02The scenes that built it

The short version: Electronic dance music has no single birthplace. It came out of a handful of local scenes, most of them started by people the mainstream music business ignored: sound system crews in Kingston, Black and Latino, largely gay, dancers in New York, Black and Latino LGBTQ dancers in Chicago, young Black musicians in Detroit, then British ravers, Berlin clubs in empty buildings, Goa travelers and Rotterdam hardcore kids. Each scene solved the same production problem in its own way - how to make recorded music feel like an event - and each left habits that are still on the rider today: the custom sound system, the long night with no bar, the warehouse, the field, the dress code, the festival that became a company.

What we mean by electronic dance music

This guide uses "electronic dance music" as the umbrella for all of it: disco's descendants, house, techno, jungle, trance, dubstep, amapiano and the rest. "EDM" means something narrower. The academic Hillegonda Rietveld writes that electronic dance music has been an umbrella term since the 1980s, but that close to 2010 the American music industry promoted rave-related festivals as "e.d.m." to shed the baggage of earlier moral panics, which produced a pop-oriented subgenre "now known as 'edm'"¹⁶. DJ Mag's digital editor makes the same point from the scene side: EDM is "not an umbrella term" but a label for the commercialization of dance music from 2010¹⁷. So when this guide says "EDM", it means that US industry era and its big-room festival sound, and nothing else. No genre in this section is ranked above another, and "underground" is used to describe how a scene operated, not to judge it.

Jamaica: the sound system as instrument

The template for everything that follows was set in working-class Kingston, in neighborhoods that had no dancehalls or concert spaces¹⁸. Sources disagree on the start date: one account puts sound systems in the 1940s, with Tom the Great Sebastian, founded by the Chinese-Jamaican businessman Tom Wong, as the first commercially successful one, while Rolling Stone UK says the late 1940s¹¹¹⁸. By the mid-1950s sound systems were more popular than live bands at parties¹¹.

The production details are worth knowing because they recur for seventy years. Early systems were loaded onto trucks with a generator, turntables and large speakers; a selector chose the records and a DJ rapped, or "toasted", over them; and in the late 1950s Hedley Jones built wardrobe-sized cabinets known as the "House of Joy"¹¹. The attraction was the exclusive: a one-off dubplate cut for a single system¹¹. Rival crews sent spies to each other's dances, and at a late-1957 clash at Forrester's Hall, Prince Buster broke Duke Reid's stylus¹⁹. Reid, a former police sergeant who ran the Trojan system, was crowned "King of Sounds and Blues" three years running in the mid-1950s; Coxsone Dodd brought American R&B records back from a 1953 US trip for his Downbeat system and later founded Studio One. In September 1961 a man was arrested for stealing one of Downbeat's dubplates¹⁹. Exclusive content as a security problem is not a new idea.

King Tubby (Osbourne Ruddock) founded Hometown Hi-Fi in 1958, and it was the first sound system to bring reverb to the general public²⁰. In 1971 he set up a used MCI desk in the front room at 18 Dromilly Avenue and made dub by stripping out vocals, adding delay and reverb, and sweeping the desk's high-pass filter²⁰ - which is, in our reading, the ancestor of every filter sweep on a DJ mixer. Police destroyed his sound system in 1975; the source does not support the often-repeated claim of a formal ban²⁰. One more correction from the same author: despite common claims, Tubby was not a staff dub-cutter at Duke Reid's Treasure Isle studio, where he maintained equipment²⁰.

The culture traveled with Caribbean migration. In New York, Downbeat the Ruler in the Bronx was among the first US sound systems, and DJ Kool Herc brought sound system habits to hip-hop¹¹. In London, Claudia Jones organized the first Caribbean carnival indoors at St Pancras Town Hall on 30 January 1959; Rhaune Laslett started the street festival in Notting Hill in 1966; and static sound systems arrived in the 1970s, which the 1973 organizer Leslie Palmer called "the voice of the youth"²¹. Channel One has played the same corner, Leamington Road Villas and Westbourne Park Road, since 1983²¹. Linett Kamala became carnival's first female DJ in 1985, and Mellotone, co-founded by Marilyn Dennis (Lady Banton), was the first all-female sound system there in 1994¹⁸.

