industries framework to nightclub production. First, I will explain four nightclub cultural production practices (external co-production, genres, locational choice, guest lists) that regulate audiences. Second, I will argue why they give reason to decentralise door policies in research on social inequalities in nightlife.

How regulation leads to social inequalities in nightlife

For city councils in the global North, nightlife is associated with cosmopolitan, bohemian city life, seen as a contributor to cities’ attractiveness and even as a source of economic growth (Füller et al., 2018; Hae, 2011a). But it is also seen as a source of crime and trouble, as clubs are perceived as hubs for selling, buying and using of drugs and are held responsible for noise and disorder (Talbot and Böse, 2007). To understand these seemingly competing discourses, it is worthwhile outlining how city councils regulate nightlife by discouraging or repressing certain music genres while enabling and promoting others (Wicks, 2019) and the regulatory practices of clubs themselves (Luckman, 2000).

First, governmental bodies regulate nightlife by repressing and discouraging certain music genres based on assumptions about the social groups that consume them. Most notably, there is an extensive literature on how (mainly) Black and working-class music genres have been policed in the United Kingdom and the United States (Böse, 2005; Gilroy, 1987, for an overview, see Fatsis, 2019). Policy documents include coded language to target Black genres, such as ‘live music with horns and percussion’ (New York City’s cabaret laws) (Hae, 2011b) and ‘DJs or MCs performing to a recorded backing track’ (London, Metropolitan Police’s 696 form) (Fatsis, 2019). These measures can have a self-disciplinary function: a reggae venue in London started to ‘upscale’ to rave events to attract less attention from the police (Talbot, 2004) and Istanbul clubs stopped playing arabesque music because of associations with ‘poor taste’ (Eder and Öz, 2015). Second, governmental bodies enable and legitimise certain other music genres, through associations with cultural prestige, aligning with white middle-class tastes. In cities like Berlin and Amsterdam, electronic dance music is actively promoted by the municipality as local music scenes are perceived as a vehicle for economic growth, especially when they attract tourists (Dorst, 2015; Füller et al., 2018; London Assembly, 2018).

Not all regulation is government-led; nightclubs have their own incentives to regulate dancefloors as well (Luckman, 2000). The temporal and spatial character is slightly different: government-led regulation targets venues, while club-led regulation takes place on a nightly basis, focusing on specific club nights as well. Door policies are the most visible form of club-led regulation and have been researched in greatest detail when it comes to audience exclusion in nightlife (Buford May and Chaplin, 2008; Garcia, 2011; Grazian, 2009; Hobbs et al., 2000, 2007; Liempt and Aalst, 2015; Malbon, 1999; Measham and Hadfield, 2009; Rigakos, 2008; Thornton, 1996). In some cases, clubs’ incentives align with or internalise government-led regulation (a ‘trouble free dancefloor’), but their motivations to attract ‘appropriate’ audiences do not necessarily align: this includes increasing spending power, seeking the subcultural prestige of electronic dance music audiences, rejecting tourists and decreasing heteronormative clubbing behaviour (especially in queer venues).

Measham and Hadfield (2009) illustrate this by distinguishing between two types of elites: consumer elites and cultural elites. The former is a well-earning group with spending power that dresses smart and likes bottle service, preferring a more stylised interior over a club that is nothing more than a ‘dark cube’. The latter prefers an underground aesthetic and dresses cool, values music taste and identifies as ‘genuine’ clubber – they possess subcultural capital (Thornton, 1996). These two somewhat stereotypical ideal types show that exclusionary door policies work in contradictory ways: a club that caters to (sub)cultural elites could turn away smartly dressed visitors whose intentions are assumed to be ingenuine, while a consumer elite club would do the same to people who are deemed to be too casually dressed, not fitting into the glamourous appeal (Measham and Hadfield, 2009). Therefore, both explicit and implicit dress codes send out a ‘code’ that visitors need to ‘crack’ to understand where they are not welcome, which may contain strong classist, racist or sexist elements, as clothing and identity are entangled (Buford May and Chaplin, 2008). Furthermore, some clubs implement door policies to ensure safer spaces for queer communities and women – even though the assessment of a ‘queer friendly heterosexual’ might also rely on racist, classist or ageist stereotypes (Garcia, 2011; Nicholls, 2017).

