Thirty Years of Forum Culture: How Dance Music Found Its Voice on the Internet

That sound, we all know it…….anyone who grew up trying to find out about electronic music in the nineties will remember. It was not a bassline or a breakdown. It was a sequence of beeps and hisses and a long, drawn-out screech that meant your dial-up modem was doing its thing, and in a few minutes you’d be online. Forty-five seconds later, if you were lucky and nobody picked up the phone, you were in. That was the gateway. That was the portal to a world of people who cared about the same music you did, scattered across every timezone, all of them equally baffled by their housemates’ taste and equally obsessed with chasing down that track ID from last Saturday.

Before streaming, before social media, before algorithms decided what you were supposed to like, there were forums. And for a certain generation of ravers, DJs, producers, and obsessives, those forums were not just a side hobby. They were the whole thing.

But let’s back up even further. Because before the forums, before ICQ, before any of that, finding electronic music in the nineties required genuine effort. This is hard to explain to anyone who grew up with Spotify. There was no playlist, no algorithm serving you something adjacent to what you’d just heard, no Mixcloud rabbit hole to fall down at two in the morning. If you wanted music, you went digging. You went to the record shop on Saturday morning and flicked through the new arrivals. You listened to pirate radio in bed with an aerial pointed at the window. You taped sets off late night shows and wore the cassettes out. You asked the DJ after the gig, and half the time they told you and half the time they gave you the look that said they weren’t going to tell you, because that was their weapon and they weren’t surrendering it for free.

When the internet arrived in people’s homes and you could suddenly type the name of a track into a text-based forum and have someone in Finland or Detroit actually respond, that was extraordinary. Not in a hyperbolic way. Just genuinely, quietly extraordinary. We had never had that before.

The original infrastructure for all of this was Usenet, a text-based network of discussion groups that had been around since 1980 but found a new kind of life once ordinary people started getting internet access in the early nineties. The newsgroups were essentially massive, global bulletin boards, organised by subject. For electronic music people, the ones that mattered were alt.rave, alt.music.techno, and rec.music.industrial. If you wanted to know what was happening at a warehouse party in Detroit or debate the finer points of EBM, this was where you went. The interface was grim, the threading was chaos, and the arguments were exactly as heated as you’d expect from people who took their record collections very seriously indeed. Moby apparently posted on alt.rave on occasion. Make of that what you will.

Running alongside Usenet, and eventually eclipsing it, was Hyperreal.org. If you don’t know the name, you probably came to electronic music a bit later. Hyperreal was a rave culture website founded by Brian Behlendorf in 1994, originating as the SFRaves mailing list in 1992 before launching as a proper site. The name came from a Jack Dangers remix of The Shamen’s track of the same name, which is the sort of reference that tells you exactly who was running the place. Brian wanted Hyperreal to be a platform for people who were contributing to the culture, with a strict rule against banner ads or commercial activity on the site. In an era when Netscape had already started turning the web into a billboard, that was a meaningful position to take. Hyperreal hosted the IDM List, a mailing list dedicated to discussion of Aphex Twin, Mu-Ziq, and associated labels Rephlex Records and Warp, and at one point hosted the first official home page for Brian Eno. Active from 1992 through to 2004, it still exists in a preserved state if you know where to look, a strange and wonderful archive of a scene figuring itself out in real time.

Then there was worlddj.com. I am going to be honest with you here. I have some of my oldest and best mates from worlddj.com. People I have known for over 25 years, people I have travelled with, shared booths with, stayed on floors and sofas with across multiple continents. We met in a forum thread about, I don’t know, probably a disagreement about whether progressive house was going soft. The site was a global community of DJs and punters who were passionate about dance music in all its forms, and at its best it was exactly that: a community. Not a brand, not a platform. A group of people who actually gave a damn about each other and about the music.

Now, about getting the actual music. This is where things get properly nostalgic, or properly grim, depending on your perspective. There was no Soundcloud. No Mixcloud. Streaming was not a concept that existed in any practical sense for most of the decade. If you heard a mix on the radio and you didn’t tape it, it was gone. If someone mentioned a classic set from a rave you’d missed, your only option was to hope someone had a cassette copy and was feeling generous. What you could do, as the late nineties arrived, was venture onto the peer-to-peer networks. First Napster, then LimeWire, and its grittier cousins Kazaa and eDonkey. You’d type in the name of a DJ, or a mix, or a label, and wait. And wait. On a dial-up connection, a sixty-minute mix could take the better part of a night to download. You’d leave it running, go to sleep, and wake up to find it had either completed successfully or failed at 94 percent, which was a specific kind of misery that a generation of us share.

And then there was the virus problem. Towards the end of LimeWire’s life, it was estimated that roughly one in three files on the platform contained malware of some kind. One investigation found that of 123 randomly downloaded files, 37 contained malicious software. The mislabelling was its own sport. You’d download what the filename promised was a two-hour Sasha live set from Twilo and open it to find either silence, a completely different track, or, if you were particularly unlucky, something that was about to make your computer very unwell. You accepted this risk as the price of access. Nobody complained too loudly. The alternative was not having the music at all.

