Electronic dance music

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Electronic dance music, known the world over simply as EDM, began in the nightclubs and warehouses of the late twentieth century and grew into a global industry worth billions. At its core it is percussive, electronic, and designed to be played by a DJ who blends one track seamlessly into the next, a practice called a DJ mix. Yet the story of how that club-night ritual became a stadium-filling phenomenon is layered with racial politics, technological breakthroughs, drug scares, corporate takeovers, and arguments over artistic integrity. The questions worth asking are these: where did the sound actually come from, who was allowed into the story, and what happened when corporate America decided it wanted a piece of the dance floor?

• 2. Roots Before the Record

  ›

  King Tubby and Lee "Scratch" Perry were working with limited electronic equipment in Jamaica during the late 1960s and into the 1970s, yet author Michael Veal considers their dub music one of the most important precursors to contemporary electronic dance music. Dub was remixed reggae that foregrounded rhythm, shredded melodies, and buried vocals under layers of reverb and delay. The producers used the studio mixing board itself as a performance instrument, making improvised deconstructions of existing multi-track reggae recordings. The Roland Space Echo, manufactured by Roland Corporation, was widely used in the 1970s to generate the echo and delay textures that defined the style.

  Jamaican-American DJ Kool Herc carried a related spirit northward when he introduced large, bass-heavy speaker rigs to the Bronx. His parties in 1973 are credited with kick-starting the New York City hip-hop movement. Herc developed the technique of playing two copies of the same record in alternation, isolating the percussion break and looping it manually, a method that gave rise to what became known as the breakbeat.

  Turntablism itself has a specific origin point: Shuichi Obata, an engineer at Matsushita (now Panasonic), invented the direct-drive turntable. In 1969, Matsushita released it as the SP-10, the first of its kind on the market. Obata later led the team that developed the Technics SL-1200, released in 1972, which became the most influential turntable in the culture.

  The disco era contributed its own technological markers. In 1974, George McCrae's "Rock Your Baby" was one of the first records to use a drum machine, an early Roland rhythm machine. By 1977, Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte had produced "I Feel Love" for Donna Summer, which became the first well-known disco hit with a completely synthesized backing track. Disco producer Tom Moulton drew on dub techniques, brought north by Jamaican migration to New York City, to offer alternatives to the four-on-the-floor style that dominated dance floors.

• 3. The Machines That Made the Music

  ›

  In 1980, Ryuichi Sakamoto's cult track "Riot in Lagos," from the album B-2 Unit, introduced the Roland TR-808 drum machine to clubs. The track laid the groundwork for a new type of electro music that would shape modern dance music. Two years later, Afrika Bambaataa's "Planet Rock" made the 808 enormously popular on dance floors. The track was influenced both by Sakamoto's work and by Kraftwerk, and it informed the development of subgenres including Miami bass and Detroit techno. According to Slate, "Planet Rock" "didn't so much put the 808 on the map so much as reorient an entire world of post-disco dance music around it."

  Also in 1982, producer Arthur Baker joined Bambaataa in releasing "Planet Rock," and the same year saw "Sexual Healing" by Marvin Gaye use the TR-808. A year later, Hashim created an electro-funk sound with "Al-Naafyish (The Soul)" that influenced Herbie Hancock, resulting in his hit single "Rockit." The Roland TR-909, the TB-303 bass synthesizer, and the Juno-60 similarly shaped the sounds of techno, house, and acid.

  Yellow Magic Orchestra, the Japanese electronic band, introduced digital sampling to popular music through their 1981 album Technodelic, the first album consisting mostly of samples and loops. The album used a Toshiba-EMI LMD-649 digital PCM sampler that engineer Kenji Murata custom-built for the group. The sampler was later adopted by other Japanese synth-pop artists. The band's 1978 track "Computer Game/Firecracker" had already interpolated a Martin Denny melody and sampled Space Invaders video game sounds, signaling the direction music technology was heading.

  MIDI standardization, combined with the development of inexpensive polyphonic synthesizers, ultimately made the sounds of synth-pop and EDM more commercially accessible. The Human League, Depeche Mode, and Eurythmics rode that accessibility into the UK charts during the early 1980s, and the rise of MTV carried those sounds to American audiences.

• 4. Chicago, Detroit, and Ibiza

  ›

  In the early 1980s, Chicago radio jocks called The Hot Mix 5 and club DJs Ron Hardy and Frankie Knuckles were playing a wide range of material, from older Philly disco and Salsoul tracks to Italo disco and electronic pop, and experimenting by mixing in effects and drum machines. The track "On and On," produced in 1984 by Chicago DJ Jesse Saunders and co-written by Vince Lawrence, incorporated the Roland TB-303 bass synthesizer and a Roland TR-808 drum machine and is sometimes cited as the first house record. J.M. Silk's "Music is the Key" from 1985 has also been put forward as a candidate.

  Chicago house music spread quickly, reaching New York City, Newark, and Detroit. By the mid-to-late 1980s it had arrived in Europe, South America, and Australia. Commercial success followed in Europe: "House Nation" by House Master Boyz and the Rude Boy of House came in 1987, and tracks such as "Pump Up the Volume" by MARRS and "Theme from S'Express" by S'Express entered the pop charts.

  Meanwhile, on the small Balearic island of Ibiza, a club called Amnesia had developed a distinct scene under resident DJ Alfredo Fiorito. The Balearic sound blended old vinyl rock, reggae, and disco with an open-minded attitude toward musical experimentation. By the mid-to-late 1980s, Amnesia was drawing people from across the European continent.

