On the final Saturday night of 2012, Jesse Waits entered the Encore resort in Las Vegas and took a private elevator to the seventh floor, where a young d.j. named Afrojack was staying. Waits wore a black Tom Ford suit without a tie, and he was texting on two phones at once. Thirty-seven and handsome, with straw-colored hair, Waits is the managing partner of XS, a club on the Encore’s ground floor, which features a vast indoor dance space and an elevated open-air stage that looks out over a swimming pool surrounded by palm trees. According to the magazine Nightclub & Bar, XS is the top-grossing night club in the country, bringing in between several hundred thousand and a million dollars a night. The Encore’s owner, the casino magnate Steve Wynn, likes to joke that the club “has a perfect name.”
There are four dance clubs inside the Encore and its sister resort, the Wynn. According to an executive at the company, the clubs’ combined revenue last year was a hundred and eighty million dollars, which was more than the slot machines earned. (The Wynn’s press office disputed all figures related to salaries or revenue, but declined to provide accurate numbers.) “Half of Steve Wynn’s profit comes from the night clubs,” Andrew Sasson, a rival club owner, told me. “Gambling is an amenity now.”
The clubs achieved this success by championing electronic dance music, or E.D.M.—an unwieldy name for a sleek sound marked by propulsive kick drums, dopamine-rush synthesizers, and soaring vocals. E.D.M. songs are often punctuated by a “drop,” in which a steady beat abruptly shifts gears, jolting listeners into a state of joyful delirium. At a time when the music industry seems increasingly anemic, E.D.M. is one of the few robust genres around; it has influenced Lady Gaga and the Black Eyed Peas, and has made celebrities of several skinny young Swedes.
Teen-age fans seek out E.D.M. online, or at festivals such as Electric Daisy Carnival, which is held in Las Vegas each June. But listeners of legal drinking age often prefer to experience the music at a club like XS, where gold-plated molds of female torsos hang over the bar. Customers pay from five thousand to twenty-five thousand dollars to reserve one of the banquette tables near the dance floor, which are stocked with Belvedere vodka and Perrier-Jouët champagne, along with silver ice buckets, carafes of orange juice and cranberry juice, and glass tumblers stacked in small ziggurats. After gambling revenues decreased during the financial crash, night clubs like XS became increasingly vital to the Las Vegas economy. Resorts bid millions of dollars to secure exclusive contracts with d.j.s, whose faces adorn billboards on the Strip next to those for Cirque du Soleil and Celine Dion. “Las Vegas goes through cycles,” Waits told me. “And, right now, if you don’t have d.j.s, you’re not relevant.”
Last year, on the annual power list compiled by the magazine DJ, seven of the top ten d.j.s were under contract with Wynn Resorts. They included Tiësto, of the Netherlands, who was, according to Forbes, the top-grossing d.j. of 2012; David Guetta, of France, who has sold more than eight million albums worldwide; Skrillex, a six-time Grammy winner from Los Angeles; and Deadmau5, a Canadian who performs in an oversized, L.E.D.-covered mouse helmet.
Waits employs forty-one headlining d.j.s, and maintaining friendships with them is part of his job. He is especially close to Afrojack. When the d.j. is in town, they often go to a gun range together, or barbecue on Waits’s back porch. “I’m like his big brother,” Waits said.
Upstairs, Waits knocked on the door of the suite, and Afrojack, wearing Louis Vuitton sweatpants, a Louis Vuitton T-shirt, and black athletic socks, greeted him with a hug. Afrojack, who is twenty-six, was born Nick van de Wall, in a suburb of Rotterdam. He is six feet nine and stocky, with a sculpted goatee and a wide smile. Both his size and his demeanor suggest a friendly cartoon bear.
Before Afrojack was widely known, Waits saw him perform. “I know this music,” Waits said. “I know what’s good. He wasn’t as melodic as some of the other d.j.s. He had this unique sound that was a little harder, a little more like hip-hop.” Waits was confident that it was a sound he could sell. “And I liked his personality, his brand. He’s this gigantic guy with all this energy, kind of like a big kid.”
In 2010, Afrojack became the first d.j. to sign an exclusive contract with the Wynn. The resort invested in Afrojack the way a record label might have, spending millions of dollars to boost his profile. His fame, in turn, helped to draw more—and wealthier—patrons to Wynn’s clubs. Because new tourists constantly arrive in Las Vegas, Afrojack can perform there dozens of times a year and sell out every time. Since signing with the Wynn, Afrojack has collaborated with Usher and Chris Brown, and produced a No. 1 single for Pitbull. He became known to the tabloids when he briefly dated Paris Hilton. Another girlfriend, with whom he has since broken up, is the mother of his eighteen-month-old daughter, Vegas.
