A few weeks back I spoke of the Haves and the Have-Nots. I tried to explain what the club market would be looking like as the now "official" recession sets in. The rich (or well-run clubs) are maintaining; they have tightened their belts and shed bottle promoters whose clients haven’t survived the crunch. With payrolls cut and a steady flow of people, they scoop from the Have-Not clubs which are dying -- things aren’t so bad for them. On the other end, however, its bad news across the board. The C- and D-list clubs are swimming upstream, and they're in a losing battle with the bad economic current.

For so many years, in so many clubs, the music has been geared to please the bottle frat-boy crowd whose musical tastes are as innovative as their shoes. I’ve found myself listening to pretty much the same rock anthems I listened to ten years ago, mixed with some very mainstream hip-hop. Sure, the good ones -- Jus Ske, Cassidy, the Ronsons, and Nick Cohen added their own flair. But everyone knows that as you club-hop, you’re so often greeted with the same track you were listening to when you left the previous club. The DJs are often as much about the social scene as the music. Through it all, the purist music party survived in clubs you didn’t read about on Page Six, and now the silver lining of the bottle-service demise is the return of the importance of music to club formatting. Recently, an eager young operator asked me to rate his joint amongst Life and some of the legendary clubs. I said on a scale of 1-10, with Studio 54 being #1, he'd rank around 150.