Accounts of club-led regulation often describe door policies as a last measure in the selection process, when self-selection does not suffice to produce the best crowd for the party (Liempt and Aalst, 2015; Malbon, 1999; Thornton, 1996). Thornton (1996) writes,

If access to information about the club and taste in music fail to segregate the crowd, the bouncers will ensure the semi-private nature of these public spaces by refusing admission to ‘those who don’t belong’. (pp. 22–24)

In this quote, audience formations are made sense of as the result of pre-existing supply and pre-existing demand (Hesmondhalgh, 2006), strongly mediated by door policy. Thornton, and others too (Chatterton and Hollands, 2003; Hobbs et al., 2000), tend to conceptualise nightclubs as monolithic units with uniform identities. However, analysing nightclubs as cultural businesses illuminates the complexity of their cultural production practices. For example, in Amsterdam in the late 2010s, most clubs collaborated with external organisations and catered to multiple taste communities. Cultural production research can more systematically grasp what Böse (2005) is right to point out: that nightclubs already regulate audiences before they even reach the door – for example through locational choices (Garcia, 2011), social media and flyers (Measham and Hadfield, 2009) and ticket prices (Garcia, 2011).

To understand nightclubs’ production practices in more detail, I adopt the cultural industries framework that departs from the premise that cultural production (the production of social and cultural meaning) does not follow one logic but is complex, ambivalent and contested (Hesmondhalgh, 2013). In the nightclub sector, the collective musical experiences of club nights (its cultural product) communicate this social and cultural meaning. The framework conceptualises the cultural industries as ‘risky business’: audience tastes are hard to predict and there is a tension between creativity and commerce, so cultural businesses cannot always bet on pre-existing demand but employ various strategies to actively create demand and mitigate risk (Hesmondhalgh, 2006, 2013). Strategies include creating specialist subdivisions; having hits compensate misses; formatting and packaging through stars, genres and serials; and offsetting artists’ autonomy with a tight grip on marketing and distribution (Hesmondhalgh, 2013). This adds to the cultural industries’ complexity: concentration of ownership goes hand in hand with deconcentration of control (Hesmondhalgh, 2013).

These features can be mapped unto the nightclub sector: Amsterdam-based nightclubs create subdivisions on a small scale as they do not keep programming in-house but hire external organisations with close ties to audiences to ensure a full house (deconcentration of control). There is a tension between creativity and commerce: nightclubs control marketing (tight grip) but grant autonomy to DJs, often allowing them to play what they want. Thursdays are often less busy nights, so giving starting organisers a chance on that night needs to be compensated with packed Fridays and Saturdays (hits compensate misses). In electronic dance music, the name of the DJ (stars) is central in marketing, but pop, R&B and dancehall parties format and package club nights through themes and subgenres (genres, serials). Such rationalising techniques often understand audiences in reductive ways, which adds to the formation and reinforcement of racialised, and other, inequalities (Saha, 2018).

Clubs create temporary experiences in physical spaces, so, their materiality implies a different relation between production, consumption and place (Concha, 2017) than in the recorded music industries, for example. Rationalisation techniques such as formatting and packaging depart from a rather abstract notion of the public (Hesmondhalgh, 2013). However, nightclub promoters see audiences as central to the social and cultural meaning of their product. They have close ties with their audiences: they often – literally – know their core audience, since many club nights start out as extended friend groups. The informal social networks of external promoters are crucial to the ways in which clubs create subdivisions to steer demand and mitigate risk. Since these production practices are oriented towards attracting ‘appropriate’ audiences, they also regulate nightlife venues. More generally then, a focus on cultural production as a form of spatial regulation adds a systematic conception of cultural production to nightlife research, and of regulation to the cultural industries framework.

Methods

I make these contributions by focusing on nightclubs in pre-pandemic Amsterdam. Most research on club-led regulation has focused on the United Kingdom and the United States (Buford May, 2014; Chatterton and Hollands, 2003) or on the notorious, subculture-driven door policies of Berlin (Garcia, 2011; moore, 2018). While historically Amsterdam’s regulatory measures are looser than in the United Kingdom, spatial constraints and high rents often prompt clubs to choose economic over (sub)cultural capital (Dorst, 2015). Since reproduction costs for club nights are high, profit margins are tight, so there is a strong financial incentive for a full house on weekend nights. This shapes the approach to cultural production and door policies.

