This take on "soft clubbing" nails the shift happening in nightlife—it’s not that people are partying less, they’re just redefining how they party. The rise of curated, intentional music experiences shows that Gen Z and Millennials aren’t ditching nightlife; they’re making it fit their lifestyles—less about excess, more about experience.
It’s wild how music is now integrated into everyday spaces—bakeries, gyms, chess clubs—turning routine moments into cultural touchpoints. And the rise of daytime events? That’s a response to shifting social habits (and, let’s be real, the hangxiety that comes with all-nighters).
Soft clubbing isn’t the end of nightlife—it’s its next evolution. The brands, curators, and spaces that embrace this shift will thrive, while those clinging to the old model risk fading out.
as a younger millennial (‘94) I totally agree with wanting a social life that is more about experience than excess. my early to mid 20s were centered around frat parties, dingy bars and dance clubs, and while they were definitely fun in their own ways, I find myself wanting to immerse myself in more uniquely curated environments.
considering the high cost of living nowadays, I don’t want to spend money on a rideshare and overpriced drinks just to listen to the same 2010s hits in the same local setting I’ve gone to a thousand times. nowadays I tend to spend this social and monetary effort towards concerts and music festivals (my idea of soft clubbing lol) but I hope to see this nightlife shift more pervasively.
It's a catchy one, soft clubbing! Also, what I'm starting to realise, having read your post, is that we've entered a decentralised era for clubbing. It's no longer about the 'where' and more about the 'why'. Any space can be a club now. A living room. A bakery. Whatever. We're seeing this with raves being organised at airports. In Germany they do techno parties on moving trains. It's an exciting time for real!
ah yes great perspective! We’re certainly in that era now and exciting to see how that will continue to widen the way we experience music. Been loving the clips from the airports in Germany, think it was Frankfurt the one I saw.
I feel like soft clubbing claims to centre intention and community, but many experiences lack genuine engagement with the music or culture. The craft, selectors, sound systems, and spatial design often feel secondary to the optics. These gatherings appear more like curated performances of connection than spaces where it genuinely occurs.
This reflects a broader cultural tension: collective rituals like clubbing are increasingly re-contextualised through a lifestyle lens. Their meditative or communal essence is diluted, replaced by forms of affiliation that require little immersion. You can ‘go clubbing’ without caring about the music, culture, or people, only the content. It’s a way to brush against culture from the outermost edges, just enough to be seen as part of it.
This raises a deeper question: how many people engaging in soft clubbing are truly contributing to its already vulnerable ecosystem? In traditional club culture, even if you’re not out every weekend, you contribute through support for venues, care for the music, purchasing power or shared knowledge. There’s a sense of mutual responsibility. With soft clubbing, that sense of reciprocity often feels absent. The focus shifts from participation to some type of aesthetic performance.
What once emerged organically through shared values, sound, and experimentation is now extracted, softened, and sold back as an advertisement to a product affiliation. These events are often shaped less by community than by corporate systems, optimised for optics, scale, and social media reach. It’s connection as commodity, fun as format curated more for brand extension than belonging.
Some may ask, ‘What’s the harm if people are just having fun?’ But when that fun depends on curation, visibility, and constant documentation, it becomes hollow. These spaces reduce culture to aesthetics, a simulation of nightlife where everything looks the part but nothing truly resonates. This isn’t harmless. It hollows out the very scenes it imitates, displaces grassroots spaces, and reframes community as lifestyle content. The club becomes a backdrop for self-performance, not connection, a cultural mirror reflecting nothing back.
Soft clubbing reflects the fragmentation of late capitalism, where sacred spaces for togetherness are flattened into branded content pipelines, leaving us with proximity and performance rather than intimacy and participation. In my opinion it shows the real life struggle of the taste economy trying to engage in something that it knows nothing about and only exists because of the lack of shared knowledge which happened post pandemic.
These aesthetics repeat across cities, making the local global and the meaningful generic. The awkwardness, unpredictability, and depth of real cultural participation are lost.
