Radical nights for better days ahead. The future of culture knows no genre.

These ethoses define Brooklyn-based club Elsewhere.

“The focus has always been new music without boundaries,” says Dhruv Chopra, Elsewhere co-founder and CEO. “It doesn’t matter what genre it is. It doesn’t matter if it’s live music or deejay music.”

The 24,000-square-foot venue features five rooms, including a rooftop terrace that boasts sweeping views of the Manhattan skyline, making it perfect for watching the sunset on summer nights. The music hotspot is also known to bring in everyone from ravers to rockstars, vinyl nerds, punks, rappers, metalheads, folk singers, old-school house audiophiles, baile funk fans, hyperpop producers and more.

Artists who have and will grace the stages this year include Whipped Cream, Teenage Halloween, The Blessed Madonna, Keys N Krates, TSHA, Genesis Owusu, Rebecca Black—yes, the singer of the viral song “Friday”—Todd Edwards, Ying Yang Twins, Beach Bums, Kaleena Zanders, Aluna and Moon Boots. These are just some of the 600 shows the club hosts for 300,000 attendees each year, an impressive feat for any venue. Indeed, Elsewhere proves to be an omni-genre space for all melomaniacs.

Chopra says the discotheque was founded on three tenets of personal inspiration. The first is supporting new sounds within various genres to help bring fans and artists together.

“We feel the future of music knows no genre, but the industry wasn’t set up to support the new omni-genre world,” he says. “As a musician myself, I felt music was being underserved and deserved better.”

The second is achieving the challenge of creating something new that was “a calling and was going to make me a better person,” Chopra says. “I felt that, for me, being an operator would push me to grow and become a member of this city in ways no other job could.

Finally, it was founded with the goal of building something “really special” with fellow music lovers Jake Rosenthal and Rami Haykal-Manning—whom he’s been friends with for 30 years. Chopra adds that the three co-founders each have a different skillset that compliments one another, making for a “lighting in a bottle” moment. For example, Chopra comes from an investment management background specifically focused on sustainability and climate change. His previous work within this sphere gives him the insight and tools needed for the financial and operational side of the business.

Elsewhere, which celebrates its six-year anniversary this month, sees itself as a cultural institution driving the future of communities with both in-person events and online discussions via Discord. Chopra says people talk about new music, books and art on the Discord, helping to not only foster an online community but also an in-person one that brings its members together on the dancefloor. The club has also created a membership program, which the co-founder says has made Elsewhere more accessible.

The membership offers three tiers: “Freak with Benefits” for $5 a month, “Sonic Explorer” for $10 and “Patron Saint” for $40 a month. The first two tiers include perks ranging from free coat-check to unlimited half-off tickets, while the all-powerful Patron Saint membership not only provides the benefits of the first two options but also unlimited free entry to the venue’s “biggest nights.” Additionally, the music space has formed a digital editorial program dubbed Zine.

Chopra says these three installments have helped the venue achieve its goal of bringing people together around new music, adding that he sees a “burgeoning need” for this as it assists people with discovering new music and finding their “tribe.” Certainly, Elsewhere is ahead of the curve and has accomplished its goal of forming something notable within New York City’s music scene.

“We help people find their music, find their people and find themselves,” he says.

Outside of championing communities within the music space, the independent venue prides itself on “optimism, open-mindedness, respect and taking care of those key stakeholders,” Chopra says.

“Optimism is a very interesting one that we’ve actually taken a while to figure out is at the core of everything we do, particularly when we were starting,” he says. “I think this is changing a lot, but you still have this holier-than-thou thing in music, particularly [with] clubs. It’s like, ‘Why are you here? Why should we let you in?’…We’re very antithetical to that.”

The inclusive space, Chopra says, has a team of over a hundred employees, creating a “well-oiled machine steeped in all the values that we’re also trying to promote.” In addition to building a strong internal company culture, Elsewhere has built a community with its art, its audiences and its local neighborhood, which is Bushwick. “[If] you don’t have happy staff, you don’t have happy artists and you don’t have happy audiences. [And if] you’re not working with your local community and really being a part of that conversation, that evolution, you’re not going to be around for long,” he says.