I define a club as a venue with a dancefloor and a DJ that programmes weekly club nights, mostly after midnight. Using council data on licensing and event listings, I identified 58 nightclubs. I focus on the two largest subgroups: niche-orientated electronic dance music clubs (house, techno, electro) (17 venues) and eclectic clubs (cluster of styles participants identified as including R&B, dancehall, hip-hop, Latin and pop) (31 venues). ¹ I focus on those key workers in the cultural production process who have to find a compromise between the interests of owners, artists and clubbers: promoters (Hesmondhalgh, 2013; Kartosen, 2016). Over the course of two periods in 2019 (June–August and October–November), I interviewed 36 promoters. Twenty-six promoters were interviewed individually, and 10 organisations preferred to be interviewed as duos.

Among this group, I distinguish between club personnel (club promoters) and external organisations or freelancers (external promoters). I interviewed 19 club promoters and 17 external promoters, representing 16 venues (6 niche-edm, 10 eclectic) and 13 external organisations (8 niche-edm, 5 eclectic). ² The average age was 32 (with 80% in their 20s or 30s), 11 respondents identified as women and only 7 did not identify as white, but as Black (5), Latino (1) and North African (1). From this sample, only three club promoters identified as women and one club promoter identified as Black. Six external promoters identified as part of various LGBTQ+ communities.

This means that, in most clubs, a white, male club promoter adds temporary diversity to the monthly programme by booking external promoters that fall outside of the ‘somatic norm’ (Puwar, 2004). This hierarchy is an example of how labour inequalities in the nightclub sector pan out. I used open-ended, semi-structured, qualitative interviews, because they are specifically strong in getting to the imagined realities and cultural ideals of respondents, including a more thorough account of the ambivalence and inconsistency in the stories through which promoters understand their production practices (Crang and Cook, 2007).

I corroborated the interviews with 28 focused and temporally-bounded visits to 25 different clubs (90 hours) for club nights organised by the interviewed promoters (although this was not always possible due to time constraints) and various industry events and public panels (21 hours). Nightclubs were located around Amsterdam’s two main nightlife districts (Rembrandtplein and Leidseplein) as well as on various locations outside of the historic city centre. These visits gave me (a white man, at the time in his late 20s) a better sense of the experience of standing in line and entering, as well as a comparison of the demographic composition of the queue versus inside the venue. The length of the line, its flow and degree of anticipation and anxiety among fellow clubbers were especially telling of how door policies function. I went clubbing both solo and with varying small groups of friends. On none of these club visits was I rejected from entry.

Club-led regulation: exclusionary mechanisms before clubbers reach the door

This section provides an initial, not exhaustive, theoretisation of how nightclub production functions as a form of spatial regulation that (re)produces social inequalities in the city at night. I distinguish four production practices that function as regulatory tools and exclude audiences before they reach the door: external co-production, genres, locational strategies and guest lists.

External co-production

In making sense of night club production in Amsterdam in the 2010s, I identified two styles of programming: in-house production and external co-production. In-house production refers to clubs that employ a club promoter (or: programmer) and book all DJs themselves. In-house production is considered more culturally prestigious because it allows venues to build a unique, recognisable identity. However, at the time of my fieldwork, only two clubs in Amsterdam kept all bookings in-house. Most clubs resort to external co-production because they see it as a financial necessity. Like record labels setting up independent or specialised imprints, nightclub promoters also create subdivisions (Hesmondhalgh, 2013) by booking external organisations, who then book DJs and do marketing. This construction helps clubs navigate the unpredictable market: external promoters have close ties with audiences and their following can guarantee attendance – like specialised imprints have a better sense of the latest trends in a specific genre. It is also a strategy to outsource the financial risk of low attendance: deals typically entail external parties taking home ticket revenue, while clubs make earnings from bar revenue. In many cases, external promoters also have to pay for venue hire. So, deconcentration of control over creativity does not imply deconcentration of capital.

Since frequent rejection and long queues lead to more annoyed visitors, club promoters are aware that carefully selecting external promoters enables them to rely less on door policies:

Promoter:

And no house [music], yes that already prevents a lot of shit.

Interviewer:

So for example house, it’s a conscious decision not to program it?

Promoter:

Very conscious. We’ve got, sometimes we have a dance-related party, but never towards the techno-side, never the vulgar side, it’s always below the radar, very much oriented towards a specific target audience, ehm one the organisation [external promoter, TK] already attracts themselves.

