Why Do People Go To Nightclubs? - Ashley Mears - #212

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, my friends. Welcome back. My guest today is Ashley Mears, and she's a sociologist who has recently done an assessment of the VIP clubbing world. Basically, she did what's technically referred to as immersive ethnographic research, but in reality, that meant she became a party girl for six months and followed some of the biggest promoters around New York, Miami and elsewhere, assessing what's going on. Given that I've been a club promoter for 14 years, looking at the anthropological underpinnings, like the psychological sociological reasons for why people enjoy going to nightclubs, I loved every minute of this. It was so fun. So expect to learn why men spend thousands on bottles of champagne in VIP clubs, why the music is so loud, why there is a very specific look of the girls that are joining the guys on these tables, the anthropological underpinnings of nightclubs in general and much more. Awesome, awesome episode. Ashley is so much fun. I'm certain I'll be getting her back on to talk about. I don't know. So I'll find an excuse to bring her back. She was great. But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful Ashley Mears.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I'm joined by Ashley Mears. Ashley, welcome to the show.

**Ashley Mears** (1:39)
Hi, good to be here.

**Chris Williamson** (1:41)
Great to have you here. Tell me your background, tell everyone that's listening what your, the 30,000 foot view of who you are.

**Ashley Mears** (1:50)
Okay, so I'm a sociologist.
I teach courses in pop culture and economic sociology and gender. And my research kind of broadly is in what we could call cultural economics, but basically the cultural foundations of value and how that plays out in different markets. And I've focused on pretty atypical cases for social scientists. And that is the fashion modeling industry, which was my dissertation and became a book later called Pricing Beauty. And then my most recent book is about high-end nightclubs and the fact of champagne waste. I know I describe it in fairly bland terms, somewhat deliberately, because as an academic, there's an impetus to kind of be serious and present your stuff in kind of theoretically and conceptually recognizable terms. But yeah, I study this kind of fun worlds.

**Chris Williamson** (2:54)
I listened to your episode on Conversations with Tyler. Yeah. Talking about this stuff and hearing too academic. You remained mostly academic, but he is pure. Like he was asking a question of like, why does the music have to be so loud in nightclubs? Which is just like, just the most pure academic question. And he said, well, actually, that's fairly good. So I want to try and take an academic's perspective, a sociological, anthropological perspective of nightclubs and nightlife.
How would you lay it out? Imagine I'm another academic. I've never been in a nightclub. I don't know why people go. I don't know what the purpose is. Give us the full monty.

**Ashley Mears** (3:40)
Well, that would make you like a lot of academics actually.
So yeah, well, first there's a lot of different types of nightclubs. There's clubs out there that cater to pretty much any kind of niche and attraction and kink or whatever. But the clubs that I studied, they offer what's called bottle service, where instead of waiting at the bar to get your drink, you can pay a pretty high price, starting at $500 on up to $5,000 or more, to sit at a table and basically rent the table for the night and the bottles of alcohol get brought to your table. And then people use this as an opportunity to show off how much money they can spend on champagne because the big expensive bottles come out with sparklers or they are brought to the table by very attractive young women that are called bottle girls. So it's a clear case of conspicuous consumption. It affords an opportunity to show off in this kind of club world. But if you're just wanting to hit the, like, I don't know, the 80s dance party that used to be up the street from my house, you know, what people seek out in all kinds of nightlife experiences is the opportunity to kind of lose oneself in the moment, in the music. And this explains why the music is so loud, because, you know, you're no longer distracted as much by the fact of other people and that kind of co-presence and, like, mutual focus on something like, you know, loud music or if everybody knows the words to a song, right? I mean, this is a pretty, this can be a really magical experience that clubs offer.

**Chris Williamson** (5:18)