I usually try to stay away from the news. It rarely captures anything positive, and I learned that the hard way during the pandemic. One of the things I changed back then was protecting my mornings. Less headlines. More silence. Classical music first thing, before the noise of the day has a chance to settle in.
Photo by ALEXANDRE LALLEMAND on Unsplash
Yesterday I broke that rule. I sat down with the news, and it hit harder than expected, not because any of this is new, but because it just keeps repeating.
Power ignoring limits. Violence treated like paperwork. Fear recycled as policy. If you have lived long enough, or lived through enough, you recognize the pattern. The details change. The script does not. It wears you down quietly, day after day, until everything feels tense by default.
That weight builds fast. You start wondering where the lines are anymore, or if anyone is even pretending they exist.
In that hollow moment, I remembered why art matters. Not as decoration. Not as distraction. As oxygen. As some dear friends told me once: “Art is something pointless for our survival that is essential to our existence.”
There is also a deeper sadness underneath all of this. The feeling that everything now revolves around money. That value has been reduced to price. No money, no space. No money, no voice. No money, no time. That is the world we live in, or at least the one we have been pushed into accepting.
Living in Miami, you see it up close. A boom city built for the wealthy. Luxury towers, fast capital, crypto optimism, techno bros chasing the next thing. It moves fast, looks shiny, and leaves very little room for anything that does not scale or sell. Culture becomes product. Nights become transactions. Even passion starts to feel like a line item.
While the world keeps fracturing, the industry seems busy chasing ghosts. Followers. Reach. Influence. As if you could track the soul of a culture on a stock ticker. We have managed to grow the crowd while losing the plot.
The mainstream has always been messy. That part is not new. The scale is. A sea of DJs, a nonstop flood of tracks, and nobody can realistically keep up. Some of it hits, no doubt. A lot of it feels like it was made to be forgotten by next Monday.
Look at the crowds though. Dance music is not just a youth thing anymore. The first generations are now in their fifties, and sixties. Some still party until sunrise, respect! Others just want decent sound, daylight, and a chair nearby, just in case. Day parties are not a softer version of the club. They are an adjustment. Life gets complicated, bodies change, but the need to move does not disappear.
Outside the club, everything feels tight. Unstable. Heavy. When things get this compressed, culture usually shuts down or explodes. We would rather see it explode.
Music is one of the last places where you actually have to listen before you speak. Where a feeling can pass through without being argued into pieces. That still matters.
We do not need more content. We need musicians. We need live sets. We need real listening sessions where the music is the point, not background noise for a drink or a post. Honestly, we might need some fucking raves again. The kind that remind you why you showed up in the first place, before the music had a price tag and the dance floor had a VIP section.
The business side is not going anywhere. High fees, expensive rooms, corporate festivals. The machine will keep running. But the real shift is always closer than it looks. Sometimes it is literally one click away.
Even the younger kids are changing the rules. Drinking less. Guarding their headspace. Maybe that changes the floor, maybe it does not. The need for music stays constant.
At EG, we are not interested in the sprint. We are taking our time, even when everything else feels rushed. Some projects need space. Some ideas need silence first. When things are ready, you will hear about them.
Until then, we are here. We are listening. We are keeping the door open.
Not because music fixes the world, but because without it, the world gets a little harder to face.
