One dance club, Pacha, has dominated the Spanish party paradise of Ibiza since the 1970s. Built on former marshland, this island disco and its all-night parties have become global symbols of hedonistic glamour, and the business has expanded to Buenos Aires, New York and beyond.

Lately Pacha’s profits have soared along with the growing popularity of electronic dance music. But so have the fees demanded by the top D.J.’s, to the annoyance of Ricardo Urgell, the 75-year-old Pacha patriarch who runs the club as a family business. Last year he decided that enough was enough.

He fired his longtime music director, Danny Whittle, and did not renew the contract for Erick Morillo, a Pacha regular for more than a decade, one of a chain of departures by other headliners like Tiësto, Luciano and Pete Tong. Only one big name, David Guetta, will return this summer, largely to protect his brand, which he built at the club.

“The D.J.’s wanted more money to play less,” said José Urgell, known as Piti, who is Mr. Urgell’s 65-year-old brother. “It was an abuse. We had to come up with a new plan because the old one was going to explode.” The Urgells’ move to shake up their D.J. lineup reflects a growing friction in the dance subculture as the music goes mainstream. The budgets behind the dance business are ballooning, with superstar D.J.’s now commanding hundreds of thousands of dollars a night in the megaclubs of Ibiza and Las Vegas, where they once spun anonymously in the dark.