It's 2017 but your favourite clubs are still way too overcrowded

“Sometimes,” comments Alice Woods of Manchester-based promoters Meat Free, “there are only two settings for a club: totally rammed and uncomfortable, or empty.”

Woods is right. In the crowded and competitive post-Brexit clubbing landscape, the pressure to sell tickets and pack out dancefloors gets ever more intense.

“The ticketed queue was insane,” remembers 28-year-old Becky of a recent night out in London, “and when we got in both of the rooms that were open were too rammed to move. I couldn’t dance and I just stood there being sandwiched between other people. It was so hot and I kept getting covered in other people’s sweat. I couldn’t even hold a drink.”

“At that point,” she goes on, “it ruins the fun. It stops being a night out and feels more like a fight for survival.”

While overcrowding is unpleasant for everyone, it’s particularly stressful for women attending male-dominated dance music nights, where the added threat of sexual harassment is omnipresent and being in a crush can mean getting a face-full of your neighbour’s armpit.

“I was on a night out,” says Sarah, 28, “and my cousin and I, who are quite petite, kept getting ring-fenced by lads. It’s just really uncomfortable because you’re so much smaller than them. If you have a guy with you it’s different, because they can act as a buffer against the crowd, but we didn’t so we had to keep moving. We’d cede turf and move further back and eventually ended up crouched under a speaker.”

A rammed dancefloor, while unpleasant, is rarely dangerous — but tragedies do occur. In 2011, two women died at Northampton’s Lava & Ignite club after a DJ’s joke about coaches leaving early caused a stampede for the exit. In 2003, 21 people died at E2 nightclub in Chicago after clubbers panicked and bolted for the exit after bouncers used pepper spray to break up a fight.

“Safety in dance clubs can be a real balancing act,” explains Steve Blake, an event safety specialist and member of the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health. “I have experienced instances myself where there has been a lack of understanding of regulations or they have been over-ridden, leading to dangerous situations.”

And promoters need to make space for people to do what they’ve come for: dance. “When looking at the capacity of venues, you have to consider that people require room to move around and express themselves,” says Blake. People also need to be able to exit the club easily in emergencies, he says.

But what’s making dancefloors feel so uncomfortably busy? While it’s easy to paint the finger at promoters for overselling tickets, that’s not the whole picture.

“With the closure of so many of the larger clubs in London, it places enormous pressure on the venues that are remaining,” explains Alan Miller of the NTIA. “This means that many events can be sold-out in advance at capacity, and pressures can occur at the door.”

Overcrowding is also due to the changing nature of the way we club now.

“I used to think there was a problem with young people not going out any more,” says Bloc festival founder and club owner George Hull, “but I’ve changed my position on that. They just do it differently.”

Time was, you’d go clubbing to a venue you like: Mancuso’s Loft, or Manchester’s Hacienda. But now we go clubbing, for the most part, to see DJs we like. Destination clubs are rare and, as a result, the industry has swung wildly in favour of talent. DJs command enormous fees, because they’re the main draw. Without the right name on the line-up, promoters will struggle to get people through the door.

“It’s virtually impossible to make money from clubbing nowadays, unless you’re a world famous DJ or one of their agents, in which case you’ll make a fortune,” Hull goes on. “This is because there’s a small pool of bankable talent who can reliably sell tickets.”

Because the margins involved are so tight, promoters are faced with the unenviable task of trying to sell enough tickets to make their event profitable — or to even cover costs — without over-selling the event and so, alienating their fans. Sometimes, even experienced promoters get it wrong.

“We’re in a highly leveraged industry,” Hull explains, “and promoters find it very difficult to keep their heads above water. When they strike it lucky with a line-up that does the business, they want to make hay while the sun shines and sell as many tickets as is reasonably possible. It’s usually to make up for past losses.”

“People think you’re just rinsing them for cash,” says Simon Denby of house and techno promoters Percolate, “but promotion really isn’t a money-making game for the vast majority of club nights that are properly in the underground.” When the ability to make a profit can turn on a dime, difficult financial decisions sometimes need to be made. “I understand why people get upset about overcrowding, but often it’s a very difficult balance. Do you want to pay an extra five pounds on the ticket price, or do you want to have more people around?”

All the promoters I reached out to for this piece acknowledged overcrowding is a problem, and explained they usually tried to address the programming to help prevent crushes.

“Spreading out the programming to try and spread the demand is key,” says Woods, but it’s not always that easy.” And sometimes the answer is to choose your venue more carefully. “You can’t have a 500-capacity venue with a 400-capacity room and a 100-capacity room, and book a DJ that will pull in 500 people and then try and palm local DJs off in the other room to rack up more sales," Woods explains.

Also, consider your approach as a punter. “With multi-room venues,” Denby goes on, “people aren’t often up for exploring new sounds. If it’s busy in one room, go and explore something new in another room.”

Miller feels that licensing is key. Give more clubs 24 hour licenses, and you’ll have a smoother flow of people entering and leaving the venue at different times, helping to alleviate over-crowding.

In these challenging times for clubs in general, it's tempting for promoters and club owners to dismiss overcrowding as a necessary evil. But this would be a mistake. Because what's the use of a dancefloor, if people don't have room to actually dance?

Sirin Kale is Staff Writer at Broadly and a regular contributor to Mixmag. Follow her on Twitter

Lawrence Abbott is an artist and freelance creative designer. Follow him on Twitter