In 1978, the sociologist Richard Peterson suggested that American popular music was on the verge of its third great revolution of the twentieth century. The first two revolutions, Peterson (1978) claimed, had been ushered in by jazz and rock. The beginnings of the third were to be glimpsed in the rise of disco music, which made dance clubs a powerful force in popularising new records. As Peterson made this prediction, disco records sat atop sales charts in Europe and North America, and the disco film Saturday Night Fever was on its way to becoming a major box-office success. Two years later, when much of disco culture appeared to have collapsed, Peterson's prediction would look like an embarrassing miscalculation. It would take twenty more years, shifts in terminology, and a whole set of technological, social and economic developments before his claim of a dance music ‘revolution’ seemed worth re-considering. In 1997, commemorative books and anniversary dance parties celebrated a decade of frantic dance music activity in Great Britain and Western Europe, amid signs that even white North American youth, long faithful to rock, were migrating towards dance clubs and the sounds of dance music.