The phone-free story has already been written. The New York Times put it on the page in November 2025: Raw Cuts, House of Yes, Signal, a wave of New York rooms that have collectively decided taking videos is no longer welcome on the floor.
The debate is definitely settled.
Dancefloors are back and if you’re phone is out on the floor get the fuck off it.
What hasn’t been talked about is the part that runs underneath this movement. The transmission of a new wave of independent dancefloors. Every one of those rooms is making decisions you don’t see about who processes their tickets, where their fan data lives, what platform sits between the promoter and the door. The cultural choice and the business choice are the same. You can’t run a no-phones policy on a platform that treats your audience like a checkout funnel.
That’s the story that’s actually moving in New York right now, and on May 13th the people running these rooms are sitting down together at Green Room in Brooklyn to talk about it out loud.
Industry Standard is what Shotgun is calling it. The Paris based ticketing platform, now in its fourth year of US operations after launching in 2014, is increasingly the default infrastructure choice for the city’s independent electronic music scene. The brand is hosting its second-ever invite-only gathering of operators; promoters, venue partners, community builders, the people who actually decide what a Wednesday night in Bushwick looks like. The first edition ran during Miami Music Week in March. They provide a space where you can fully disconnect from the outside world and dance with no worries. It’s a haven in a world where everything is being recorded and posted. The communities these shows build continue to prove the impact turning off your phone at a show makes as well. These rooms become safe spaces for the people in them, and we were lucky enough to have had a conversation with the person helping keep these clubs alive.
That person is Zach Walker, the VP of Partnerships at Shotgun. He’s the guy behind the scenes making sure that the best artists, promoters, and venues in NYC are able to build our community. Zach has spent 15 years working across the music industry, from marketing, to editorial work, to ticketing, building his vast knowledge of the industry through operating the mechanics of it. Now at Shotgun, he’s focused on creating spaces where the underground can thrive.
What’s the actual problem you’re trying to solve by getting these specific people in a room together?
The people running the best rooms in this city already know each other. What they don’t have is a structured way to share the business side of it: what ticket pricing is actually moving, how to handle a slow month, which platforms are genuinely building for independent operators vs. just talking about it. That information circulates in text threads and backstage. We’re trying to make it a real conversation.
To better understand how some of those people are running the best rooms in the city, all you have to do is look at who they are;
Raw Cuts, the Brooklyn collective founded by Erez Davids and Cal Green, runs one of the most disciplined no-phones, no-VIP formats in the city. They were the centerpiece of the New York Times piece in November. They’ve hosted LF SYSTEM, Carlita, Archie Hamilton, Mella Dee, Locklead rooms at H0L0 in Ridgewood and beyond.
Signal, the East Williamsburg club that opened on Morgan Avenue in May 2025, was designed from the floor up as an acoustics-first room. It’s got a floating wood floor, sculptural walls, three discrete sound systems including a d&b Audiotechnik rig, and a 400 cap. The place is crispy. Joshua Buhler, Leonard Fink, and Nicholas Spector built it after years running the Golden Records NYC party series. Steve O’Sullivan, Dyed Soundorom, Byron The Aquarius, Ron Like Hell, and Mike Servito.
House of Yes, the Bushwick institution founded by Kae Burke and Anya Sapozhnikova, turned ten years old in December. That’s a decade of dance music in one of the most ambitious creative nightlife spaces in Brooklyn.
Book Club Radio runs events disguised as exactly what the name suggests — a Librarian’s Manifesto read aloud before the music starts, an explicit framing of how the room is supposed to behave. EDM Identity profiled them in 2023 as a direct response to dancefloor disengagement. Intentionality as a programming choice.
ZERO Community operates the longest tail of the bunch; seven years of City of Gods at Industry City with House of Yes, an East Coast Halloween fixture, plus The Masquerade series with selectors like Satori, Christian Löffler, Robag Wruhme, and ELIF.
You have a partner roster in this city that overlaps almost exactly with the venues and collectives that got named in the Times’ phone-free piece: Raw Cuts, House of Yes, Signal. Is that coincidence, or is there something about the kind of operator who chooses Shotgun that maps to the kind of operator running a phone-free room?
It’s not coincidence, but I’d push back on the idea that Shotgun chose them. They chose us, and that distinction matters. The operators running phone-free rooms have already made a decision about what kind of experience they’re building. They’ve decided the floor is worth protecting. When you’ve made that call, you start looking at every other infrastructure decision the same way: who’s processing my tickets, where does my fan data go, is the platform I’m using aligned with what I’m trying to build or working against it. Shotgun doesn’t produce competing events. We’ve turned down acquisition offers. We’re not going to show up in your market running shows next to yours. For an operator who has already decided to protect the room, that’s not a small thing. So yeah, there’s overlap with the Times list. I think what it actually reflects is that a certain kind of operator, one who’s made intentional decisions about the culture they’re building, eventually ends up asking the same questions about their infrastructure. We just happened to be the answer they landed on.
DICE getting acquired by Fever last year was a real moment for a lot of operators in this scene. From where you sit, what actually shifted on the ground after that deal closed and what are promoters telling you they’re now looking for in a ticketing partner that they weren’t asking about two years ago?