Internet radio was the more civilised solution, and it came of age in exactly the right moment. Shoutcast, created in 1998 by the same people who made Winamp, changed everything for electronic music fans with niche taste and not enough money for international postage on records. The technology was built on MP3 compression, which kept the bandwidth demands manageable even for dial-up connections, and its tight integration with Winamp meant that finding and tuning into a station was genuinely simple. Winamp itself, released in 1997, was already a fixture on every self-respecting music fan’s computer. RealPlayer had got there first with streaming audio, but Shoutcast democratised it. Suddenly, anyone with a decent enough connection and something to say could run their own station. Within a few years, the Shoutcast directory had over 20,000 stations listed. We would sit for hours with headphones on, tuned into stations broadcasting from Germany, the Netherlands, the United States, wherever the music was. There was something almost miraculous about it. A station in Frankfurt playing nothing but minimal techno at three in the morning, and you could hear it in your bedroom in Australia or Scotland or South Africa. The forums were where you shared the stream URLs, debated which stations were worth your time, and posted track IDs from sets you’d caught mid-mix and couldn’t place.

The Australian scene had its own cornerstone. inthemix.com.au was established in 1999 by Andre Lackmann and Libby Clark, originally to document the underground rave and club culture in Sydney through photography and community forums, and it served as the primary hub for the Australian dance music community for nearly two decades. At its peak, what happened on inthemix in terms of stories or forum threads could literally make or break a show, an artist, or a festival. For a country that was geographically isolated from the scenes it was taking its cues from, having a place online where you could connect with people who shared your taste was not a luxury. It was essential.

By its later years, however, inthemix had quietly picked up a nickname in certain corners of the community. People had started calling it inthebitch. It was not affectionate. The forums had curdled in the way that a lot of large online communities eventually do, particularly those built around a scene that was simultaneously going mainstream and fracturing internally. What had begun as a tight-knit gathering of genuine enthusiasts had become something harder to navigate, with the anonymity of forum culture enabling exactly the kind of behaviour that poisons communal spaces: pile-ons, personal attacks, relentless negativity toward artists and promoters who had the misfortune of becoming visible enough to attract attention. The people who had built their reputations and their livelihoods around Australian dance music learned fairly quickly that a thread about their night could go sideways fast and that there was very little they could do about it. Promoters who had once been active participants in the community stepped back. The forums had gone from being a resource to being a hazard.

Over in the UK, DontStayIn was doing something similar to inthemix, at a scale that was genuinely impressive in its numbers. At its peak it had over 20 million discussion forum posts, with over 120,000 written every month. It won awards, topped nightlife traffic rankings, and was genuinely useful for finding out about events and seeing club photography. In April 2009 it was acquired by Development Hell Ltd, the publishers of The Word and Mixmag. By mid-2016 both the site and its associated social channels had gone quiet.

Because here is the part that nobody really wants to dwell on but is worth being honest about. These forums did not just fade away gracefully. They got bad before they got quiet. As the scenes they covered grew larger and more commercially attractive, the demographics shifted. The tight-knit regulars who had built genuine relationships over years found themselves sharing space with a much wider and less patient internet population. Trolling became sport. Arguments that had once been passionate but fundamentally good-natured became genuinely poisonous. The moderation was rarely good enough to keep pace with the scale of what was happening, and the platforms themselves were not built for what they became.

Then MySpace arrived and changed the rules. Suddenly artists had profile pages, fans could add them, and the interaction moved from forum threads to comments sections. Then Facebook dispersed it further, to the point where the idea of a dedicated, single-purpose community of electronic music fans felt almost quaint. Why post in a forum when you could post anywhere, to everyone you knew? The problem, of course, is that posting to everyone you know is a very different thing from posting to people who specifically understand what you are talking about. The intimacy was gone. The expertise was diluted. inthemix officially ceased operations in November 2018, with its editorial legacy absorbed into Music Junkee. It was, as one of its editors put it, bigger than the site itself, bigger than the company. That made the ending feel correspondingly large.

Except that something interesting has started to happen. The forums are coming back, or something that functions like them is. Reddit has communities for virtually every electronic music genre you can name, and the better ones are surprisingly close in spirit to what the old forums were at their best: knowledgeable, opinionated, capable of genuine depth. Discord servers have become the new mailing lists, with the pace and intimacy of a real conversation. Twitch has given DJs and producers a live space to perform and interact with audiences in something approaching real time. Facebook groups, for all their obvious limitations, have given older scenes a place to reconvene.

Nobody is dialling up to access any of this. The screech of the modem is gone, replaced by fibre and 5G and a bandwidth that would have seemed unthinkable to someone sitting in a bedroom in 1994 waiting half an hour for an MP3 to download, fingers crossed that it wasn’t actually a virus wearing a mix’s name as a disguise. But the reason people are gravitating back toward these more focused, community-centred spaces is the same reason they were there in the first place. You can follow ten thousand accounts on Instagram and still feel like nobody around you understands why a particular twelve-inch from 1993 matters. Sometimes you just want to talk to people who get it.

The hundreds of different forums that were around the world (way too many to list) taught us that the music was always, underneath everything else, about connection. The arguments and the track IDs and the gig reports and the long threads that wandered magnificently off-topic were all just different ways of saying: I found something important and I want to share it with someone who will understand why. That has not changed. It never really does.

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by Damion Pell

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