Rolling Stone UK goes further and says there would be no hip-hop, techno, house, garage, drill, dubstep or jungle without this genealogy¹⁸. That is a sweeping opinion, and it fits the UK bass lineage better than it fits house and techno, whose main roots are disco, funk and electro. The production lessons are less arguable: the rig is the brand, bass is felt as much as heard, and the exclusive record is the draw.

New York: disco and the people at its heart

Modern club culture was built in New York by and for Black and Latino, largely gay, dancers. Francis Grasso is credited as one of the first DJs to beatmatch, first on Rek-O-Kut turntables with a basic crossfader and later on pitch-controlled decks, at the Sanctuary, a former German Baptist church at 43rd Street and Ninth Avenue with a capacity of 346 that was described as "the first totally uninhibited gay discothèque in America"²². Several of the bigger claims about him on the page that reports this are tagged "citation needed", so take the firsts loosely.

David Mancuso's Loft, opened on 14 February 1970, is covered under the clubs section below. The detail that matters here is who was in the room. Its sound engineer, Alex Rosner, put the crowd at "probably about sixty percent black and seventy percent gay", and the writer Vince Aletti called it "completely mixed, racially and sexually"²³. A 1975 Department of Consumer Affairs ruling let private, alcohol-free parties continue, and that ruling benefited the Paradise Garage and other private clubs²³.

The Paradise Garage at 84 King Street held "construction parties" during its renovation and officially opened on 28 January 1978. It was members-only with guests, served no alcohol or food so it could run until noon, and fitted about 2,000 people on a 5,000-square-foot dance floor¹³. The NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project describes its crowd as "sexual and ethnic minorities (primarily African-American gay men)" and the club as "the birthplace of the modern nightclub"¹³. Gay Men's Health Crisis held its first fundraiser there in April 1982 and raised more than $50,000¹³. The sound was designed by Richard Long together with the resident DJ, Larry Levan, and the room was built around it²⁴. The closing date depends on what you count: the Project gives 26 September 1987, while the lease ended on 1 October 1987, which may be the last party and the lease end respectively¹³²⁴.

The production model these rooms handed down, in our summary: membership and invitations as safety and community control; no alcohol, so the party could legally run past bar hours; the sound system designed first; and the DJ as the programmer of a long arc across a whole night.

Disco Demolition

On 12 July 1979 a Chicago rock station, The Loop, and the White Sox ran a promotion at Comiskey Park: bring a disco record and get in for 98 cents. The shock jock Steve Dahl had been fired in December 1978 when his station switched to disco. More than 47,000 people turned up at a stadium built for about 44,492; a crate of records was blown up between games of a doubleheader, fans rioted, 39 people were arrested and the second game was forfeited²⁵. Vince Lawrence, then an usher and later a Chicago house pioneer, noticed that many of the records people brought were not disco at all but records by Black artists such as Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder²⁵. The historian John-Manuel Andriote reads the night as an expression of white straight men's threatened masculinity; Dahl has consistently denied that it was racist or anti-gay²⁵.

The same source notes that the event is "often cited as 'the night disco died'", but that oversaturation and weak product also played a part²⁵. The music did not die. It went back underground and, within a few miles of Comiskey Park, turned into house.

Chicago: house

The Warehouse at 206 South Jefferson Street, in the West Loop, ran from 1977 to 1982 under the New York promoter Robert Williams. Entry was by membership at $4 a night, juice was served instead of alcohol, capacity was reportedly up to 2,000, and the doors were open from midnight Saturday to midday Sunday¹⁴. The crowd was initially Chicago's Black gay men and women and Latino dancers, who were often unwelcome at North Side clubs (the city's landmark report summarizes the community as Black and Latinx LGBTQ men and women); it later became one of the first Chicago venues where gay and straight dancers of several races shared a floor¹⁴. The city's landmark report is itself inconsistent on whether Williams bought or leased the building¹⁴.

The report is also a rare primary source on how the room worked. The sound system was by Richard Long, who also did the Garage and Studio 54, and could be heard from the street; the DJ booth sat on the rear loading dock; and the room was usually dark, with glowing lights and exhaust fans that made a fog¹⁴. Frankie Knuckles became resident in March 1977 on Larry Levan's recommendation, so New York and Chicago are one connected story rather than two¹⁴. Knuckles left around the end of 1982 or in 1983, depending on the source, to open the Power Plant, and in 1998 he was the first winner of the Grammy for Remixer of the Year, Non-Classical¹⁴²⁶. "Most music historians agree" the word house comes from the club, with "some debate"; Knuckles himself remembered a tavern sign around 1980-81 reading "We play house music"¹⁴.

