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 t...

The debate is definitely settled. Dancefloors are back and if you’re phone is out on the floor get the fuck off it.

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.

What’s the actual problem you’re trying to solve by getting these specific people in a room together?

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;

The debate is definitely settled.
Dancefloors are back and if you’re phone is out on the floor get the fuck off it.

Dancing Astronaut

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