(Club promoter, white, male, 40s)

The quote makes clear that while external co-production can be used to attract new audiences, it also excludes certain groups of clubbers. The word vulgar (Dutch: ‘ordinair’) has a strong class connotation, as working-class nightlife is traditionally associated with moral decline (Chatterton and Hollands, 2003). This same club promoter took pride in not having a door policy that selects in any way: when I attended one of their club nights, they had a bouncer (as per city council rules), but entry was free and walking in and out was no problem. While the door policy appears lenient, the promoter explained that this is only possible because of conscious decisions at earlier stages of the production process. Through selection of external organisations, spatial regulation is embedded in cultural production. Like licensing practices, these decisions can be based on, for example, a specific racialised or classed understanding of genre (Wicks, 2019), but where government-led regulation is oriented towards venues, external co-production regulates on a nightly basis (per club night).

Genre-based formatting

Genre is a way of formatting club nights. Music genres articulate relationships with specific audience demographics (Hesmondhalgh, 2005) and these associations ‘stick’ to racialised, gendered and classed social groups (Alacovska and O’Brien, 2021; Stirling, 2016). Clubs use genres to attract certain audiences while dissociating themselves from other audiences. Dissociation refers to obscuring the links between a commodity and another entity or making sure desired negative associations prevail (Ibert et al., 2019). A case in point is a club promoter working for a venue that seeks to speak to an older, working-age, middle-class audience (late twenties, thirties). This group is expected to spend more money on drinks, so this preference is partly born out of a commercial incentive. Door policy is part of the strategy: on Friday and Saturday, door policies are stricter than on Thursday’s student night. However, a door policy is not enough: specific uses of genre play a role in ensuring that older clubbers come back, but also that younger clubbers will not be tempted to try and enter on weekend nights. This club instructs their DJs in advance through a briefing, explaining what kind of music should (not) be played at what time:

When you’re eh a bit older to say it like that and then can’t really appreciate that Dutch hip-hop or you don’t know it, it’s hard to then, to mingle in, so we have the policy, we don’t forbid it, so you can play one that everyone knows, a Bizzey, or a Poke like I just said, but we don’t eh want the Lil’ Kleine and eh Jonna Fraser ³ and that kind of stuff, because, that is possible though on Thursday. (Club promoter, male, white, late 30s)

The briefing is a formatting technique that centralises an older, middle-class relationship with the hip-hop genre by omitting contemporary local tracks. Online event pages for Thursday and the weekend use the same genre labels, but the briefing extends formatting to the night itself. The promoter later contrasts contemporary Dutch hip-hop with 1990s/2000s American R&B and hip-hop. He posits the former style has a following among the youth and creates a shared experience based on what is novel, while the latter style creates a collective feeling based on nostalgia. Where Dutch hip-hop alienates the older audience, nostalgic hits dissociate the younger audience. Priming a mainstream 1990s/2000s articulation of R&B and hip-hop becomes a way of upscaling the venue to attract mostly white, older, middle-class audiences, like choosing rave over reggae (Talbot, 2004), making apparent the specific production practices through which genre-based formatting regulates nightclub spaces.

Locational strategies

Spaces add symbolic value to cultural commodities because they function as quality stamps (Concha, 2017). In that sense, a well-chosen party location is – like external co-production and genre-based formatting – a production technique that adds to the social and cultural profile of a club night, while also trying to manage unpredictable audience tastes. Take this example of a promoter of a Latin party. ⁴ In reflecting on how this genre finds an audience in the Netherlands, he explains his venue choice in Amsterdam and the rest of the Netherlands:

What’s very important, are the locations. We are very conscious to be in music venues, places where eh, we play [name of a popular Dutch three-day alternative music festival] consciously, those are places where Latin is not – first, we don’t want to be on the same program with other Latin parties, but second, our audience is very important, so we’re not going [to organise] at the dodgy places, we very consciously do not have a VIP-area, we don’t do tables, we don’t sell bottles, all very important things to keep the dodgy crowd out. (External promoter, male, Latino, late 30s)