“How’s it looking tonight?” Afrojack said. D.j.s often ask Waits this question, and he always gives a similar answer.
“It’s good,” he said. “Tickets are sold out. Tables looking good.”
Afrojack asked Waits if he was enjoying his new Ferrari. Waits blushed. He came to the night-life industry after volunteering for a conservation group and working as a snowboarding instructor, and he seems ambivalent about living ostentatiously. Afrojack has no such reservations. He told Waits that he, too, had recently bought a Ferrari, as well as a Mercedes and three Audis, one of which he’d given to his mother. “There’s nothing cooler than buying your mom a nice car,” he said, beaming. “She’s happy as a motherfucker.”
Waits was determined to keep Afrojack and his mother happy. In a few months, two new dance clubs were scheduled to open on the Strip: one at Mandalay Bay, called Light, and one at the MGM Grand, called Hakkasan. Both were trying to lure d.j.s away from the Wynn. It was as if Waits had won the World Series three years in a row, and now two expansion teams were trying to poach his free agents. “We can’t afford to keep everybody,” Waits admitted. The d.j. market was entering a bubble. Skrillex had been earning fifty thousand dollars a show. “Now he’s worth five times that,” Waits said.
Shortly before 1 A.M., Afrojack put on sneakers and headed to Tryst, a club in the Wynn Las Vegas, which is adjacent to the Encore. He slipped through the kitchen, “Goodfellas” style, and entered the club by a side door, trailing a bouncer named Big Rob, who led with his sternum as he plowed through the crowd. Afrojack stepped into the d.j. booth, and a giant projection of his face materialized behind him, rippling against Tryst’s signature ninety-foot waterfall.
Like most E.D.M. d.j.s, Afrojack both creates his own tracks and spins hits by other artists. He spent the next two hours standing before a laptop and a mixing board, punctuating musical climaxes with karate chops and fist pumps. Waits, who rarely drinks, watched from the side of the stage, sipping a bottle of San Pellegrino.
When Afrojack played his most popular song, “Take Over Control,” a column of waitresses appeared, carrying a thirty-litre bottle of Armand de Brignac champagne that a customer had just bought for a hundred thousand dollars. Then came the drop—a march-like snare buildup replaced by a four-on-the-floor kick-drum beat—and Afrojack raised his arms in triumph. The crowd roared, climbing on couches and taking videos with their cell phones. The Wynn clubs were made for such moments: alcohol flowed, if not freely; the room was packed with beautiful people, most of whom had waited for hours, or had paid exorbitant amounts of money to avoid doing so. Being on the inside, a few feet from a celebrity d.j., felt like a victory.
Around 3 A.M., a pair of confetti cannons went off, showering the club with red, green, silver, and gold ribbons. Two of the green ones landed on a lamp and began to melt, their edges curling like wilted spinach. A few others fluttered onto Waits, who brushed them off the shoulders of his suit jacket. A club employee appeared, carrying a portable air compressor. As the floor vibrated with each bass note, he knelt by Waits and shot out a stream of air, cleaning the ground around his shoes.
One afternoon a few weeks earlier, the country star Shania Twain rode up Las Vegas Boulevard on a black stallion named Molesso. While Twain’s song “Man! I Feel Like a Woman” played over a loudspeaker, the horse trotted past Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville and onto a red carpet in front of the fountains at Caesars Palace. Twain dismounted and accepted a bouquet of white roses from the casino’s president. The stunt, promoting Twain’s upcoming residency at Caesars, recalled Frank Sinatra’s arrival at the grand opening of the Dunes, in 1955, atop a Bactrian camel. Sinatra had worn a turban and an embroidered robe; Twain, in black leather pants and boots, went hatless.
Twain was scheduled to perform sixty times in two years. During the shows, she would enter on a flying motorcycle, and perfumes from Twain’s line of fragrances would be pumped into the auditorium. Molesso, and a white Andalusian horse named El Alcazár, would also have roles. In addition to Twain, Caesars Palace hosts Rod Stewart and Elton John; Britney Spears recently announced a two-year residency at Planet Hollywood. These are the spectacles that Las Vegas does best—and the kinds of high-overhead production that clubs like XS are helping to make obsolete.