Williams then opened the Music Box on Lower Wacker Drive with Ron Hardy as resident, and the friendly rivalry between Hardy and Knuckles pushed the music on¹⁴. Radio carried it further: WBMX's Hot Mix 5 started in 1981 and broadcast live DJ mixes to a reported million listeners a week²⁷¹⁴. Cheap Roland machines did the rest. Jesse Saunders' "On and On" (1984, with Vince Lawrence) used a TR-808, a Korg Poly-61 and a TB-303, though "first house record" is a contested title that Farley "Jackmaster" Funk and New York also claim²⁷. Steve "Silk" Hurley's "Jack Your Body" became the first house UK number one in 1987²⁷.

Phuture's "Acid Tracks", made by DJ Pierre, Earl "Spanky" Smith Jr. and Herb J from late 1985, reached the world through Ron Hardy, who played a tape of it repeatedly at the Music Box until fans bootlegged it as "Ron Hardy's Acid Track"; Trax released it in 1987²⁸. The members' later accounts disagree on what the 303 cost and whether the sound was an accident²⁸. Trax itself is part of the respect story: the label was criticized for pressings on recycled vinyl and unpaid royalties, DJ Pierre has said "Trax never paid me royalties", and Robert Owens and Larry Heard sued in June 2020²⁹.

Detroit: techno

Detroit techno was made by young Black musicians from the Detroit area, led by Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson, the "Belleville Three". Atkins and Rick Davis, as Cybotron, sold about 15,000 copies of "Alleys of Your Mind" in 1981; Atkins started Model 500 and the Metroplex label in 1985; Derrick May's "Strings of Life" came out in May 1987; and a high-school party circuit of "prep" clubs, followed by the Music Institute at 1315 Broadway in 1988-89, gave the music its rooms¹⁵.

The name was fixed by a British record. The 1988 compilation Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit, released by Virgin's 10 Records and compiled by Neil Rushton with May, had the working title The House Sound of Detroit; Atkins' track "Techno Music" prompted the change, and Rushton says the four of them chose the name together³⁰. Two takeaways: no single person coined "techno", and Detroit was first heard in Britain as a branch of Chicago house.

Underground Resistance, formed in 1989 by "Mad" Mike Banks and Jeff Mills, added politics: an anti-corporate stance, anonymity (balaclavas) against the superstar-DJ model, and an Afrofuturist vision of self-determination³¹. The Afrofuturist reading is well documented for UR; applying it to the whole first wave is a critical interpretation, not something every artist claimed. The city's festival began as the free Detroit Electronic Music Festival at Hart Plaza in 2000 and has been produced as Movement by Paxahau since 2006³².

UK: acid house, rave, free parties and the bass lineage

In 1987 Danny Rampling, Nicky Holloway, Johnny Walker and Paul Oakenfold spent a week on Ibiza, where Trevor Fung introduced them to ecstasy and they heard Alfredo at Amnesia. Back in London, Danny and Jenni Rampling started Shoom, Oakenfold launched Future and Spectrum, and Holloway launched The Trip³³. By 1988-89 warehouse parties promoted by flyer, word of mouth and pager had grown into orbital raves around the M25 - Sunrise, Energy, Biology - and The Sun swung within a week from calling acid house "cool and groovy" (12 October 1988) to "Evils of Ecstasy" (19 October)³⁴. The legal response, from the 1990 increased-penalties act to the 1994 "repetitive beats" law, is covered under the clubs section below.

The free-party strand peaked at Castlemorton Common from 22 to 29 May 1992, with an estimated 20,000 to 40,000 people and sound systems including Bedlam, Circus Warp, Spiral Tribe and DiY; thirteen Spiral Tribe members were charged with public order offenses and acquitted after a long trial³⁵. Castlemorton is the event usually credited with prompting the 1994 Act³⁵.