There are several elements to unpack in this quote. First, there is reference to music venues creating symbolic value: many Dutch cities have a larger music venue (1000+ capacity) subsidised by the local council. For this promoter, organising a party at these venues or at an alternative music festival is a strategy of cultural legitimation as it sets his party apart from others in the same genre. The remark about VIP areas and bottle service should also be understood in Amsterdam’s regulatory context: the local council associates VIP tables with organised crime, which is why there are strict rules around them (e.g. it is not allowed to pay for tables in cash) (Rengers and Thie, 2017). VIP tables are not so commonplace in Amsterdam: only a handful of venues have them. In this quote, what echoes is the moral discourse of government-led regulation that the promoter adopts or internalises in his production practices (Kneale, 1999). The promoter uses the word ‘dodgy’ (in Dutch ‘fout’) to describe venues that are not fully law-abiding and whose crowds are characterised by a lack of taste. Like ‘vulgar’, ‘dodgy’ has a class connotation. As the club night has no door policy, this ‘dodgy crowd’ sometimes enters the parties, but only to find, in the words of the promoter, that it is ‘not their party’. This adds a spatial layer to the cultural industries framework that applies to the live music industries more widely: locational choice – in this case subsidised music venues – rationalises and regulates unpredictable audiences.

Guest lists

Audiences are key to the social and cultural meanings that club nights produce, so promoters are concerned not only with creating demand but also creating the ‘appropriate’ kind of demand through exclusivity strategies such as the guest list (Hracs et al., 2013; moore, 2018). For example, club nights might appoint ‘ambassadors’, a term commonly used by nightclubs for tastemakers who help bring attention to a party. Clubs use ambassadors to create a ‘buzz’, hoping that if these tastemakers attend, other people will follow suit. For example, multiple promoters use private Facebook groups of dedicated clubbers to offer them guest list spots, because they are known to set the ‘right’ vibe for club nights. When influential members of that group like your party, promoters see it as a stamp of approval. This shows the extent to which clubs are dependent on audiences and are not closed-off institutions where the bouncer or door host, in one demarcated moment, decide who looks right and who does not. The efforts promoters make – finding ambassadors, mobilising Facebook groups – show a different dynamic of power, where clubs need the prestige of tastemaker audiences already out there to create demand. Creating demand then regulates space by actively attracting tastemakers in advance with the expectation that other clubbers with similar taste, style and behaviour will follow suit.

In Amsterdam’s clubbing economy guest lists are not limited to those ‘in the know’ (Thornton, 1996). Given the pressure of rents and tight margins of most nightclubs as well as the unpredictability of trends and audience tastes, many promoters produce long guestlists to ensure full dancefloors. For clubs, handing out free tickets has relatively little financial consequence: they mainly rely on venue hire and bar revenue for income. But for external promoters, extensive guest lists can be a competitive necessity: there is an oversupply of promoters with similar audiences in want of a weekend slot and too many poorly attended nights may result in losing this slot. This leads to long guest lists, as described in the following vignette at an R&B party:

When I arrive at 12.30am, there seems quite a big queue. They’ve made two lines, one for guest list and one for regular entry. I’m a bit confused which one is which, because the queue for the guest list is so much longer. In fact, there is no one in line for the regular queue. When I walk past I’m joined by a couple of women who’ve decided that this is indeed faster, and that’s true. There is a small black cord, behind which the door host (a young woman with blue hair, dressed in black leather) stands, joined by a bouncer. After letting in the first group of the guest list queue, the door host turns to me and asks if she can help me with anything. This comes across as a bit odd, because it’s a line you would expect at a clothing or bookstore, not in front of a club. But I answer that I would like to enter and she asks if I’m alone (I am) and then hands me a ticket. (Field notes, 18 July 2019)

This anecdote provides a corrective to popular accounts that associate the guest list with cultural prestige: promoters bank on an ‘imagined’ exclusivity (Hracs et al., 2013). At a techno party I attended, the same thing happened: a starting promoter had sold out the venue, but as too many guest listers turned up – presumably on the list to mitigate the risk of poor attendance – there was uncertainty whether people who had bought pre-sale tickets, including myself, could actually enter. Multiple promoters described this as Amsterdam’s ‘guest list culture’ where people only attend parties for which they are on the list and point out that some nights have more than half the audience on the list. For example, a promoter referred to 300 people on the list for a 1300 capacity venue as ‘a small amount’.

Guest lists also reinforce social inequalities in the longer term. Since external promoters’ income relies heavily on ticket sales, it becomes harder to reach a point of financial stability when your business relies on handing out free tickets. As mentioned in the section ‘Methods’, external promoters more often fall outside of the ‘somatic norm’ (Puwar, 2004), which suggests that the continued economic hierarchy between clubs and external promoters means that temporal interventions in the white, masculine, middle-class logic of night club production become increasingly difficult. Attracting ‘diverse’ organisations signifies a deconcentration of creative control that can lead to temporarily including historically-excluded audiences on the dancefloor, relying on external promoters’ social networks (as they know enough people to put on the guest list). However, this temporality tightens nightclubs’ grip on economic capital and firmly establishes economic hierarchies between clubs and external organisations.

