PI Update: BET Don't Get No Love

 In the history of the Save Pleasure Island Blog, the club BET Soundstage never got a lot of love. In the late 90's when I lived in Gainesville I visited PI one Saturday night as a first visit ever. Mannequins fascinated me but I didn't know the difference the music they were playing and what BET Soundstage was playing but I really liked Mannequins. But because all the top hits at the time were Hip Hop, more time was spent in Soundstage because the music was familiar. The club was packed from the top level bar down to the dance floor on the lower level. Even the stairs were packed with patrons and there didn't seem to be an prohibition to remaining on the stairs and watching from there. In the later years of Pleasure Island the club Motion had opened and a lot of the same Hip Hop got played over there and the crowd migrated to it. BET Soundstage would often be pretty empty.

In the end, Black Entertainment Television dropped the sponsorship and BET was removed from the building and it was just called Soundstage Club.

Curiously, following the so called "Pleasure Island Putsch" in 2010 where all the remaining club names signs were removed from all the buildings, the Soundstage Club was not removed for unknown reasons and it would remain there until the building was demolished during the conversion from Downtown Disney to the Disney Springs name.