The conversations changed. Promoters who had been comfortable started asking questions they weren’t asking before: who owns this now, what does that mean for my fan data, are my early-access lists going into a competitor’s CRM. That’s a legitimate concern. When the platform processing your door is owned by the same company producing events in your market, the conflict is structural.
Shotgun has turned down acquisition offers. You don’t produce your own events. You’re dedicated only to music. In a market where every other major platform has gone the other direction, how do you explain that position to a promoter who’s trying to figure out who to trust with their door for the next five years?
Honestly, I don’t explain it that much. The situation explains itself.
DICE was acquired by Fever. Fever produces events. Eventbrite has been trying to re-enter nightlife for two years and still doesn’t know what it wants to be. The platforms that came up speaking the language of the underground took the highest bid and moved on. That’s just what happened.
Shotgun has been offered acquisition deals. We said no. We don’t produce events in the markets where our partners are operating. We don’t have a festival arm, we’re not building a competing business on top of the data our promoters are generating. That’s not a brand position, that’s just how the company is structured.
For a promoter trying to decide who to trust with their door for the next five years, the question I’d ask is: what does this platform need from me beyond the transaction? If the answer is your audience data to feed their own event business, that’s worth knowing before you sign.
You’ve got NYC Rave Girls, House of Yes, and Xanadu/Danger Danger on the panel — community layer, venue layer, promoter and brand layer. What’s the conversation you’re hoping happens between those three vantage points that doesn’t happen anywhere else?
The honest answer is I want them to disagree.
Mary and Kseniya are coming from the community side. They built NYC Rave Girls from the audience up, which means they think about what a room feels like to the person who bought a ticket and showed up alone hoping to connect with something. That’s a specific vantage point and it doesn’t always align with what a promoter needs to make the economics work.
Ilan has been running House of Yes for ten years. A decade in Bushwick means he’s watched the neighborhood change around him, watched venues open and close, watched the culture shift. He knows what it costs to hold a room together over time and what you have to compromise to do it. That’s different from what the community layer sees.
Ian is operating at the brand and promoter layer where the actual business decisions get made: who’s booking, what’s the ticket price, how do you build an audience that shows up on a Tuesday.
Those three perspectives don’t naturally agree on what a room is supposed to optimize for. The community wants authenticity, the venue needs longevity, the promoter needs it to pencil out. What I’m hoping happens is that conversation gets had out loud, in a room where people are actually listening, instead of in three separate DMs that never connect.
The phone-free thing reads in the press as a cultural choice, vibe, presence, etc. But every operator running that policy is also making a series of infrastructure decisions to support it, from door communication to fan data to refund flow. What does a ticketing partner actually do to support a no-phones room that a generic platform doesn’t?
The policy is the easy part. Telling people no phones on the floor takes thirty seconds to write in the event description. What’s harder is building the operational layer that makes it coherent.
Start with door communication. If you’re running a no-phones room, your ticketing partner needs to be able to message your attendees before they arrive, clearly, in your voice, so the policy isn’t a surprise at the door. A generic platform gives you a confirmation email with their branding on it. That’s not the same thing.
Fan data is the bigger issue. The operators running these rooms have built real audiences. People who come back, who follow them to new venues, who trust the curation. That audience relationship lives in the ticket purchase data. If your ticketing platform owns that data and you can’t export it, can’t message those people directly, can’t build on top of it, then you don’t actually own the relationship. You’re renting it from the platform.
Refund flow matters more than people think for this specific format. A no-phones room is a considered experience. The person buying a ticket has made a deliberate choice. When something goes wrong, how that gets handled either reinforces the relationship or breaks it. A checkout funnel built for volume doesn’t have a lot of patience for that nuance.
What we try to do is make sure the infrastructure matches the intention. If an operator has decided the floor is worth protecting, every touchpoint we control should reflect that decision. The confirmation email, the check-in process, the data they walk away with after the show. None of that is glamorous but all of it is what makes the policy real instead of just a caption.
The five operators we’ve been talking about share a real philosophy about what a room is supposed to be. What does the next year look like for an independent NYC promoter who wants to build a business on that philosophy and not get crushed by the consolidation around them?
Harder than it was two years ago and more possible than people think.
The consolidation is real. The platforms that were built around independent culture have mostly been absorbed into companies that don’t share those values.
The venues that defined neighborhoods are closing. The economics of running a 300-cap room in Brooklyn in 2026 are genuinely difficult in a way that requires more than good taste to navigate.
But the operators who are surviving are the ones who figured out that the floor is a relationship, not a transaction. Raw Cuts didn’t build what they built by optimizing ticket yield. House of Yes didn’t make it ten years by treating Bushwick as a market to be captured. The promoters who are still standing are the ones who invested in the audience as a community and built real loyalty that doesn’t disappear when a bigger player moves into the neighborhood.
So practically, what does that look like for the next year? Own your data. Know who your audience is, where they came from, how they found you. Don’t build on infrastructure that extracts that relationship and sells it back to you. Be deliberate about who you partner with because your partners are a signal to your audience about what you value.
And show up. The scene is built by people who are in it, not people who are managing it from a distance. The promoters who are going to be standing in two years are the ones in the room tonight.
Industry Standard NYC takes place May 13th at Green Room in Brooklyn. The gathering is invite-only.
RSVP link: https://shotgun.live/en/festivals/industry-standard-nyc