Telling the UK story only as acid house and Ibiza leaves out half of it. A second strand came from Black British sound system culture, carried by MCs, pirate radio and sub-bass rigs:

• Jungle grew out of breakbeat hardcore with ragga basslines and sound system samples from about 1990; "jungle techno" and "hardcore jungle" emerged in 1992-93 at clubs such as AWOL, Roast and Telepathy and on pirates including Kool FM, and drum and bass had emerged by 1998³⁶. Who named it is disputed, and some heard the name as reclaiming a racist slur as an assertion of Black identity³⁶.
• UK garage came from New York garage house, jungle, ragga and R&B in early-1990s London. A "Sunday Scene" grew partly because jungle owned the Friday and Saturday bookings, and in 1994 DJ EZ playing Todd Edwards records at 130 bpm instead of 120 helped create speed garage³⁷.
• Grime came out of East London in the early 2000s on pirates such as Rinse FM and Deja Vu, and Dizzee Rascal's Boy in da Corner won the 2003 Mercury Prize³⁸. In 2005 the Metropolitan Police created Form 696, a club risk-assessment form that an MP called "draconian" in 2009; it was used to shut grime events and is blamed for the scene's late-2000s decline³⁸. Its later scrapping is widely reported, but we did not verify it.
• Dubstep had its first dedicated night in FWD>>, founded in 2001 at the Velvet Rooms and then Plastic People in Shoreditch, with Croydon's Big Apple Records as a hub; Digital Mystikz and Loefah founded DMZ Records in 2005, and a queue of 600 at DMZ's first-anniversary dance in Brixton forced the night into the main room³⁹. The genre's roots are traced to "the Jamaican sound system party scene"³⁹.

A pattern runs through both strands (our reading): in each era a policing tool shaped production. The 1990 fines, the 1994 law and Form 696 each pushed events toward licensed venues, risk assessments and more paperwork - which is part of why the paperwork section of this guide is as long as it is.

Berlin after the Wall, and Frankfurt

Berlin techno grew in the empty buildings and legal gray zones of a reunifying city. Dimitri Hegemann's Ufo club ran from 1988 to 1990, and Tresor opened in March 1991 in the vaults of the former Wertheim department store on Leipziger Strasse, with hard techno in the basement and house upstairs in the "Globus" room⁴⁰. (Its Wikipedia page says it opened months before unification, which cannot be right: reunification was 3 October 1990.) Tresor Records, founded in October 1991, released Detroit artists including Juan Atkins, Robert Hood, Blake Baxter and Drexciya⁴⁰. The club closed in 2005 and reopened in 2007 inside the Heizkraftwerk Mitte power plant⁴⁰. The version of the story in which white Europeans invented techno after the Wall falls apart on that release list alone.

The Love Parade began in West Berlin in July 1989 with about 150 people, started by Dr. Motte and Danielle de Picciotto, and topped a million attendees a year from 1997 to 2000⁴¹. In 2001 the courts ruled it a commercial event rather than a political demonstration⁴¹ - which, in our reading, shifted the cost of safety from the public purse to the organizers. Its end, at Duisburg in 2010, is covered in the safety section; it is a standard crowd-management case study, and we do not retell it here.

Berghain descends from queer fetish party culture: parties in the Reichsbahnbunker from 1992, the men-only Snax Club from 1994, and Ostgut in a former railway depot from 1998 to 2003, before Berghain opened in a former power plant in December 2004⁴². Its no-photos rule and its opaque door are part of the production (the door policy has also faced accusations of racism)⁴². In March 2024 "techno culture in Berlin" was added to a heritage list, and DJ Mag headlined it as UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list⁴³. The German UNESCO Commission's own email, quoted by the campaigners at Rave The Planet, says it entered the National Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage⁴⁴. That is a German national listing, not UNESCO's international one, and it is often misreported.

Frankfurt was a parallel center. Sven Väth began DJing at the Dorian Gray disco at the airport in 1982, aged 18; labels including Eye Q, Harthouse and Cocoon followed; and Robert Johnson in neighboring Offenbach had been running for about 21 years as of 2020⁴⁵.

The production lessons from Germany (ours): repurposed industrial space, the sound system as identity (Berghain's Funktion-One is covered under clubs), phone and photo policies as atmosphere, and the legal status of an event quietly deciding who pays for its safety.