Despite this, people’s need for ritual, transcendence, and collective feeling remains stronger than ever. The question is not whether we gather, but how, and whether the spaces we create nourish the soul or just the body.
this hits to close to home as one of the founders of the Beat Social (Producer Open Mics) in the uk, it definitely went viral after 2020 because the first wave of artists needed a real space to express themselves without that classic clubbing pressure
Interesting. Nightlife used to be for the counter-culture and now the Mayor is getting involed, which means it's been coopted. This is good news, most people are awake during the day, it's a more efficient time to make the counter culture the dominant mainstream culture. Soft clubbing is on its way to change the world!
The internet kills me with these things. Wtf is soft dancing? Does my great grandmother get on the front here and say she hearts soft dancing tho that’s all she has done since being 80. And it doesn’t even encompass the whole of whoever wears and says this. Sure you like soft dancing but to what song? to what time of the day? Surely u just don’t only soft dance? Surely you have a martini before you get up and do your 2 steps soft dancing? Soft dance as the sunset? Soft dance as you’re blacked out drunk out of your senses? Yes I to love soft dancing, especially to hard gabber.
Could not agree more! I thought my 20s would be like a 2000s music video but instead I find myself in more intimate settings listening to a curated playlist and to be honest I kind of prefer it! I had no idea about the 'Night-life task force', really interesting post
Great article, and I agree with the observations. Another thing that struck me is the image friendly presentation of these spaces. Every space can now be a club because every space can be captured, presented on social media and used to generate attention, the more decontextualised the better -- trains, pizza shops. I think the role of the smart phone cannot be understated in this shift to 'soft clubbing'.
With the changing of the type of drugs British young people are taking, they are now either staying at home in or hanging out with weirdos and listening to bad music. As with most "western" countries, Britain is on the verge of collapse, and thank goodness for that.
This made me laugh because I was soft clubbing before it had a name. I used to be out like “anyone else on a deadline and have to wake up in 4 hours?” The idea of early parties with good music and no pressure is dream behavior. Sign me up! How do you find out? (And not these last minute announcements…. I need like 3 weeks notice lol)
This take on "soft clubbing" nails the shift happening in nightlife—it’s not that people are partying less, they’re just redefining how they party. The rise of curated, intentional music experiences shows that Gen Z and Millennials aren’t ditching nightlife; they’re making it fit their lifestyles—less about excess, more about experience.
It’s wild how music is now integrated into everyday spaces—bakeries, gyms, chess clubs—turning routine moments into cultural touchpoints. And the rise of daytime events? That’s a response to shifting social habits (and, let’s be real, the hangxiety that comes with all-nighters).
Soft clubbing isn’t the end of nightlife—it’s its next evolution. The brands, curators, and spaces that embrace this shift will thrive, while those clinging to the old model risk fading out.
as a younger millennial (‘94) I totally agree with wanting a social life that is more about experience than excess. my early to mid 20s were centered around frat parties, dingy bars and dance clubs, and while they were definitely fun in their own ways, I find myself wanting to immerse myself in more uniquely curated environments.
considering the high cost of living nowadays, I don’t want to spend money on a rideshare and overpriced drinks just to listen to the same 2010s hits in the same local setting I’ve gone to a thousand times. nowadays I tend to spend this social and monetary effort towards concerts and music festivals (my idea of soft clubbing lol) but I hope to see this nightlife shift more pervasively.
It's a catchy one, soft clubbing! Also, what I'm starting to realise, having read your post, is that we've entered a decentralised era for clubbing. It's no longer about the 'where' and more about the 'why'. Any space can be a club now. A living room. A bakery. Whatever. We're seeing this with raves being organised at airports. In Germany they do techno parties on moving trains. It's an exciting time for real!
ah yes great perspective! We’re certainly in that era now and exciting to see how that will continue to widen the way we experience music. Been loving the clips from the airports in Germany, think it was Frankfurt the one I saw.
nice one Yus!
This is really cool! Thanks for sharing
Really enjoyed this read Yus! Hope you’re good! X
Thanks Rosie! I’m well, hope you are too!
Great read!
I feel like soft clubbing claims to centre intention and community, but many experiences lack genuine engagement with the music or culture. The craft, selectors, sound systems, and spatial design often feel secondary to the optics. These gatherings appear more like curated performances of connection than spaces where it genuinely occurs.
