The Mainstreaming Of EDM And The Precipitous Drop That Followed
So when did EDM — the U.S. record-biz term for electronic dance music's early-2010s commercial surge through Avicii, Deadmau5, Skrillex and a number of new festivals — "die," anyway? At the height of its powers, naturally.
By 2015, EDM's global value was estimated at around $6.9 billion. But the moment its demise began to feel like a hard fact was that August 6 of that year, when Britt Julious's "Lollapalooza Confirms It: EDM Is Over" ran on the Chicago magazine website.
"EDM eventually concentrated in festivals rather than raves, fueling its emphasis on culture and atmosphere over music," Julious wrote, noting that the Lollapalooza dance stage was moving toward the smoother, less boisterous sounds of progressive house: "If EDM is no longer the loudest stage of the festival, something is changing." She sealed her argument by comparing Chicago's Wavefront Music Festival, which had included EDM among its musical flavors, to its new iteration, relocated and renamed as Mamby on the Beach, which featured plenty of electronic dance music and no EDM at all.
And no, that's not a contradiction. "EDM" has never actually been an initialism in the summer of 2015, "means the drop-heavy, stadium-filling, fist-pumping, chart-topping, massively commercial main stage sound that conquered America. It means Dayglo vests, EDC [Electric Daisy Carnival], Ultra [Music Festival, in Miami], Vegas pool parties, and flying cakes. It's possibly somewhere between electro and progressive house, directed by Michael Bay, and like many music genres, trying to pin it down exactly is like trying to grab a fistful of water. Or should that be a fist-pump of water?"