Ibiza and the Balearic idea

Alfredo Fiorito, born in Rosario, Argentina, arrived in Ibiza in 1976 and first played Amnesia, then an outdoor terrace club, in 1983. He mixed house with disco, rock, jazz, funk, soul and synth pop - "Balearic beat" - and was the club's artistic director for two years from 1988⁴⁶. He died in December 2024, aged 71⁴⁷. His sets were what the four British DJs heard in 1987, which makes Ibiza the bridge that carried Chicago and Detroit records into British rave.

The island then became the summer headquarters of the club business. Ricardo Urgell opened Pacha Ibiza in June 1973; the Dubai-based FIVE Holdings bought the Pacha Group for €302.5 million in October 2023; and in 2025 Blond:ish became Pacha Ibiza's first female headline resident⁴⁸. Space opened in 1986 near the airport, where its Sunday terrace parties had airliners passing overhead; Carl Cox held a residency there for nearly 15 years and played a nine-hour final set in September 2016, and the venue reopened as Hï Ibiza in 2017⁴⁹. The destination superclub and residency economy that Ibiza built was later copied in Las Vegas (our reading; the Vegas rooms are in the clubs section).

Goa, psytrance and the outdoor party

Goa was a hippie capital from the late 1960s. In the 1980s DJs such as Goa Gil, Fred Disko and Laurent played dub versions and then electronic music there on two tape decks; Goa trance emerged in the early 1990s at beach and forest parties around 1991-93; DAT replaced cassettes; and turntables appeared in Goa only in 1999⁵⁰. London nights such as Return to the Source (1993) and Megatripolis carried it west, and it went global as psytrance⁵⁰.

Psytrance developed its own production culture, separate from the club lineage: multi-day outdoor events, decor-led stages, sunrise sets and dedicated harm-reduction spaces (our summary). Its flagship is Portugal's Boom Festival, first held in August 1997 and biennial since 1998, on land at Idanha-a-Nova that the festival bought in 2016 after crowdfunding⁵¹. Boom won A Greener Festival's Outstanding award at every edition from 2008 to 2018 and drew people from 147 countries in 2018; its most recent edition ran in July 2025⁵¹. If the biennial pattern holds, 2026 is an off year.

Belgium and the Netherlands: new beat, gabber and the festival industry

Belgium's new beat emerged in 1987. The usual origin story is that a DJ played A Split-Second's "Flesh", a 45, at 33 rpm with the pitch at +8; one account names Dikke Ronny at the Ancienne Belgique in Antwerp, others credit DJ Marc Grouls at the club Boccaccio, so treat the "accident" as a story rather than a verified event⁵². New beat fed directly into the hardcore that emerged around 1990 in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany⁵².

Rotterdam's gabber followed in the early 1990s. Paul Elstak's 1992 Euromasters record had "Gabber zijn is geen schande!" ("It's not a disgrace to be a gabber!") etched into the vinyl, and Billboard called the scene the Netherlands' "first homegrown youth culture" in 1997⁵³. The scene explicitly rejected attempts by the far right to claim it, with releases such as DJ Chosen Few's "Chosen Anthem (Against Racism)" (1993) and Party Animals' "Die Nazi Scum" (1996)⁵³.

The Dutch then built a world-leading festival production industry. ID&T, founded in the early 1990s by Irfan van Ewijk, Duncan Stutterheim and Theo Lelie, started Thunderdome in 1992, Mysteryland in 1993 and Sensation in 2000, an all-white-dress-code stadium show at the Amsterdam ArenA; on 11 May 2003 Tiësto played solo all night at the Gelredome⁵⁴. Its corporate path tracks the whole industry: SFX bought 75% in 2013, SFX filed for bankruptcy in 2016 and became LiveStyle, LiveStyle sold ID&T to Superstruct in 2021, and KKR bought Superstruct for US$1.4 billion in 2024⁵⁴. Themed indoor stadium shows, dress codes and pyro-heavy hardstyle stages are the Dutch contribution to the look of a modern mainstage (our summary).

The US EDM era

The American mainstream music industry, in the country where disco, house and techno began, arrived late and big. Around 2010 the industry repackaged rave-derived festivals as "EDM", and DJ Mag argues that American audiences embraced dance music once it was framed as a rock-style show rather than a "rave"¹⁶¹⁷. Consolidation followed. SFX Entertainment floated in 2013, filed for Chapter 11 on 1 February 2016 with about $300 million of debt swapped for equity, and ousted its founder, Robert F.X. Sillerman⁵⁵. SFX held a majority of ID&T, which partnered on Tomorrowland's offshoots; the Belgian Tomorrowland itself is not usually described as SFX-owned, though some coverage says so⁵⁵⁵⁴.