“Those shows have just gotten killed,” Sean Christie, another Wynn club manager, told me. He said that Vegas resorts often treat big shows as loss leaders, to entice customers into the casinos. The Colosseum at Caesars Palace has forty-three hundred seats. “If we did forty-three hundred people at XS on a Saturday, we’d be out of business,” Christie said. On a typical Saturday night, the club draws between six thousand and eight thousand people. The Wynn’s four night clubs average a profit of fifty per cent.
When I met with Christie at his office, he and ten of his employees were preparing to greet the d.j. Diplo—it was his birthday, and they needed a cake. Christie and Waits scour live shows and Web sites for new talent, and they pride themselves on being able to spot stars early. “We take chances on a lot of guys,” Waits told me. “We bet on the right people, and we lock them in.”
In Christie’s office, two dry-erase boards had been turned into a wall-size calendar. The square for each day contained two numbers: the first, in red, was the d.j.’s fee for the night; the second, in black, was the club’s expected take. To determine how much the Wynn could pay a d.j. and still turn a profit, Christie and Waits used a formula that included everything from the number of a d.j.’s Instagram followers to the weather forecast. Still, Vegas being Vegas, luck is a factor. In August, 2011, a young Scottish d.j. named Calvin Harris, who at that time was popular in Britain but little known in America, signed a twelve-month deal with the Wynn, for forty thousand dollars per show. A month later, Harris released “We Found Love,” a collaboration with Rihanna, which became the No. 1 single in America for ten weeks. Soon, the Wynn was making nearly a million dollars each time Harris performed, while still paying him forty thousand.
A maxim in Vegas goes that the person who invented gambling was smart, but the person who invented chips was a genius. The same could be said of night clubs and bottle service. Last year, XS earned more than eighty per cent of its revenue from alcohol sales. A bottle of Grey Goose that wholesales for forty-five dollars costs more than six hundred in the club—a markup of more than a thousand per cent. The biggest customers often spend half a million dollars on drinks in a night. Because the clubs are often full, the extravagance of the bar tabs distinguishes a great night from a good one. “It’s a whole new metric,” will.i.am, the leader of the Black Eyed Peas, who also d.j.s at the Wynn, told me. “What makes a hit in pop music is how many times a song gets played on the radio. A hit in d.j.-land is how much alcohol is bought.”
Originally, a “disk jockey” spun records on the radio or at a club. In the seventies, d.j.s began remixing popular songs; eventually, many started producing their own tracks. These days, d.j.s promote themselves on Soundcloud, and use club gigs to spin their own songs alongside radio hits. “You put your music on the Internet for free, and promoters fly you out to d.j. and pay you three million bucks a year,” will.i.am said.
On a Saturday afternoon in January, an S.U.V. delivered Afrojack from a house he was renting in West Hollywood to a private airstrip near Los Angeles International Airport. His pilot for the day, a genial Finn named Beku, escorted him onto the runway, where a six-seat British Aerospace 124 was waiting. Afrojack was headed to Las Vegas for two nights. The forty-five-minute flight was going to cost him five thousand dollars, plus a five-hundred-dollar cleaning fee for smoking on board. “I could fly commercial and make twenty-five per cent more money,” he said. “But then I wouldn’t sleep, and I wouldn’t be comfortable.”
The plane took off shortly before dusk. One of Afrojack’s tour managers, Sujit Kundu, was on the flight, as was Antony Preston, a songwriter who often works with will.i.am. Afrojack was making an album that would contain both instrumental club tracks and radio-friendly songs with vocals. He had already spent time in the studio with Rihanna, Snoop Lion, and the producer Dr. Luke; now he wanted Preston’s help with some of the hooks.
Afrojack spent a few minutes watching the sun set. Then he lit a Marlboro, opened his MacBook, and cued up a slow-building track with swirling, dreamy synthesizers. A female voice sang, “Don’t wake me up.”
Across the aisle, Preston shook his head. “Chris Brown just did that,” he said. Brown had recently released a song with the Italian d.j. Benny Benassi, called “Don’t Wake Me Up.”
“But I made this before Chris Brown!” Afrojack protested.
“It doesn’t matter,” Preston said. Afrojack could keep the music, but he couldn’t use the lyrics “for, like, four years, at least.”
