Disclaimer: I live in Berlin currently but I've never been a techno person.
From what I hear from people who are, the clubs have become basically tourist traps that are unaffordable to locals and some have even been priced out of their original locations so not sure if this decision will help much.
Can't speak to London, but abandoned buildings are few and far between in today's Berlin. It's not the city it was even five or six years ago due to massive redevelopment. As regards forests, I guess there's the Grunwald, but good luck running a rave there, it's basically the backgarden for a whole bunch of old people's dachas.
They got much more expensive after the pandemic, in 2019 an expensive entrance was 18-20€, after it seems that some clubs are up to the 20-30€.
I remember in 2015 paying 10-15€, even Berghain would be around 15-18€ and that was expensive already.
The techno scene is still pretty good music-wise if you check the line-up and avoid the new fad of celebrity DJs from the past 8-10ish years. I'm very fond of my early techno days where you could barely see the DJ from the dancefloor, they would be spinning in the shadows and the focus was dancing (this in the early 2000s so not an OG at all to the scene from the 90s, and not in Berlin).
Berghain's door policy mostly still works: keeps the American tourists out and the club good times. It's starting to feel a bit dated in general, like the moment's moving past it, but it's always a good time.
I agree, as ruthless as the door policy is every single time I've been there I had a good time, the crowd inside knew what they were there for and what the scene is about.
To me personally since the big room/celebrity techno DJs took more space in the scene it has become much harder to find dancefloors like Berghain. I'm still sad for De School closing in Amsterdam, it was a very different place than Berghain but the crowd and dancefloors were very enjoyable.
I moved in Berlin in 2016, which isn't too long ago but the prices were much cheaper (for some places that means sub-10 vs over 20 euros now, for Berghain it means half the price back then), and even then locals were the minority. Foreigners self-select by coming especially for the scene, while the % of locals here who care for it isn't that much higher than the % of locals born in other cities.
Even at today's prices, Berghain is a fraction of what you'd pay on proper tourist hotspots like Ibiza (think $70 upward). Or what you'd pay in other cities like London.
I think night clubs are always mostly tourist traps in most cities in the world. In Berlin, like other places, there are a few cream-of-the-crop that attract the locals.
Interestingly, as an expat/immigrant I've met all my local Berlin friends clubbing, and most of my friends here are German. My colleagues who don't go clubbing seem to be in little bubbles of other expats.
This is happening everywhere and with everything. IMHO its a result of the inflated "elite class", that is people who are well off enough to spend their days with consumption only or they were overpaid.
As a result, these people go everywhere and do consumption and outcompete everyone who is not like them. Then everything gets adjusted to their pleasure and they consume all the resources(being housing, food, entertainment etc).
Also, the supply and demand are not able to stabilize because the money moves around the globe freely but working people can't. So when a cryptobro from Russia moves to Portugal he can consume all the Portuguese resources but he can't bring fellow Russians to work and re-supply. Why wouldn't Portuguese just work harder and make buck by increasing the supply to meet the demand? Well because the cryptobro demands luxury housing, luxury food, massages, cars and cocaine but the Portuguese in the location they moved in are maybe painters, taxi drivers, chemical engineers or doctors and they can't simply start doing this new stuff.
The folks are angry with working class immigrants but most of their troubles are actually due to a-few-millionaires who are not rich enough to do substantial long-term investment but are rich enough to consume like there's no tomorrow.
You write as if there is a finite supply of "entertainment" which comes out of thin air. If someone is consuming, then someone is supplying. You mentioned yourself that the ones supplying are the locals. So, in your analogy the locals are getting jobs in night clubs, restaurants and construction to feed the needs of this "consumption class". In economies without tourism, this is done by producing export goods.
It is a finite supply that can be build upon over time. That's why the prices are going up. If everyone suddenly had the same amount of money as the "consumption class", some of the millionaire would have had to prepare the food and clean the toilets. The whole idea of money is that it is something you are supposed to receive for creating value and use it to extract value from others by trading it. Fiat, gold, crypto - it doesn't matter - you can't consume it directly. When you have a lot of people who own a lot of money but not enough people to do the stuff, prices go up. Basic supply-demand stuff.
The real economy is not elastic enough to handle increase in demand instantly. It takes years to train people to do the things that are taken for granted.
Think of it like the developer salaries in the USA when the money poured in, until it stopped.
The finite supply is space, not DJs.
And that’s a mostly political problem as it’s not like there is a lack of space in general, but what you are allowed to do with that space.
Someone needs to turn stuff into an Apartment or a burger no matter how libertarian or communist the policies are. It takes time, it transforms a society.
Generally speaking, money is for bookkeeping among agents that produce and consume value and the production and consumption has natural speed within the laws of physics. When people who move around faster and demand stuff to consume than the people who produce, then you have local bubbles that disrupts the society.
Also, since the output of the people is finite the larger is your elite class the less stuff to consume for everyone. Better have you elites becoming elites because they dramatically increased the production of the stuff they consume(for example, they might have invented the internet and the services on it and improved efficiency of trade or they might have made great music and improved the working conditions of people who work in insulation, thus more people accepted the job etc.). If you have an elite that is growing faster than they improve the yield, then you have a parasitic class that might end up destroyed if grows too big.
From what I hear from people who are, the clubs have become basically tourist traps that are unaffordable to locals and some have even been priced out of their original locations so not sure if this decision will help much.