A lot of people aren’t best pleased about this MDL Beast Soundstorm festival, due to take place in Saudi Arabia next month. The guestlist is a who’s who of dance music’s richest players – who seem to be happy to take part in a Saudi propaganda exercise.

A few naysayers have tried to tell me this week that the average clubber doesn’t care about this. Wrong. My email subscriptions have gone through the roof since I started writing on the subject on Sunday – and my readership has gone up around 50% on normal levels.

But there’s one place where you will not find a single word of commentary or news on this issue. And that’s in the dance music press. They, or rather the editors who dictate what their cheap interns must write, have decreed their response will be the same as it always is with awkward topics.

And that response is to say nothing and pretend it isn’t happening. This week, Resident Advisor have managed to find time to publish an article about Blackburn’s rave scene and one about a producer sharing 50GB of samples – but not one article about this story. Mixmag, DJ Mag and the usually decent Chicago based 5 Magazine have written nothing about it either.

Then again, why should we surprised? During this pandemic, they refused to write about plague raves until pressure forced them to. And not a single word was written about the controversy surrounding Dominick Fernow earlier this year. It was the first major test for Resident Advisor’s new editor Whitney Wei – and she failed it pathetically.

The dance music press just isn’t fit for purpose…