Live Nation's deal with Insomniac, the promoter of Electric Daisy Carnival, was announced by Pasquale Rotella on 19 June 2013 as a "creative partnership", with terms undisclosed and Insomniac keeping creative control⁵⁶. The Wall Street Journal had reported, from unnamed sources, that Live Nation was buying half the company for about $50 million⁵⁷. A 50% stake is how it is usually described; officially, the terms were never disclosed. The festivals themselves, and their promoter-reported attendance, are covered in the clubs section.

Further afield

The scenes above are the ones with the deepest documentation in English, which is not the same as being the only ones that matter. A few verified examples of a much larger map:

• South Africa. Amapiano emerged in Gauteng in the mid-2010s, with its precise origin disputed between townships and Pretoria and no single founder; its log drum is linked to the kwaito pioneer M'du Masilela, and its popularity spread across Africa and beyond from 2019⁵⁸. Beatport added an amapiano category in 2022⁵⁸, and Tyla won the first Grammy for Best African Music Performance in 2024 for "Water", which the Recording Academy calls "amapiano-infused Afro pop"⁵⁹. Gqom came out of Durban in the early 2010s, made in FL Studio and shared on file-sharing platforms, and taxi owners used it to draw passengers⁶⁰.
• Mexico. Sonideros are sound systems from mid-20th-century Mexico City neighborhoods such as Tepito, playing cumbia, salsa and guaracha while the sonidero sends saludos (shout-outs) over the music; the culture spread to the US with migrants⁶¹. It is a sound system culture in its own right, not an offshoot of the US or UK.
• Brazil. Funk carioca grew from 1970s Rio soul nights; in the 1980s baile funk split off under the influence of Miami bass and freestyle, and a faster 150 bpm style followed in 2018⁶². Much English-language coverage frames the bailes mainly through crime, which is a contested and stigmatizing view, and we do not repeat it.
• India, Singapore and Indonesia. Sunburn was first held on 28-29 December 2007 at Candolim Beach, Goa⁶³. Zouk started ZoukOut in 2001 as an all-night festival on Sentosa's Siloso Beach, with a record 28,000 attending in 2010⁶⁴. Jakarta's Djakarta Warehouse Project began in 2008 as a warehouse party and ranked 64th in DJ Mag's Top 100 Festivals for 2026⁶⁵.
• Japan, as hardware. Roland, founded in Osaka in 1972, made the TR-808 in 1980 and "contributes significantly to the birth of MIDI" in 1983, by its own account⁶⁶. Japanese machines were in Chicago and Detroit before most of the world had heard either city's records.

A global framing follows from this (our inference): sound system culture is a worldwide family - Kingston, London, Mexico City, Rio - rather than a single US and UK origin line with international add-ons.

Women and non-binary pioneers

Women were there before the clubs. Daphne Oram worked at the BBC from 1942 and was the first studio manager of its Radiophonic Workshop in 1958 (NPR says she co-founded it), and left within a year to develop her "Oramics" system; Delia Derbyshire realized the Doctor Who theme in 1963 from Ron Grainer's score, but BBC policy denied her a composer credit⁶⁷⁶⁸. Wendy Carlos advised Robert Moog and introduced his synthesizer to the public on Switched-On Bach (1968), which sold more than a million copies; Suzanne Ciani explored Don Buchla's modular system; and Laurie Spiegel programmed music systems at Bell Labs, with her Kepler piece on the Voyager Golden Record of 1977⁶⁸. In the scenes themselves, add Jenni Rampling co-founding Shoom, Linett Kamala and Mellotone at Notting Hill, Sarah Lockhart founding FWD>>, and Blond:ish at Pacha^33183748.

The stages have been slower to catch up. female:pressure's FACTS 2024 report covered 175 editions of 110 electronic music festivals in 2022-23 and found women made up 30% of bookings and non-binary artists 3%, up from 9.2% women in the first report in 2012; the most male-heavy line-ups included Time Warp and Boom⁶⁹. The network shesaid.so, founded in London in 2014, reports about 12,000 members across 18 chapters⁷⁰. Thirty percent is a large improvement on nine, and it is still thirty percent.

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