but surely the nu-clubber/middle aged middle classes nowadays find out about the organic, posh restaurant dj gigs by reading Times and Guardian Saturday pullouts, not by going through some San An initiation ceremony before discovering the real island nightlife, a view that is long out of date imo. You're right of course in that mass saturation Ibiza is fickle and many diehards may well disappear but the daytime shift was already pre-2020 changing things anyway, not just in IBZ but everywhere. so the island doesn't become irrelevant, it just offers something different. and for those of us old farts who like bar gigs, a win-win.
I think we are jumping to some extreme potential conclusions. If the Ibizan authorities really want to change the target tourist market it will take a lot of time and money to create the infrastructure to enable this. At present, the island simply doesn’t have the a big enough range of alternative options to cover for the young people that come for clubbing and cheap pub crawls. So I think it will transition over time.
If they are looking at families, older people, heritage, sight seeing and water sport tourists, they need to create the infrastructure for that. while some of it is there, what is required to replace clubbing infrastructure is largely not in place to the scale required. It will take decades to create. There is also a lot of competition for these markets elsewhere in the Med.
I am interested to see to what extent the clubs and authorities collaborate to deliver more of an offer aligned to this year at Ushuaia and Cova Santa. It will also be interesting to see what night life returns - will all the mass market bars and big clubs actually be operational after the last two years? I still think that there are big financial fall outs to come due to the impact of Covid. But I can see this being an ideal opportunity to shut down the likes of the west end and announce plans to replace it, change opening and closing times, put further restrictions in place over how venues are used, etc.
The idea that you need to go to Ibiza at 18 to want to return at 50 is fanciful, tastes and wants change with age and circumstances.