BPM® · This isn't about Hard Techno. It’s about Power.

Uncover why allegations in the electronic music scene reflect structural silence, power imbalance and a justice system that rarely protects victims.

It's not a sudden crisis. It’s the Symptom.

Why the allegations shaking the hard techno scene are not a sudden crisis — but the delayed, inevitable collision between unchecked power, structural silence, and a justice system that has always failed victims far more reliably than it has failed perpetrators.

#MeToo did not create violence. It removed silence.

Electronic music is not collapsing. It is experiencing delayed accountability.

The hard techno scene is in upheaval. Allegations of sexual misconduct, grooming, and assault have surfaced against several prominent artists. Social media has accelerated the reaction: screenshots, testimonies, anonymous documents, threads dissecting every detail. Agencies have distanced themselves. Tours have been cancelled. Comment sections have become courtrooms. It feels, as it always does, like an explosion. It is not.

What we are witnessing is not the sudden emergence of a crisis. It is the delayed surfacing of one that has always been present. And unless we resist the gravitational pull of names, outrage, and cancellation cycles — and choose instead to examine what lies beneath — this conversation will end where every previous version has ended: in noise, not change.

This article is not about individuals. It is not a courtroom verdict, nor an exoneration. It is an attempt to elevate a debate that social media, by its very architecture, is designed to flatten.

Uncover why allegations in the electronic music scene reflect structural silence, power imbalance and a justice system that rarely protects victims.

It's not a sudden crisis. It’s the Symptom.

Why the allegations shaking the hard techno scene are not a sudden crisis — but the delayed, inevitable collision between unchecked power, structural silence, and a justice system that has always failed victims far more reliably than it has failed perpetrators.

#MeToo did not create violence. It removed silence.

Electronic music is not collapsing. It is experiencing delayed accountability.

The hard techno scene is in upheaval. Allegations of sexual misconduct, grooming, and assault have surfaced against several prominent artists. Social media has accelerated the reaction: screenshots, testimonies, anonymous documents, threads dissecting every detail. Agencies have distanced themselves. Tours have been cancelled. Comment sections have become courtrooms. It feels, as it always does, like an explosion. It is not.

What we are witnessing is not the sudden emergence of a crisis. It is the delayed surfacing of one that has always been present. And unless we resist the gravitational pull of names, outrage, and cancellation cycles — and choose instead to examine what lies beneath — this conversation will end where every previous version has ended: in noise, not change.

This article is not about individuals. It is not a courtroom verdict, nor an exoneration. It is an attempt to elevate a debate that social media, by its very architecture, is designed to flatten.

The question is not whether all men are responsible. The question is: when something is wrong, who speaks up? Who interrupts the joke? Who checks their friend? Who refuses to look away?

- Amélie Lens

DJ & Producer

This Isn’t about Hard Techno. It’s About Power.

Every era of public reckoning presents itself as unprecedented. The fall of Harvey Weinstein felt unprecedented. Jeffrey Epstein felt unprecedented. The Pelicot case in France — in which Gisèle Pelicot revealed that her husband of fifty years had drugged her and invited dozens of men to assault her over nearly a decade — felt unprecedented.

Each revelation provokes the same sequence: shock, fury, polarization, and then, within weeks, a return to ambient forgetting. But data has never supported the idea that abuse is rare. It has only supported the idea that silence is common.

The Gisèle Pelicot case crystallized something that data has long established but that culture persistently refuses to absorb: the abuser is rarely the stranger in the alley. Far more often, he is the person in the room — the trusted figure, the respected colleague, the beloved partner. Dominique Pelicot was, by all social appearances, a devoted husband and grandfather.

The predators are proximate and they are protected precisely because proximity makes accusation unthinkable.

The Boys Club dynamic

Epstein extends the same logic into the domain of institutional power. His network did not persist because individuals failed to notice. It persisted because the people who noticed stood to lose too much by saying so. What sustained it was not ignorance. It was calculus.

The electronic music scene is not Epstein network. But the architecture is recognizable: concentrated prestige, informal hierarchies, career dependence on access, and the rational silence of those who know that speaking costs more than staying quiet.

The culture of bystander tolerance — the "bros" who laugh along, who look away, who protect reputations over people — is not a peripheral feature of the problem. It is its sustaining infrastructure. The structural reforms are necessary. They will not be sufficient. A licensing requirement does not, by itself, produce a man who checks his friend. A reporting channel does not, by itself, produce a colleague who intervenes.

The question is not whether all men are responsible. The question is: when something is wrong, who speaks up? Who interrupts the joke? Who checks their friend? Who refuses to look away?