This reflects a broader cultural tension: collective rituals like clubbing are increasingly re-contextualised through a lifestyle lens. Their meditative or communal essence is diluted, replaced by forms of affiliation that require little immersion. You can ‘go clubbing’ without caring about the music, culture, or people, only the content. It’s a way to brush against culture from the outermost edges, just enough to be seen as part of it.
This raises a deeper question: how many people engaging in soft clubbing are truly contributing to its already vulnerable ecosystem? In traditional club culture, even if you’re not out every weekend, you contribute through support for venues, care for the music, purchasing power or shared knowledge. There’s a sense of mutual responsibility. With soft clubbing, that sense of reciprocity often feels absent. The focus shifts from participation to some type of aesthetic performance.
What once emerged organically through shared values, sound, and experimentation is now extracted, softened, and sold back as an advertisement to a product affiliation. These events are often shaped less by community than by corporate systems, optimised for optics, scale, and social media reach. It’s connection as commodity, fun as format curated more for brand extension than belonging.
Some may ask, ‘What’s the harm if people are just having fun?’ But when that fun depends on curation, visibility, and constant documentation, it becomes hollow. These spaces reduce culture to aesthetics, a simulation of nightlife where everything looks the part but nothing truly resonates. This isn’t harmless. It hollows out the very scenes it imitates, displaces grassroots spaces, and reframes community as lifestyle content. The club becomes a backdrop for self-performance, not connection, a cultural mirror reflecting nothing back.
Soft clubbing reflects the fragmentation of late capitalism, where sacred spaces for togetherness are flattened into branded content pipelines, leaving us with proximity and performance rather than intimacy and participation. In my opinion it shows the real life struggle of the taste economy trying to engage in something that it knows nothing about and only exists because of the lack of shared knowledge which happened post pandemic.
These aesthetics repeat across cities, making the local global and the meaningful generic. The awkwardness, unpredictability, and depth of real cultural participation are lost.
Despite this, people’s need for ritual, transcendence, and collective feeling remains stronger than ever. The question is not whether we gather, but how, and whether the spaces we create nourish the soul or just the body.
this hits to close to home as one of the founders of the Beat Social (Producer Open Mics) in the uk, it definitely went viral after 2020 because the first wave of artists needed a real space to express themselves without that classic clubbing pressure
Interesting. Nightlife used to be for the counter-culture and now the Mayor is getting involed, which means it's been coopted. This is good news, most people are awake during the day, it's a more efficient time to make the counter culture the dominant mainstream culture. Soft clubbing is on its way to change the world!
The internet kills me with these things. Wtf is soft dancing? Does my great grandmother get on the front here and say she hearts soft dancing tho that’s all she has done since being 80. And it doesn’t even encompass the whole of whoever wears and says this. Sure you like soft dancing but to what song? to what time of the day? Surely u just don’t only soft dance? Surely you have a martini before you get up and do your 2 steps soft dancing? Soft dance as the sunset? Soft dance as you’re blacked out drunk out of your senses? Yes I to love soft dancing, especially to hard gabber.
Could not agree more! I thought my 20s would be like a 2000s music video but instead I find myself in more intimate settings listening to a curated playlist and to be honest I kind of prefer it! I had no idea about the 'Night-life task force', really interesting post
Great article, and I agree with the observations. Another thing that struck me is the image friendly presentation of these spaces. Every space can now be a club because every space can be captured, presented on social media and used to generate attention, the more decontextualised the better -- trains, pizza shops. I think the role of the smart phone cannot be understated in this shift to 'soft clubbing'.
With the changing of the type of drugs British young people are taking, they are now either staying at home in or hanging out with weirdos and listening to bad music. As with most "western" countries, Britain is on the verge of collapse, and thank goodness for that.
This made me laugh because I was soft clubbing before it had a name. I used to be out like “anyone else on a deadline and have to wake up in 4 hours?” The idea of early parties with good music and no pressure is dream behavior. Sign me up! How do you find out? (And not these last minute announcements…. I need like 3 weeks notice lol)
Smashed it. What a word
Nespresso 7am happy hour: https://www.instagram.com/share/BAIPsox18M