Elsewhere opened its doors in 2017, following the 2014 closure of Glasslands, the three founder’s previous club endeavor. Glasslands, like Elsewhere, was known for booking performers across the vast spectrum of music. “We brought everybody together at Glasslands, and that was a small 300-cap venue,” Chopra says. “Eventually, the writing was on the wall that the neighborhood was changing and Glasslands was bursting at the seams. We needed a bigger space.”

Chopra’s first venue venture was known for its early support of rising acts and international artists, many of whom are now considered top-tier talents. This includes Grimes, Disclosure, FKA twigs and Greta Simone Kline, who was known by her former stage name, Frankie Cosmos, at the time. Notably, Glasslands even booked some of these artists’ first shows, as seen with Lana Del Rey. During this time, Chopra saw—and continues to see—a number of changes in how melophiles consume music.

“The world of performance and the world of musical taste and culture, in general, has this beautiful duality that started 10, 15 years ago with people listening to everything,” Chopra says. “So there’s this sort of coalescing of people who are more open-minded and have these more open-minded and progressive values [that make them] interested in new music broadly. But [there’s] also this fragmentation. At the same time of this coalescing, there’s this beautiful counterpoint with fragmentation where people listen to all these subgenres.”

Additional changes he has seen throughout the years include artists creating new music at a faster pace as it has become easier to distribute and publish music, as well as get royalties. He adds that the advances in technology and the virality of social media have made it simpler than ever before to create music, allowing people to segregate into niche genres and scenes. He notes that people will again be “listening to more and more of everything” as artists continue to innovate new genres at a rapidly growing pace. He even sees social media artists rising at “exponential rates” and becoming “global superstars.” Chopra adds that local scenes are continuing to flourish as well.

“You have this beautiful duality between the world of young music listeners listening to [and becoming] connected by this layer of global superstars, but [are] also steeped in these local vernaculars,” he says. “I think that trend has only grown. The long tail has become longer and wider as the area under the normal curve sort of comes down. That peak comes down. Fragmentation continues. New and new channels continue, and we don’t see that stopping. We actually see that increasing—this trend towards inclusivity and optimism.”

Chopra says that one of the most interesting evolutions he has seen throughout the music scene is advocacy policy at the local, state and even federal levels. For example, the New York City Prohibition Era Cabaret Law, which banned social dancing without a cabaret license, was struck down within a month of Elsewhere’s opening. It’s important to note, though, that it’s largely believed that the law was originally targeting racially mixed jazz clubs in Harlem. However, it was broadly applied.

In addition, the three co-founders worked with Senator Chuck Schumer during the pandemic to “create a bailout for independent venues, promoters and artists, [which] truly saved the industry from extinction.” He adds that the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA) was “the one that led the charge.” NIVA, formed in April 2020, was the driving force behind the lobbying and grassroots efforts to pass the bipartisan Save Our Stages Act, which was signed into law as part of the second COVID-19 Relief Bill—successfully saving the live music industry from mass collapse. Now, Chopra sits on various local advisory boards, including The New York City Hospitality Alliance and the Brooklyn Allied Bars and Restaurants. He also works with the North Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce and the mayor’s office.

As for the future of music, Chopra sees artificial intelligence (AI) as the most recent development within the scene. He cites numerous other tools that were game-changing at the time of their inception, such as synthesizers, digital processors and Serato machines. He adds that AI is just another instrument “that reduces the barrier to great music.” However, he questions, “What’s that going to do for the exponential rise of new artists and songs?”

“It’s tied into this idea of the community we serve,” Chopra says. “It’s not just fans and artists. Everybody’s creating music. Everybody’s listening to music. People are doing so many things that they’re passionate about. I think that’s going to continue. I’m very interested to see where that goes.”

Despite the numerous changes Chopra has seen and continues to see, one thing remains constant: Elsewhere is a club meant to be enjoyed by all music lovers.