Brexit: The impact on dance music so far

Dron is more concerned about the logistics of leaving the EU than exchange rates, however. “The main issue for us is that we have always used the UK as a sales and tax base for buying and selling within Europe,” he says. “Since Europe is such a huge and important market for us we will have to find a new home within the EEC so that we don't have to deal with import/export duties and business customers can continue buying with VAT zero rated.” This, compounded by the global fad for vinyl, and crippling shortage of working pressing equipment, means that prices will go up, and many smaller labels will face very long waiting lists to press limited-quanitity runs.

Increased vinyl costs also eat into the profitability of home-grown record labels. “Vinyl’s been getting steadily less profitable in the six years we’ve been running the label,” says Tom Lea of Local Action. “Costs were going up before Brexit and the demand was going down. Most UK labels are having their records pressed in Europe, so the weakened pound obviously made it even more expensive.” Lea tells me they’ve tried to become less reliant on vinyl to counteract this (particularly given the lengthy delays involved in receiving vinyl orders from European factories), and they’ve been trialling different formats, such as USB necklaces, as a way of producing physical merch that’s not so expensive to produce.

British clubbers are uniquely comfortable hopping on planes bound for foreign party capitals, and we’re a travel-happy bunch: observe the explosion in European dance music festivals in the last five years. But unless the pound sorts out its recurring case of coke dick (just like it looks like it’s going to stay up, it droops again), British dance music lovers may find their foreign festival habits too expensive to sustain.

“The exchange rate drop affected us quite badly this year,” concedes Dave Harvey of Croatian-based, British-run festival Love International. “Everything costs more! Hopefully things will stabilise.” Harvey explains they decided to swallow the increased costs for 2017 rather than passing on the burden to festival goers.