The next track was darker, more urgent, with another imperative hook: “Don’t blink.” “That’s good,” Preston said. “But you need to change it to ‘Don’t sleep.’ People who don’t speak English don’t know what ‘blink’ means, but everybody in the world knows ‘sleep.’ ”
The third track was a piano-heavy instrumental in need of a vocal. Preston teased out a melody: “I’m a lighthouse,” he sang. “I’ll guide you back.” He tried a few variations, then settled on one. Afrojack liked the vocal line, but he wasn’t sure about the song’s structure. “It’s a thirty-second verse, a thirty-second pre-chorus, and a thirty-second chorus,” he said. “Is that right for a radio song?”
“You don’t go by time,” Preston said. “You go by bars.”
Afrojack cocked his head. “What’s ‘bars’?”
Outside the window, the Luxor hotel’s pyramid came into view. “Vegas!” Afrojack said. The plane descended near the Strip, flying over a billboard featuring Afrojack’s face. Next to it was a billboard for Hakkasan, one of the rival clubs.
A few months earlier, Hakkasan had sent personalized pitch books to the Wynn d.j.s it wanted to poach: Tiësto, Calvin Harris, Deadmau5, and Afrojack. The books described the perks that a Hakkasan residency would offer, including a chauffeured Maybach limousine, access to a fleet of private jets, and a two-story SkyLoft suite with a butler. Hakkasan was also offering more money. At the Wynn, Afrojack earned a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a night. He said that Hakkasan promised him two hundred and fifty thousand, and more shows. Still, he was struggling with the decision. “I’ve had some legendary nights at XS,” he said. “And I feel like, if I’m loyal now, maybe if I go through a tough time they’ll be loyal to me.”
Afrojack arrived at the Encore and checked into his favorite suite. “Every time I’m here, it feels like I’m in my house,” he said. With six hours until showtime, he took off his shoes, bought “The Dark Knight Rises” on pay-per-view, and ordered room service: nachos with ground beef and a Diet Coke. “The nachos here are the best,” he said. “I don’t eat them anywhere else.”
Afrojack was an introverted child who excelled at math and took apart computers for fun. He lived with his mother, Debby, who was an aerobics teacher, and they had little money. “If we went to McDonald’s, it was a good month,” he said. He drew anime-style comics, and learned English from Eminem albums and “The Bold and the Beautiful.” In school, he was nicknamed Afro because of his hair—his mother is white, and his father, whom he has never met, is black. House music, the precursor of E.D.M., was born in the seventies in the gay and black night clubs of Chicago, but today the vast majority of dance-music fans are white. With the exception of Afrojack and a few others, the élite E.D.M. d.j.s are all white and male.
When Afrojack started going to clubs in Rotterdam, his shyness disappeared. “For an insecure person, it’s the best place to be,” he said. “You can’t see shit, you can’t hear shit—you’re there for the music.” Now, he tries to bring the same joy to others. “I feel personally responsible for the night being great,” he said. “I’m not just trying to make a d.j. set. I’m trying to make a party.”
He has produced dance music for more than a decade, and says that he would do it even if it weren’t his job. But these days when he writes a song his ambition is to create a hit. “I know what people like, and I give it to them,” he said. Although he has no formal training, and cannot read music, he has an intuitive talent for assembling the parts of a song so that they deliver the maximum impact. To illustrate, he played a song called “Beyond,” from the latest album by the French duo Daft Punk. “It’s cool,” Afrojack said. “But where’s the hook? Where’s the drop?” Then he played one of his own unreleased songs. “Sonically, it’s not half as genius as Daft Punk,” he said. “But the kids are gonna love it, because it has all the elements they love.”
Just after midnight, Waits stopped by to visit. “How’s it looking?” Afrojack asked him.
“It’s sold out,” Waits said. “It’s slammed.”
Kundu, Afrojack’s tour manager, laughed. “We go through this every time!”
Afrojack took out his laptop and went back to work. He makes his songs using a program called FL Studio, which he has stocked with a library of more than two hundred thousand samples, from synthesizer whooshes to snare hits. Lately, he’d been working on a track with a thick, fuzzy bass riff. On his screen, the song, which he called “Rock Star,” appeared as a series of red and green horizontal bars. Zooming in on a segment representing six seconds of bass, he equalized and compressed the sound to get the timbre he wanted. The song’s tempo was a hundred and twenty-eight beats per minute—faster than a traditional pop song, but standard for E.D.M.—and as he worked his knees bounced in double time. He absent-mindedly lit several cigarettes, ashing them into a glass of Diet Coke. Nearly an hour later, after replaying the six-second chunk hundreds of times, he took off his headphones. “Got it,” he said. He transferred the song to a thumb drive that held two hundred of his own songs, as well as a thousand tracks by other artists, and slipped the drive into the front pocket of his jeans.
