The concept for public, nighttime dance parties with entertainment provided by a disc jockey using a single turntable began in the European war time musical culture in the late 1930s and 1940s in Germany and France. The performance space was called a discotheque in France, and over time, disco became the recognized term to refer to the dance club as well as the genre of music.

By 1964, dance music culture made its way to England at a club called Mecca Locarno where white DJ Jimmy Savile requested two turntables set up side-by-side on the stage instead of the initial set-up of one turntable hidden away up in the light box out of sight from the dancers. In these early years, the European discotheque began to refer specifically to a smaller party and dance space as opposed to the larger dancehalls built to hold thousands. In 1965 at a club called Arthur in New York City, Terry Noel brought seamless mixing of two records to the disco, rather than the earlier format of one record played immediately after the end of the previous record with no silence in between while the DJ cues up the next song.

In the early 1970s, New York City’s emerging disco culture was coming up as a gay club culture, with fans, musicians, and dancers who were primarily African American and Latina/Latino. The DJ became a new kind of star, controlling the sound and creating the atmosphere by manipulating the lights from the DJ booth. Their names often would be well known to dancers such as the most influential DJ Larry Levan. Resided at the Paradise Garage, Levan kept the dancers on the dance floor playing a wide-ranging repertoire. By the mid-1970s, a distinctive disco sound dominated the scene. Observed by Joe Radcliffe, Billboard’s (music trade magazine) dance editor during the emergence of disco, “in 1974–1975, the disco music scene was literally controlled by a handful of Black artists affiliated with a small group of specialized record labels led by Motown and Philadelphia International Records” (also known as the Philly Sound). Among the most influential disco songs are the recordings of MFSB—an acronym for “Mother Father Sister Brother”—produced by Philadelphia International Records.

By the mid-1970s, the role of the producer in disco music often eclipsed that of studio singers and musicians. Producers such as Giorgio Moroder, who worked with disco superstar Donna Summer, and Nile Rodgers, founder of the super group Chic, became legends in their own right. Disco crossed over from primarily Black and gay audiences into the mainstream following the release of Saturday Night Fever (1978), a popular disco film featuring a soundtrack by the Australian bother trio the Bee Gees. Many rock and popular artists began including disco-influenced material in their repertoires.

By the early 1980s, Disco began to fade in popularity due to its growing commercial sound and lack of originality, but also as a result of rising racism and homophobia directed at disco music and club culture. In 1979, Chicago radio disc jockey, Steve Dahl, hosted Disco Demolition Night in Comiskey Baseball Park. After the first game in the scheduled double-header, Dahl detonated a large pile of thousands of pieces of vinyl. The records were mostly those of disco artists, but also included funk, soul, rhythm & blues, and rock records by artists of color. This event was terrorizing on a large social and cultural scale, resulting in the movement of club culture toward a safer underground context. Disco music, the concept of the disco club, and the role of the disco DJ influenced DJ culture from hip-hop to house and techno, and electronic music in general.