Taken together, these four nightclub cultural production practices show how the rationalising logic of capital – setting up subdivisions, packaging and formatting, creating demand – further (re)produces mechanisms of exclusion (Saha, 2018). As these four practices (temporarily) restrict access for certain audiences or constructs them as ‘out of place’, they serve as a form of spatial regulation. This has implications for the centrality of door policies in urbanist and experiential accounts of club-led regulation.

Decentralising door policies as exclusionary mechanisms in nightclub production

Getting rejected at a nightclub’s gates is how exclusion becomes lived experience (Buford May and Chaplin, 2008), but in the previous section I have shown how cultural production practices, invisible to the public eye, exclude audiences in advance, before they reach the door. This section reinstates the relevance of these findings by explaining why this implies that door policies paint a relatively limited picture of social inequalities in nightlife. I give five reasons: door policies only capture a limited set of inequalities; promoters give preference to other production practices; strict door policies are financially unattainable; door policies neglect the importance of social networks; and clubs exclude existing audiences by attracting new ones.

First, door policy analysis has primarily focused on cultural elites, subcultural sensibilities and dress codes (Measham and Hadfield, 2009; Thornton, 1996) to get at race and class exclusion (Buford May and Chaplin, 2008). This quote illustrates that in Amsterdam clubs that assess subcultural aspects such as style and taste, like Berghain and many other clubs in Berlin (moore, 2018), are outliers rather than exemplary cases:

We reject people who are openly drunk and big groups, you know, stag parties, but actually we don’t have a door policy. We won’t say: do you know what DJ is playing and if you don’t know, you won’t be coming in. (Club promoter, white, male, 30s)

Among my respondents, this response was exemplary. To give an idea: only 5 out of 28 club nights I visited were clearly assessing style and/or musical knowledge at the door. Typically, these parties would not just have a bouncer but also a door host (in financial terms: an extra employee), resulting in longer queues (so, especially larger venues opt out of a door host). This does not mean clubs without door hosts do not attempt to dissociate certain audiences, but rather that they do so through cultural production practices.

Second, as the previous quote also illustrates, promoters are sceptical of door policies’ effectiveness and see them as at odds with ideals of inclusivity. Even though most see door policies as necessary to ensure basic safety for visitors, they are ambivalent or downright dismissive when it comes to dress codes. However, by and large, they do not express the same level of reflexivity when it comes to choosing external collaborators, picking locations, formatting techniques like genres and using guest lists.

Third, most clubs cannot financially afford strict door policies. Turning many people away means a severe loss of income. Conceptualising clubs as risky cultural businesses explains why they often work with external organisations that guarantee audiences through pre-sale and guest lists. It also sheds light on the temporal and contingent aspects of door policies: why getting in early or on a quiet night is different than late on a popular night. Like a promoter for a city centre club, that is not very fond of large groups of male tourists, explains: ‘But yes, we get the nice tourists, and of course it’s a good addition, if an organisation fails to get a full house you can always let those 50 to 100 tourists in’ (Club promoter, white, male, 30s).

Fourth, door policy research neglects the importance of informal social networks by assuming a distant relationship between clubs and audiences. Not only is nightlife consumption heavily shaped by friend groups (Buford May, 2014), so is nightlife production. Take for example this external promoter who usually has a chat with the door staff beforehand to explain that their audience might wear sweatpants or certain bags, but that this should not be a reason for rejection:

Usually, it goes well, but not always, so then a friend apps me saying yes, I’m not allowed in with my bag and then I’m like, uhm why not? So then I have to go to the door to ask why not. (External promoter, white, female, 20s)

Here, we see how social networks mitigate the effects of door policies, illuminating that external promoters need to manage allegiances with nightclubs on the one hand and their audiences on the other hand. How door policies are executed is mediated by the external promoter that hosts the night.

