Controversial statement? Thinking we (as in all the angels) are all collectively wrong? Hear us out. Before we get into this though the pictures used are from Mythos. Mythos is an excellent club, heck, we go there sometimes, we just used Mythos dance floor as an example

Dance Pads. We have seen them as a dance group slowly creep their way into more and more clubs. They came around as a solution to a problem. The problem was the antiquated dance system’s which was difficult to use, difficult to manage and difficult to explain to “newbies” how to use.

The problem is, that the solution is now becoming a problem of its own.

At the time of these pads slowly making their way out of where they ACTUALLY belong (Country Western clubs) dance systems like T.I.S were difficult to manage. Time’s change though and with those time changing comes a decline in the price of the animations you need to put into those same dance systems.

Dance Pads represent a big issue, especially for clubs like Mythos, Rockin Robin and a few others who have basically covered the majority of their dance floor in them. To be honest, it’s not actually one big single issue, it’s several, which could be impacting the traffic to your club in a very negative way.

1: They discourage groups from going

A group of friends who are bouncing around the events listing or heard of your club end up actually going to your club. One of them has a dance hud, and all their friends join that HUD. If your dance floor is covered in these pads, I can guarantee you that that group will slowly leave one by one within the first 15 minutes. No one wants to line up in a sterilised line formation and dance the same dance as everyone else in the same club if they are used to using their own dances or a dance hud and can’t find the free space to move around because their dance pads are covering the entire floor.

2: They encourage a clique to start forming

All three of us angels have seen it when we go to the same clubs with these dance pads, and the cliques generally stake up most of the front rows in front of the DJ. Now, it’s true that all clubs end up having cliques, but with clubs that have normal dance systems, those little groups of friends scatter themselves across the entire dance floor and don’t concentrate at the front, effectively forming a psychological barrier between them, the DJ and new people coming into your club.

Someone new walks into a club with these pads in them, they see the front stacked 1 or 2 lines deep with friends with no one behind them. What’s that new person going to think? Will they want to pop into a dance pad alone by themselves and basically stand out like a sore thumb? No, they will leave. An “open” dance floor, like Muddys, Peak Lounge or the multitude of others allows the more shy person entering your club to basically “blend in”. Dance Pads don’t.

3: Your club will stagnate

We have seen it a lot. CLubs which should be biting at the heels of the likes of Muddys, Peak Lounge, Totally 80’s etc who are well-staffed, have decent DJ coverage but just can’t quite get to those levels of the other clubs. They have their regulars, but new people generally don’t tend to stay, the regulars begin to wander off to new clubs and the traffic gets lower and lower.

There are reasons Muddys, Peak, Totally 80’s and a whole host of other clubs have those numbers, and one of those reasons is their open dance floor.

Dance Pads Don’t Belong In Most Clubs

The heading covers most of it. These dance pad systems first started showing up where they actually belong, in a country club for the patrons to line dance to modern country music. A general SL club-goer who enters a rock club, 80’s club or EDM club and see’s lines and lines of people immediately will think they have teleported into a country club and that niggling problem will remain in the back of their minds until they eventually decide to TP out and go somewhere else.

Dance Pads solved a problem in the beginning. However the problem of dance machines like TIS being overly confusing isn’t really a problem anymore with the numerous updates that have happened to that system, and other systems like it over the past half-decade.

Numerous awesome clubs who have these pads covering their dance floor from one end to another are now starting to scare off a growing number of event hoppers, including us, the Angels. We only tolerate those pads in a few clubs (like Mythos) because they have good DJ’s. However if we teleport into a quieter club with under 15 people in it, and we see those pads on the floor? We instantly leave.

If you are a club owner and you are using these…things. Try an experiment. Leave a big open spot in the middle of the dance floor with no pads, or better yet, if your dance pads are covering your floor from one end to the other, remove the first two rows (in front of the DJ), a middle row, and a back row…I bet you start to notice a difference in traffic within a month.

Written/Edited by Liandra Aries