In Partnership with
June 24, 2025
Each week we're going deeper into some of the key learnings from IMS Ibiza 2025, exploring the data, best practice and stories behind the insight.
We start with the idea that club culture and electronic music should start learning from the 'Global South'. That scenes from Sub-Saharan Africa to South Asia to South America are redefining the future of music and community-building, and that It's time to listen, learn, and shift the spotlight.
First some definitions. The 'Global South' is a frustratingly vague term that the Oxford Dictionary defines as 'the nations of the world which are regarded as having a relatively low level of economic and industrial development, and are typically located to the south of more industrialized nations.' The IMS Business Report 2025 flagged these regions (pretty much the whole world, excluding Europe and North America, or 'the west') as the fastest growing market for electronic music: "Nearly 80% of all streaming subscribers added in 2024 came from the ‘global south’, said MIDIA Research's Mark Mulligan. "This is a realignment for the whole industry"
But what we're interested in is how these 'new' territories have put their own stamp on electronic music and club culture, just as a transatlantic exchange between cities like Chicago and Detroit in the US and Ibiza and Berlin etc. in Europe created a paradigm for the culture in the 80s and 90s - and what we can learn from them.
Representing a region that encompasses 85% of the world's population is impossible, so for this piece we narrowed things down with the help of IMS Ibiza speaker Dare Balogun, Cultural Strategist for Metallic INC, the force behind the annual Homecoming Festival in Lagos Nigeria, and Kunal Merchant, part of the Indo Warehouse collective, a record label and experiential series that 'showcases the beauty of South Asian culture, music, and rhythm within the global language of house and techno'. As Dare said in IMS Ibiza's session on Cultural Exchange - The Role Of African Music In Reimagining Dance Culture “Where Africa is right now… it’s how I imagine dance music was at the start. Something real and exciting and led by emotion and community. Those are the people we should all be learning from.” So what can scenes in the Global South teach - or remind us?
1 Let limitation spur imagination
Limited infrastructure and resources in the Global South can be extremely challenging. Look at the amazing Nyege Nyege festival in Uganda, where the availability of only two CDJs to rent in the whole country for the 2018 edition meant constantly having to move them from one stage to another - and adjusting the DJ set times accordingly. But as Orson Welles said, "The enemy of art is the absence of limitations," and sometimes those limitations are the spur for imagination. What might be novelties in the West - "parties during the day, parties on a Sunday, using non-conventional venues" - says Dare, can be necessities in Nigeria. "People are not afraid to take risks to new formats [when] those formats never existed there to begin with." Perhaps the message here is that not everything has to fit the perfect 'club' template to make a party or scene work. Embrace the limitations and create something new.
2 Tap into that outsider energy
Something the underground scene in - for example, Lagos - offers is space for marginalised communities away from the city's long established mainstream nightlife, rooted in bottle service and conspicuous consumption. The underground is a haven for those excluded, either culturally or economically, and that only adds to the strength of its passion and community. "What these electronic nights are doing," says Dare, "is really democratizing night life and creating something truly accessible." This is not a new thing - as Dare points out, it was outsiders and misfits that populated the first discos in New York and the House clubs in Chicago that created the template for club culture as we know it. Western promoters not pro-actively creating accessibility to these groups are missing out on the outsider energy, community and creativity that has fuelled the culture from the beginning.
3 City wide celebration
In terms of festival culture, Dare points to positioning large events as a celebration for the whole city, without the exclusivity deals or protectionism that many festivals (and even clubs) in the US and Europe insist on. "In Lagos when we do Homecoming we want other people to do shows, especially with so many people flying into the city. We're glad to add them [non-official events] to our calendar." In this way an event like Homecoming - already split across multiple venues rather than concentrated at one site - can catalyse a city wide celebration. "You feel like you're not competing, but collaborating with other events in the city." Kunal has experienced this while touring India. "We played a festival set in Goa, from 5-6am, and afterwards we were invited to play another event, on top of a hill overlooking the ocean, from 8-10. We weren't really sure what to expect - but it was incredible."
4 The event itself as an achievement
"There 's such a hunger and appetite for this music [in places like India]," says Kunal. So people don't take it for granted." Says Dare of throwing parties in Nigeria: "Something's just not going to work. Someone might not show up. There might be a power cut. Someone might get stuck in traffic. Nothing is guaranteed. So for an event to take place, by the time it happens, it's such a celebration of people coming together, what you've achieved and what you've also built." We can't turn the clock back in the West to the early ramshackle days of acid house and DIY sound systems. The novelty and scarcity of events in some countries will naturally lead to more enthusiastic audiences. But maybe what we can do is try to remember that every event is an achievement. Beyond commercial survival, are too many of us hung up on whether a night's 'sold out', our social media metrics, or commercial rivalries, rather than the joy those events actually bring to the people on the dancefloor? Maybe… take a moment.
5 Make everyone a participant
And fuelling that sense of achievement - and community - says Dare, is the idea of participants rather than spectators. "Firstly a lot of parties have these stacked lineups, no real headliner, mainly local talent: the DJs at the party are the people who'd be at the party if they weren't playing. There's less or no distinction between artist and fan, everyone is playing a role." From Bang Face to Tresor.West, promotions built from the ground up, enlisting their communities to be part of the event have demonstrated a resilience (and an insulation from galloping artist fees) that many other overleveraged, 'top-down' events lack. Turn your audience into a community by inviting them into the process: looking at the talents of the people on your dancefloor, creating opportunities for them, might be the place to start.
6 Inspiration might be on your doorstep
Some of the most exciting and innovative events and parties in Europe and the US are built around diaspora audiences, from the trans-South American / African exchange of Enchufada in Lisbon to the South Asian-spotlighting Dialled In London (and Glastonbury) and Indo Warehouse to Homecoming's events from Miami to Amsterdam. Diaspora events might seem at first glance quite 'niche', says Kunal, but counterintuitively, they actually open up the culture to more audiences. "Our Indo Warehouse events in the US tend to be 70% South Asian, but the most exciting thing is that we're finding that 40% of people who come to our shows, this is their first club event. Their first rave! We also see a really wide spread of ages." If reaching new, more diverse audiences is your aim, maybe you don't need to fly to Lagos or Goa to see how it's done.
Written by Duncan JA Dick - IMS contributor.
