Dance first, film later. Since 2017.

Solomun has been telling people to put their phones away on his Pacha Ibiza dancefloor every summer for nine seasons. The rest of the industry only just caught up.

Solomun’s Solomun+1 residency opened its 12th season at Pacha Ibiza on Sunday 31 May. Among the things that came back was a small printed flyer his team has quietly handed out at the door since 2017. The wording is gentle. The pattern is not.

“Since 2017, every Sunday at Pacha, we’ve placed a small note at the door,” Solomun wrote in his Instagram post for the opener. “Not a rule. Not a ban. Just a gentle reminder of what this night is really about. The music sounds different when you’re fully inside it. The room feels different when the phones are away. The night stays with you longer when you actually lived it.” He signed off: “Dance first. Film later.”

We have written about phones-down music already this year in 'The Folder Fred Opened'. Fred again…'s USB002 tour built the entire format around it. The thing easy to miss until you start looking is that Solomun has been doing this longer than Fred has been on a poster.

The lineage

Berghain in Berlin has refused phones in the room for two decades, and fabric in London does the same on its main floor. Michael Bibi’s Solid Grooves announced last month that it has banned phones across its entire 2026 DC-10 residency. The lineage runs through clubs first and to mainstream pop second.

The data backs the pattern. According to Eventbrite, the number of phone-free events globally grew 567 per cent between 2024 and 2025, with US attendance up 913 per cent (EDM.com, 2 June 2026). What was a Berlin underground stance ten years ago is now a deliberate house policy at the biggest commercial venues in the world.

What it means for photographers

From the side of the pit where we shoot, this is a quietly important shift. A phone-free night does not mean a photo-free night. It means the only authoritative images of the room come from people who were paid to be there with the access to make them well. When Solomun, Fred again or Bibi choose this format, they are handing the editorial record of the night to the photographers in the room, not the crowd with their hands up. That changes what the work is worth.

It also changes how the room reads. The energy in a phones-down room reads different from a festival show where every face is half-lit by a screen.

The dates

Solomun+1 runs every Sunday at Pacha Ibiza from 31 May through 4 October 2026. The flyer will be at the door, with the same wording as nine years ago. The room is unchanged. The phones still go in the car.