A few minutes later, Afrojack was onstage at XS. He put on his headphones and inserted the drive into a device called a C.D.J., a pseudo-turntable that allows him to mix digital files the way d.j.s once manipulated vinyl records. He played for a few hours, taking occasional swigs from a bottle of vodka. When “Rock Star” came on, the crowd—mostly well-dressed Angelenos in their early to mid-twenties—cheered more loudly than it had all night.
At 4 A.M., Afrojack left the stage, dropped his shoes off in his room, and headed to an after-party in the suite of a friend, the French d.j. Cedric Gervais, who had performed at a different Wynn club that night. A few members of the Denver Broncos were there, and a young cosmetology student in black short shorts went around offering small white tablets of MDMA, or Molly, the drug of choice for many clubgoers. (Gervais denies throwing a party.)
Afrojack stayed until five-thirty. “For the record, that was not my after-party,” he said, on the way back to his room. “I don’t do drugs. I don’t do anything!” He slipped his key card in the door, but the light flashed red. He tried it again. “It’s not working,” he said, groaning. He went to get a new key, padding to the lobby in his socks.
One of the opening d.j.s at XS is a round, bald man who performs under the name Warren Peace. He plays most nights before the main act, from eleven to one, and for another hour after the headliner leaves. Peace, who learned to spin on vinyl, prides himself on his virtuosity. Afrojack calls him “the best resident d.j. in the world.” Still, he is an employee of the club, like a cocktail waitress or a security guard, and his modest salary reflects that.
One morning, I met Peace for a buffet breakfast at the Wynn. He had ridden his bicycle to the hotel, as he did most days, and that afternoon he was driving his children to a swim meet. Peace began d.j.ing at the radio station of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in 1988, and he had watched the local dance scene evolve from desert parties and warehouse raves to a well-regulated leisure industry.
For decades, there were no dance clubs on the Strip; the big resorts worried that clubs would distract customers from gambling. In 1995, the Rio added a club, and soon other resorts did, too. Most of them played an “open format” of hip-hop, Top Forty, Michael Jackson, and classic rock. Prominent dance d.j.s performed occasionally, but none established a residency until 2008, when the British trance producer Paul Oakenfold started a weekly gig at the Palms. XS opened the next year, and by the time Afrojack signed his contract, in 2010, the Wynn clubs featured E.D.M. five nights a week.
I went with Peace one night to see Tiësto perform at XS. The line to get in was as long as a football field; inside, there was barely enough room to walk, much less dance. There was surprisingly little dancing going on. (“They shouldn’t even call it dance music,” will.i.am told me. “They should call it look-at-the-d.j.-and-get-drunk music.”)
At 1:18 A.M., Tiësto appeared, wearing his own brand of headphones and a butterscotch leather jacket. He took a shot of Jägermeister, stepped into the booth, and played “Can’t Stop Me,” by Afrojack. Near the lip of the stage, a young woman in stilettos started dancing on the arm of a couch, and a busboy motioned for her to get down.
“I won’t fall!” the woman told him.
“You’ll fall,” he said.
She danced for fifteen more seconds, then fell.
Tiësto’s set was a jukebox of familiar dance music: Calvin Harris, Swedish House Mafia, Chris Brown’s “Don’t Wake Me Up.” At one point, Tiësto high-fived a friend while chugging a pint of Heineken. Later, in search of a rest room, he left the stage for four minutes. The crowd did not seem to care.
“These guys can be on autopilot every night, if they want,” Peace yelled into my ear. He had seen some headliners perform the same set two nights in a row. Some of the most famous d.j.s, he explained, are better at making songs than at mixing them. “The guy who designed the Camaro can’t necessarily drive it,” he said. Still, it was the middle of winter, and several girls in minidresses were splashing around, barefoot, in the shallow end of the pool. “I can’t do that,” Peace said.
Afrojack told me that Peace’s talent at mixing wasn’t enough: “As long as you don’t have your own songs, you don’t stand out.” Peace recognized this. He had recently bought a copy of FL Studio, and he had been tinkering with the software backstage during the headliners’ sets. He was looking forward to an upcoming Australian tour, when he would have more time to learn. “I’m going to really get into it,” he said.
At 4:14 A.M., Tiësto unplugged his headphones and thanked the crowd. Peace entered the booth. “Everybody make some noise for Tiësto!” he said. He cued up his first song, and the crowd began shuffling out.