Fifth, attracting new audiences can also aim to exclude existing ones. Door policies often aim to include women or, at queer venues, sexual minorities (Buford May, 2014; Garcia, 2011), but cultural production sheds light on how club-led regulation leads to inequalities in queer and female audience participation. As a promoter explains,

They [name of club] asked all kinds of organisations [external promoters] because they were, back in the days [a gay club] and then they became [new name] but they didn’t really want to be a, they were really a gay club, but they didn’t want that anymore, so in no time no gays were attending at all, it was taken over by straights. (External promoter, white, female, 40s)

This club tries to attract straight audiences not by rejecting queer clubbers at the door, as they are probably aware that would rightfully cause public outrage, but by inviting external organisers and, by extension, changing the guest list in a way that goes unnoticed by the public eye.

Taken together, a focus on clubs as cultural businesses enables a more elaborate account of the exclusionary mechanisms that lead to social inequalities in nightlife. This means there is a need to decentralise the most visible instances of club-led regulation and exclusion (rejection at the door) and include cultural production practices (external co-production, genre-based formatting, locational choice, guest lists) that precede door policies and are typically invisible to the general public. In this paper, I adapted the cultural industries framework to capture that when nightclubs attempt to create demand in an unpredictable market, they regulate spaces of consumption, (re)producing social inequalities in the city at night.

Conclusion

I analysed nightclubs to understand how cultural production practices function as tools of spatial regulation. To do so, I have situated the role of door policies, the main way in which club-led regulation has been analysed, in relation to a wider array of strategies that clubs use and that affect their audiences before they reach the door. The main contribution is that research on nightlife inequalities would benefit from a more thorough understanding of cultural production. To do this, I adopted the cultural industries framework that considers how cultural businesses operate in unpredictable markets: they not only cater to pre-existing demand but also need to actively create demand (Hesmondhalgh, 2006). The strategies through which they mitigate risk and create demand are rationalising techniques that (re)produce social inequalities (Saha, 2018). The four production strategies used by Amsterdam-based nightclubs discussed in this article (external co-production, genre-based formatting, locational choice, guest lists) imply a closer relationship between production and consumption than, for example, the recorded music industries. Because nightclubs are concerned with attracting the ‘right’ audience, cultural production practices also regulate nightlife spaces and thereby reinforce social inequalities in audience participation. While racist and classist profiling at the door remains a direct form of racism and is a powerful example how exclusion becomes lived experience (Buford May and Chaplin, 2008), I argue door policies are only the tip of the iceberg in an analysis of nightlife, exclusion and social inequalities.

There is a myriad of cultural production practices that lead to social inequalities in audience participation. I provided an initial theoretisation of four production practices that function as regulatory tools. First, since many clubs create subdivisions as they rely on external organisations to fill dancefloors, and these external organisations have close ties to audiences, clubs regulate audiences by selecting external promoters. Second, clubs format events through specific understandings and interpretations of genre to attract certain audiences while dissociating others. Third, through locational choice promoters use a venue’s cultural status to distinguish their party from other parties in the same genre. Fourth, promoters use guest lists to attract tastemaker audiences in advance, in the hope that other clubbers will follow their style and behaviour to create the right type of dancefloor. As said, while these practices are in line with the cultural industries framework, they also expand it, by demonstrating how the commodification process of nightclubs is oriented towards producing temporary collective musical experiences in physical spaces. Expanding on this project could capture further how the economic organisation of the cultural industries not only leads to social inequalities in labour and production cultures and to reductive social thinking in the texts these industries produce (Hesmondhalgh, 2013; Saha, 2018), but also how the economic organisation of spaces of consumption regulates their public, (re)producing inequalities in audience participation.

I nuance the central role of door policies in producing social inequalities in nightlife for five reasons. First, door policies centred on style, subcultural capital and dress code are the exception rather than the rule. Clubs have various incentives to not implement these. Second, promoters question door policies’ effectiveness and are ambivalent about their politics. They show much less ambivalence about other production practices that also exclude audiences. Third, many clubs cannot afford strict door policies financially: on the night itself they often find themselves more lenient as excluding large groups means loss of money. Fourth, door policy research assumes a distance between promoters and clubbers, but in the economic reality of Amsterdam’s night-time economy, the two groups are often part of the same social networks. Social networks mitigate the workings of door policies. Fifth, clubs actively create demand and attract new audiences as a non-door policy strategy to exclude existing audiences. This captures how nightclubs may also exclude the (female or queer) audiences they seek to include through their door policies. Hopefully, this article can inspire more case studies of how cultural production (re)produces specific social inequalities (and intersections between these inequalities) in nightlife and audience participation more generally.