Max HeyraudOver half a million people raved at festivals across Ireland this summer, but how many of them actually go to clubs?
Never before have there been so many festivals happening across the country, and never before has electronic music been so central to their DNA. From headline slots on Ireland’s biggest stages to independent festivals in rural Ireland, dance music feels inescapable during festival season. But it begs the question: what does all this mean for clubs?
Over half a million people attended music festivals in Ireland this summer, with dance music often at the centre. Fatboy Slim headlined Electric Picnic, David Guetta took Longitude, and BICEP commanded All Together Now. At Galway’s International Arts Festival, Index brought Interplanetary Criminal, Tommy Holohan, and Shampain to the city. Even the Cork Jazz Festival, a bastion of tradition, has booked techno legend Jeff Mills for October, a sign that electronic music is bleeding into spaces previously untouched by it. Meanwhile, District X, AVA, Emerge, Beyond the Pale, Forbidden Fruit, and Fuinneamh have carved out their own brands with lineups almost entirely made up of electronic acts.
Take Electric Picnic as a case study. In 2017, just one dance act appeared among its twelve headliners: Pete Tong’s nostalgia-heavy Ibiza Classics show. Acts like Four Tet, Annie Mac, Floating Points, and BICEP provided solid representation further down the bill, but electronic music was far from the festival’s focus. Fast forward to 2025, and the picture is unrecognisable. Fatboy Slim headlined the main stage, Barry Can’t Swim, Ewan McVicar, Jazzy, and Maribou State sat high on the lineup, and the new 8,000-capacity Terminus Stage was dedicated entirely to dance acts like DJ Heartstring, Girls Don’t Sync, and Horsegiirl. Add in the electronic-heavy Smirnoff, Red Bull, Heineken, and Anachronica stages, and the dominance is clear.
Forbidden Fruit tells a similar story. The two-day festival at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham in Dublin hosts 30,000 people in total, and is now almost entirely electronic, featuring headliners such as Underworld, Jamie XX, Peggy Gou, and Caribou. Here, practically every attendee will engage with dance music across the weekend. The festival also creates a ripple effect across the capital: nearly every club in Dublin runs afterparties, and even those that don’t are filled with festival spillover, operating at or near capacity both nights.
All Together Now, another 30,000-capacity festival, has also become defined by electronic music. Its Smirnoff x AVA stage acts as the hub of the festival, while the towering Arcadia stage has become its crown jewel, drawing thousands nightly for raves under fire-breathing structures.
Up north, Belfast’s AVA Festival continues to stand as a pillar of electronic culture, hosting 16,000 ravers on an all-dance lineup, while Emerge Festival brings in 70,000 across two days. Irish techno heavyweight BLK. is selling out stadium-scale events, including 22,000 at Belsonic, a series that typically leans on global pop stars like Lionel Richie or Justin Timberlake. District X in Dublin, meanwhile, has expanded from 20,000 attendees at its debut to 25,000 this year, a clear sign of dance music’s accelerating demand.
And these are just the headline events. Shows like D8 in the Garden, SILO, 3Arena electronic takeovers, and Live at the Marquee in Cork operate as de facto one-day festivals, further fuelling the appetite.
The numbers speak for themselves: more people are engaging with dance music in Ireland than ever before. But one question remains: how many of them engage with club culture outside of the festival season? Festivals attract punters from every corner of the island, including regions where nightlife infrastructure is sparse. But even in cities with thriving club scenes, many festival-goers don’t transfer their interest into year-round clubbing.
This disconnect raises questions about the “festivalisation” of dance music. Has the culture shifted so much that people now primarily associate electronic music with sun-soaked outdoor spectacles rather than dark, sweaty clubs? House music in particular has long been marketed as a summer soundtrack, synonymous with Ibiza terraces and sparkling festival stages. That image may have cemented itself in the public imagination, leaving clubs, the original heart of the culture, struggling to capture the same energy.
Has dance music become a seasonal thing? The way we talk about “festival season” and “club season” probably doesn’t help. It sets up the idea that summer belongs to festivals while clubs are for the colder months, as if the two can’t coexist. But even in autumn and winter, the period traditionally seen as peak time for nightlife, clubs aren’t pulling anywhere near the numbers that festivals do in the summer. So where are all those people going?
Part of it comes down to perception. Festivals are seen as big occasions, day-long outings where you dress up, meet your mates early, and make a proper event of it. Clubs, on the other hand, are often framed as casual, weekly haunts. If money is tight, it makes sense that people will save up for the one-off, larger-scale blowout instead of spending regularly in smaller venues. Unfortunately, it’s the grassroots spots and community-driven hubs that take the hit.
At the same time, the barriers to clubbing are real. It’s not always about money, though expensive drinks don’t help. For some, it’s the discomfort of confined spaces, or simply the lack of glamour compared to festival stages and open-air raves. There seems to be a gap between the tens of thousands who dance at electronic music festivals and those willing to engage with it inside the walls of a club.
It’s a conversation that comes up again and again: the uneasy coexistence of clubs and festivals. But it doesn’t have to be a competition. In an ideal world, festivals would feed directly into the club scene in a positive way. We already see hints of this in the form of afterparties, but the link often stops there. A huge number of people first encounter dance music at festivals, it’s a low barrier to entry, where you don’t need to know every act, and where people are more open to new sounds and experiences. That should carry over into clubs long after the festival gates close.
Somewhere, though, it gets lost in translation. Instead of a symbiotic relationship, clubs and festivals can feel like separate ecosystems competing for the same audience. If both worlds worked more closely together, the bond between them could be stronger and healthier for the culture as a whole.
As we step deeper into “club season,” it’s worth remembering that clubs remain the beating heart of dance music. They’re the spaces where communities grow. And right now, they could use even a fraction of the support and attention their festival counterparts enjoy.