- Amélie Lens

DJ & Producer

This Isn’t about Hard Techno. It’s About Power.

Every era of public reckoning presents itself as unprecedented. The fall of Harvey Weinstein felt unprecedented. Jeffrey Epstein felt unprecedented. The Pelicot case in France — in which Gisèle Pelicot revealed that her husband of fifty years had drugged her and invited dozens of men to assault her over nearly a decade — felt unprecedented.

Each revelation provokes the same sequence: shock, fury, polarization, and then, within weeks, a return to ambient forgetting. But data has never supported the idea that abuse is rare. It has only supported the idea that silence is common.

The Gisèle Pelicot case crystallized something that data has long established but that culture persistently refuses to absorb: the abuser is rarely the stranger in the alley. Far more often, he is the person in the room — the trusted figure, the respected colleague, the beloved partner. Dominique Pelicot was, by all social appearances, a devoted husband and grandfather.

The predators are proximate and they are protected precisely because proximity makes accusation unthinkable.

The Boys Club dynamic

Epstein extends the same logic into the domain of institutional power. His network did not persist because individuals failed to notice. It persisted because the people who noticed stood to lose too much by saying so. What sustained it was not ignorance. It was calculus.

The electronic music scene is not Epstein network. But the architecture is recognizable: concentrated prestige, informal hierarchies, career dependence on access, and the rational silence of those who know that speaking costs more than staying quiet.

The culture of bystander tolerance — the "bros" who laugh along, who look away, who protect reputations over people — is not a peripheral feature of the problem. It is its sustaining infrastructure. The structural reforms are necessary. They will not be sufficient. A licensing requirement does not, by itself, produce a man who checks his friend. A reporting channel does not, by itself, produce a colleague who intervenes.

From a young age, girls are taught how to behave: « Don't dress like that, don't drink too much, don't stay out late.» Rarely do we invest the same energy in teaching boys about boundaries, respect and intervention.

- Amélie Lens

DJ & Producer

It's a deeper systemic failure system

There is a dimension of this that structural reform alone cannot reach — one that Amélie Lens named directly, and that the UK Parliament report, in its conclusion, identified as the deepest problem of all. Too often, problems of discrimination, harassment and misogyny are seen as women's issues — that it is their role to experience, avoid, overcome, withstand, analyse, discuss and understand misogyny so men don't have to.

Amélie Lens articulates the same point from the inside of the industry: « From a young age, girls are taught how to behave: don't dress like that, don't drink too much, don't stay out late. Rarely do we invest the same energy in teaching boys about boundaries, respect and intervention. »

These outcomes require a different kind of cultural education — one that, as the Parliament report bluntly concludes, must begin in schools, aimed specifically at boys, and must address misogyny, consent, and gender-based violence not as abstract topics but as behavioral norms that require active unlearning.

We are tired. The dancefloor is our home and the backstage is our workplace, but neither feels safe for us. Safety has been treated as a "women's problem" for far too.

- Amélie Lens

DJ & Producer

Awareness is the foundation of any revolution

Electronic music is not uniquely immoral. It is uniquely visible right now and if the industry wants to claim cultural progressiveness, it must confront the structural imbalance with structural reform. This article is not about resolving every layer of the problem, It's about identifying its depth.

The hard techno reckoning is not the collapse of a genre, It's the collision between mythology and mathematics :

Myth : Nightlife is a liberated space immune to societal power dynamics

Mathematics : Power, when unchecked, produces predictable outcomes.

The discomfort this reality produces is not incidental. It is the point. For half of humanity, it is not discomfort — it is the ambient texture of daily life. Acknowledging that distinction is the beginning of understanding it. Accepting an uncomfortable reality does not mean endorsing it. It means refusing the luxury of looking away — a luxury that, it bears repeating, only some people have.

Over the coming days, we will work through the structural and cultural mechanisms that make these conditions not only possible but predictable — not to prosecute, but to illuminate. Awareness is the precondition for education, and education is the only durable engine of change.

We will examine the numbers behind the noise; the deconstruction of inner masculine biais; the culture of bystander tolerance; the psychology of idolization; the role of algorithmic amplification in reshaping power and visibility; the specific dynamics of alcohol, substances, and consent in nightlife spaces; the architecture of backstage access; the limits and necessity of harm-reduction initiatives; and the legislative reforms the industry can no longer defer.

The Dancefloor, at its best, represents something genuinely worth defending: The collective energy from shared experience and the temporary dissolution of social hierarchy, gender equity or diversity in a common space. But that aspiration cannot survive on atmosphere alone. It requires architecture.

And architecture requires honesty about the conditions under which the space has been unsafe.

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Written by Alexandre Trochut

Alexandre Trochut