Last June, Skrillex and Fred Again — two of the best-known practitioners of electronic dance music and its many subgenres — got more than 25,000 people to swarm to the still-pretty-dormant Civic Center Plaza, on a Saturday night, no less.
I had a hunch that the Skrillex-Fred Again show, along with things like Portola and the many EDM residencies and festivals at Bill Graham and the Midway, was a harbinger of even more dance music booming across San Francisco. That hunch has come very, very true in recent weeks and months: Downtown First Thursdays and this upcoming NBA All-Star Weekend have made EDM acts and DJs a big part of their event lineups. Make no mistake: Dance music is a core component of the city’s downtown recovery plan.
Scotty Jacobs, then a supervisorial candidate for District 5, was reveling among the thousands at the Skrillex-Fred Again show. It felt fitting, he recalled, that the show happened right after he launched his campaign. One of his tentpole platforms: making San Francisco the dance music capital of the West Coast.
It seemed, perhaps, a bit less grave a concern than the other myriad issues befalling San Francisco. Despite coming in a distant third — behind then-incumbent Sup. Dean Preston and eventual victor Sup. Bilal Mahmood — there is something to be said for a sustainable way to revitalize downtown outside of coercive return-to-office pushes. (To wit, the city in September announced its four entertainment zones — venues that permit to-go liquor sales, live music, and the debauchery that comes with that combo.)
“Dance music really is one of the places where I feel like the energy of our city is captured best,” Jacobs, who gave himself the moniker of “Party Zone” during the campaign, told me. “It's times, spaces where you have people of all ages, of all backgrounds, of all identities and orientations, all coming together as humans to have a shared experience.”
Perhaps it sounds a bit froufrou — the sort of thing you hear in the wee hours of a post-party bliss out. But he’s not alone. Another Planet Entertainment vice president Mary Conde told me something similar last June, when I had spoken to her about Bill Graham Civic Auditorium being an early adopter of this EDM push, describing the rave community as a Deadhead-esque “family affair.”
That sort of camaraderie and high energy was in mind when Katy Birnbaum, the CEO and founder of Into The Streets, began working on Downtown First Thursdays.
“We hit on a formula where, before that, folks didn't really believe you could necessarily have events at night,” Birnbaum said. “There’s been kind of a lot of pushback around that, as well as even just coming downtown.”
Live music, Birnbaum said, was key to getting folks out of their WFH gear and partying on 2nd Street. It helped that they snagged big-name musicians like local genre-hopping hero Toro y Moi and meme princess-turned-hyperpop queen Rebecca Black for sets at Downtown First Thursdays, along with beloved DJs like Noodles and Rich Medina.
That pedigree of talent gets a steady influx of people attending, but the possibility of big acts making surprise appearances brings in different audiences: For a chilly month like December, which Birnbaum feared would have worse turnout, she planned on having Black make an appearance to lure people in. That event produced the series’ best-ever turnout.
Birnbaum anticipates more and more street events — night markets, block parties, and fairs — featuring live music as a way to build crowds. “There’s only so many shopping shuffles you can do,” she said.
And that’ll likely only intensify, especially if the NBA’s concert series at Pier 48, which features EDM mainstays The Chainsmokers and Zedd along with musicians-slash-Celebrity All-Star Game competitors Noah Kahan and 2 Chainz, goes swimmingly this weekend. The city will likely look to live music — and dance music in particular — as a way to get more people downtown. Hopefully there won’t be too many noise complaints on either side of the Bay.