In January, the Wynn announced its d.j. lineup for 2013. Calvin Harris, Tiësto, and Deadmau5 were all decamping for Hakkasan, and Skrillex had signed a contract with Light. Waits said that, despite his years of building relationships, it had all come down to money: Hakkasan would pay Calvin Harris roughly three hundred thousand dollars per show; Deadmau5 would earn even more. (Neil Moffitt, the C.E.O. of Hakkasan, declined to discuss specific figures, except to say that Waits’s numbers were “bullshit.”)
Hakkasan, Ltd., is controlled by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al Nahyan, a prince in Abu Dhabi’s royal family. To non-Emiratis, Sheikh Mansour is best known as the majority owner of Manchester City Football Club. For decades, Manchester City had been overshadowed by its local rival, Manchester United. When Mansour bought the team, five years ago, he spent nearly six hundred million dollars buying up talent from around the world; in 2012, the club won its first Premier League title in forty-four years. Mansour evidently wants to repeat this formula with d.j.s. So far, he has spent more than a hundred million dollars on Hakkasan Las Vegas.
Afrojack had been tempted by Hakkasan’s offer, but he had decided to stay. He worried about the club’s long-term profitability. Besides, he had been happiest when he was a teen-ager d.j.ing on Crete, earning just enough to pay his rent. “I have no idea what I’m supposed to do with all this money,” he said.
Christie and Waits were doing their best to stay optimistic. “We feel like we signed some pretty big free agents ourselves,” Christie said, referring to the Wynn’s two dozen new acts. Most of them were relatively unknown, but Christie was confident that at least some of his bets would pay off. “And, if we’re wrong, there’s always next year,” he said.
At the beginning of April, Afrojack flew from New York to Las Vegas to perform at XS’s fourth-anniversary show. He had hired a ten-seat Gulfstream G-IV, at a cost of thirty-eight thousand dollars. It was the latest splurge in a splurge-heavy few months: in February, he had bought another new Ferrari, which he totalled after forty-five minutes, when he hit an oil slick; in March, he’d rented an eighty-foot yacht in Miami to throw a first-birthday party for his daughter. He was glad to have the time with her. “She’s starting to miss me a little more,” he said. “Every time I don’t see her for a couple weeks, I feel guilty.” He realizes that his life style is outlandish. Still, he said, “If someone gives you a whole bunch of ice cream, what are you going to do, put it in the refrigerator? No. You’re going to fucking eat the ice cream.”
On the plane, Afrojack watched the Manhattan skyline recede. “That’s what I love about these planes,” he said. “Big windows.” On the door to the cockpit was a sign that read, “Do Not Push—Slide.” He pondered it. “That’s actually a really deep life message,” he said.
The plane was forty thousand feet over western Indiana when he decided that he wanted to make a new track. He began with a brisk four-four beat and a repeating keyboard phrase that sounded like a theme from a video game. He added string flourishes, whistle sounds, and a shrill, buzzy tone that recalled a fax machine. By the time the plane had entered Nebraska airspace, the song was more or less finished. He lit a cigarette and spent the remainder of the flight playing Final Fantasy X. Eventually, the Strip came into view. “Home, sweet home,” he said.
During the next four months, Afrojack performed in Spain, Croatia, Malta, and Greece, and he played at the Wynn’s clubs twelve times. Since Hakkasan opened, in April, Waits and Christie have leaned more heavily on their marquee acts. For the first time, they have also paid independent promoters to deliver high rollers to their clubs. Over all, summer attendance at the Wynn was down by five per cent. Still, when David Guetta performed at XS on Labor Day weekend, he drew more than ten thousand customers, the club’s all-time record.
The promoters at the Wynn acknowledge that the d.j. bubble will pop. “It may not last longer than next year,” Waits said. In the meantime, the resort plans to wring as much profit from E.D.M. as possible. Waits has made overtures to several top d.j.s for 2014—including some of the ones who left last year, such as Deadmau5 and Skrillex—and the resort is diversifying beyond dance clubs. A restaurant called Andrea’s, which is named for Steve Wynn’s wife, opened in December. It combines Asian-fusion cuisine with an E.D.M. soundtrack selected by a dance d.j. billed as a “musical chef.” The lighting is dim, and Andrea Wynn’s eyes are projected onto an L.E.D. screen behind the bar—a glowing update of the optometrist’s billboard in “The Great Gatsby.” The music is played at a volume that makes conversation difficult. The Wynn calls it “vibe dining.” ♦
