In 2025, Swedish House Mafia, Mochakk & More Big DJs Played Delis, Bullfighting Rings & City Halls. But Why?

This weekend, the biggest electronic music show in Los Angeles didn’t happen in a nightclub or even an arena, but at the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street.

Under traffic lights and atop asphalt that typically carries crosstown traffic, 13,000 people gathered for a Dec. 13 set by Brazilian producer Mochakk. The show marked the fourth time the iconic intersection was closed to drivers and used for a dance party, coming at the end of a year in which the use of such nontraditional venues became a phenomenon in live dance events.

“There’s not an artist in dance music worth their stones that isn’t saying, ‘How can I do it differently? How can we create a look that’s not been done, or use a space that hasn’t been used?” says Wasserman’s Cody Chapman, who booked such unconventional shows for artists including Fisher, Swedish House Mafia and Zeds Dead in 2025. 

In October, Swedish House Mafia played a bullfighting ring in Mexico and also became the first electronic act ever to play New York’s Arthur Ashe Stadium, which is typically reserved for tennis matches. Michael Bibi‘s Solid Grooves label held a show on the loading dock of a former Sears distribution center in downtown L.A., a site Dom Dolla, Jamie Jones and Sammy Virji have also played. Zeds Dead dropped tracks at a nearby deli, while Mochakk rocked the Venice Beach skatepark. In March, Fisher played a block party in front of San Jose City Hall, not far from where Fred again.. and Skrillex drew 25,000 people to the San Francisco Civic Center in 2024 — the same year Diplo did a set on a New York City subway car.

These so-called pop-up shows are complicated to produce and generally don’t make much money. So why play a loading dock when you could just play a club?

“The content you get from these seemingly impossible plays is extraordinary,” says Chapman, “and the global effect you get from putting an impossible-seeming event on social media is huge. It’s the most valuable thing you can do in live.”

In a genre connected and fueled by DMs, tags, engagements, follower counts and virality, generating this kind of flashy social content for artists to share with fans (and for fans to share with each other) is, for many artists, worth investing in. But value exists off TikTok too, with Chapman calling both the hype around these shows and the way they let artists do something special for their fans “priceless.” 

While DJs in Europe have long been known to play castles and mountaintops, pop-ups have only become a phenomenon in the U.S. over the last few years as dance music has become more ingrained in U.S. culture. “So as artists [in the U.S.] see all these extraordinary venues in Europe and the rest of the world… it was inevitable that artists, agents and managers started looking at left of center spaces across America and trying to figure out how to unlock those too,” says Chapman. (Paris-based livestream producer Cercle has long been a leader in producing livestreamed DJ sets at locations like the Eiffel Tower and a Bolivian salt flat at dawn, occasions that no doubt helped fuel the desire for epic locations among artists.) 

But while dance music blew up in the States roughly 15 years ago, pop-ups are a more recent trend simply because, as Chapman says, “there is a lot more red tape here.”

“These shows have been more successful in 2025 because in previous years, they wouldn’t let us do things in certain places,” says Kobi Danan, co-founder of L.A. dance event producer Framework, the company behind the Hollywood Boulevard and Sears building shows, among other events in L.A. and beyond. “For the Hollywood Boulevard shows, we got ‘nos’ from the city for at least three years. It took many years to build trust.” 

Danan says that for Frameworks‘ three Hollywood and Vine shows, the company has worked with HOAs, given free tickets to locals and even made up for lost revenue experienced by businesses on the Boulevard. Still, some cities remain wary. Framework had to cancel a 2024 set by Solomun at an abandoned power plant in Oxnard, Calif., after officials declined to issue the permit over concerns about egress in case of emergency. As such, Framework staff were forced to build a fake power plant at L.A.’s Exposition Park as an alternative.  

“It had Tesla coils and fire geysers and all kinds of craziness,” says Danan. “I’m talking 60-foot-tall chimneys and everything. It was outside of the budget.”  

“It’s tragically difficult at times,” Chapman says of putting on these pop-up shows, recalling the time the organizers of one show realized the street they were building on was at a slight angle, forcing them to rebuild the entire production in 12 hours. “I think promoters are often the unsung heroes. They’re the ones dealing with local litigators and councils and turning spaces that shouldn’t be used for parties into safe, usable environments.” (To that end, Los Angeles event promoter Stranger Than has also produced DJ events at locations including the beach, L.A. City Hall and a former supermarket.)

The challenge isn’t just renting enough porta-potties or traffic barricades but changing the perception of a genre that’s in some cases still shaking off a reputation for being seedy, illegal and dangerous due to dance music’s underground history.  

San Francisco, a city with a rich dance music history, has been particularly amenable to pop-ups, allowing the aforementioned Civic Center show in 2024, opening its Pier 80 to Goldenvoice’s annual dance festival Portola in 2022 and hosting a pair of upcoming New Year’s Eve shows by Swedish House Mafia and Skrillex together with Four Tet at the Pier’s 200,000-square foot warehouse, which used to house shipping components. (These shows are also being produced by Goldenvoice.) San Francisco’s mayor, Daniel Lurie, even announced the first-ever performance at the city’s Moscone Center, a 992,000-square-foot downtown convention center, on his official TikTok.  

“We’ve talked about music, arts, culture driving our comeback. Well, it continues,” Mayor Lurie says in the clip about the Dec. 19 set with Australian dance star Fisher. “This show is going to bring people to downtown at a time where Moscone is usually quiet at the end of the year. Our restaurants, our bars, our business are going to benefit.” 

“I’ll give a shout-out to Mayor Lurie,” says Chapman, who booked the Fisher show, “because he is a big supporter of entertainment in the city and does not seem to see dance music as a red flag.” In terms of a pop-up’s ability to bolster the local economy, Danan also notes that amid Hollywood Boulevard shows, “every hotel in a three-mile radius is sold out, and every restaurant reservation is completely booked. It’s a win/win for everybody.”

But pop-up shows aren’t cheap, with Chapman reporting that they can cost 10 times more than the price of playing a traditional venue. As such, opportunities must be weighed carefully, particularly as these shows can leave a lot of fans unable to get tickets. “You have artists that can sell 20, 30 or 40,000 tickets somewhere, but you find this extraordinary site that can only scale to 4,000. Is it worth doing, when you know the demand is so much higher than what you can fulfill?”

This dilemma is weighed against the opportunity to create a show that might be a life moment for those who were there (“one of the best nights of my life, no joke!” one Reddit user reported of the Skrillex and Fred again.. Civic Center set) and which can build the legacies of artists who just want to do something different and cool.

“Anyone who’s looking at revenue as an immediate end game is missing the point on generating real revenue,” says Chapman. “We’re trying to build careers and lifelong artists, and the short-term buck is worth so much less than the possibility that they could be doing this forever.”

One solution to the supply/demand issue has been for artists to do a super-small underplay for fans right before another larger show, like Zeds Dead, whose set at Katz’s Deli in May happened hours before their performance at L.A. club Exchange, or LP Giobbi, who preceded a Nov. 2024 set at L.A.’s Fonda Theatre with a morning set at a Venice Beach coffee shop. 

Some artists have found other ways to provide unique opportunities to fans who may have been unable to score tickets to a pop-up event. Last month, two days before his Hollywood Blvd. show (which was subsequently canceled due to rain and rescheduled for December), Mochakk spent a day inside a custom-designed ice cream truck, handing out popsicles. “Lemon or berry?” the artist patiently and enthusiastically asked each of the roughly 1,000 fans who had lined up around the block to meet him.

“We approach these moments as impact points,” Mochakk’s manager Dave DeValera says of the ice cream truck, a concept the team has also used in New York. “We probably have four to six a year, and we’re usually lining them up with a large-scale show. It’s about creating visibility, fan engagement and true fan connection. These events just get a more grassroots conversation going on the ground, rather than just being a digital conversation.”

DeValera reports that after the New York ice cream truck event, ticket sales for an upcoming Mochakk party jumped from 3,000 to 8,500. “It was just generated from the energy of being in the city,” DeValera says, “and the amount of organic press pickup [around the ice cream truck event] was unusual for an electronic artist.”

With both intangible and statistical benefits, it follows that many DJs want to do these shows, which Chapman admits is “becoming a little bit tiring as an agent… Doing it in a way that feels authentic for a particular artist has become all the more important.” He says this is why it made sense for Mochakk, a lifelong skateboarder, to play the Venice skatepark, an event that drew thousands.

As the trend presses into 2026, it’s also evolving. Chapman foresees some of the left-of-center builds used for one-off shows becoming regularly used spaces, as San Francisco’s Pier 80 warehouse in L.A.’s Sears building is.  

“We’re starting to see a lot more of these things being done once and having a blueprint, so you can do 10 more and they can become series,” he says.

While touring this way would, says Chapman, “be impossible” given that every site is different, he does see an opportunity for shorter touring legs that follow “one creative idea and deliver shows of similarity.” He’s currently working on plans for such a tour that he hopes to have to market by September 2026. 

While the trend isn’t yet big enough to eradicate the need for traditional venues, certainly there are such venues in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and beyond that would’ve loved to host a show by any of the aforementioned artists who ended up playing in unconventional spaces in those cities instead.

To that, Chapman says he’d “challenge anyone with a traditional venue to “step up their game and figure out how they can offer more flexibility in the room” so that artists can create their own worlds within them.

“Because in electronic music specifically,” he continues, “I don’t think the one size fits all model is what people are looking for.”