  In Detroit, DJs Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson fused Chicago house-influenced electronic sounds with Detroit funk and the textures of their post-industrial city to build the techno sound. One of the first Detroit productions to gain wider attention was Derrick May's "Strings of Life" from 1987. According to Frankie Knuckles, it "just exploded. It was like something you can't imagine, the kind of power and energy people got off that record when it was first heard." British DJ Mark Moore described it as the record that led London club-goers to finally accept house music. The term "techno" first came into common use after a 1988 compilation on 10 Records and Virgin Records titled Techno: The Dance Sound of Detroit.

• 5. Rave Culture and Its Enemies

  ›

  By 1988, house music had become the most popular form of club music in Europe. That same year, Danny Rampling and Paul Oakenfold brought the Balearic spirit from Ibiza to London, opening clubs called Shoom and Spectrum respectively. Both became synonymous with acid house. Also in 1988, the Balearic party atmosphere coincided with MDMA gaining prominence as a party drug in UK club culture.

  By the summer of 1989, as many as 25,000 people at a time were attending commercially organized underground parties called raves. The growth was stunning, but it attracted official hostility. Governments at state and city levels enacted laws intended to halt the spread of rave culture, partly because of the perceived association between the music and drug use.

  In the United States, rave culture never achieved the same broad mainstream reach it had in Europe during the late 1980s to early 1990s. It remained tied to regional scenes in New York City, Florida, the Midwest, and California. The pioneer genres of electro, Chicago house, and Detroit techno were influential on both sides of the Atlantic, but mainstream American media and the record industry were openly hostile to them through the 1990s and beyond.

  Trance emerged from the UK rave scene in the late 1980s and developed further in Germany during the early 1990s. Breakbeat hardcore grew within the rave scene and gave way to jungle, a genre influenced by Jack Smooth and Basement Records, which became recognized as a separate genre popular at raves and on pirate radio in Britain. By 1994, jungle had begun gaining mainstream popularity. By 1995, some jungle producers had moved toward what would become collectively called drum and bass. Dubstep originated in South London in the late 1990s as an offshoot of UK garage, with the earliest known releases dating to 1998. The term "dubstep" as a genre name came into use around 2002, associated with labels such as Big Apple, Ammunition, and Tempa.

• 6. America's Reluctant Embrace

  ›

  In 1998, Madonna's album Ray of Light, produced with British producer William Orbit and heavily influenced by club music, brought dance music to the attention of mainstream American pop listeners. Around the same time, many American house and techno producers were still traveling abroad to build their careers as DJs, because the US market remained resistant.

  Dutch producer Tiësto provided a soundtrack to the entry of athletes during the opening ceremony of the 2004 Summer Olympics, an event that a British newspaper later deemed one of the fifty most important events in dance music history. In 2003, Billboard created its first-ever Dance/Mix Show Airplay chart. According to Spin, Daft Punk's performance at Coachella in 2006 was the "tipping point" for EDM, introducing the duo to a new generation of rock fans.

  French house musician David Guetta began regularly achieving crossover hits in 2009 through collaborations with pop and hip-hop acts including Kelly Rowland, Akon, The Black Eyed Peas, and Sia. Dubstep producer Skrillex popularized a harsher sound dubbed "Brostep." In December 2011, Swedish House Mafia became the first electronic music act to sell out New York City's Madison Square Garden.

  In January 2013, Billboard introduced a new Dance/Electronic Songs chart tracking the top fifty electronic songs based on sales, radio airplay, club play, and online streaming. By late 2011, Music Trades was already describing electronic dance music as the fastest-growing genre in the world.

  In June 2012, media executive Robert F. X. Sillerman, founder of what is now Live Nation, re-launched SFX Entertainment as an EDM conglomerate and announced plans to invest one billion dollars to acquire EDM businesses. His acquisitions included regional promoters, festivals, nightclub operators in Miami, and Beatport, the online music store focused on electronic music. Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino described EDM as the "new rock 'n' roll." By October 2015, Forbes declared the possibility of an EDM "bubble" as SFX's value declined and festival oversaturation grew. SFX emerged from bankruptcy in December 2016 as a restructured company called LiveStyle.

• 7. The Ghost in the Machine

  ›

  As EDM's commercial peak arrived, so did questions about who was actually making the music. Ghost production, in which a hired producer creates a track for a DJ who releases it under their own name, became a recognized feature of the industry. Ghost producers receive a simple fee or royalty payments and often work anonymously under contract terms that prevent them from identifying themselves as contributors.

  Producers including Martin Garrix and Porter Robinson have been noted for ghost production work for other artists, while DJs such as David Guetta and Steve Aoki have been noted for their use of ghost producers. Tiësto has openly credited his ghost producers in an attempt to avoid criticism. London producer Mat Zo alleged that DJs who hire ghost producers "have pretended to make their own music and left us actual producers to struggle."

  The broader creative critique came from DJs like Carl Cox and Steve Lawler, who felt that the over-commercialization of dance music had damaged the art of DJing. Writing in Mixmag, DJ Tim Sheridan argued that push-button DJs using auto-sync and playing pre-recorded sets of obvious hits had created a situation overtaken by spectacle and money rather than skill. Deadmau5 criticized the homogenization of popular EDM, suggesting it "all sounds the same." During the 2014 Ultra Music Festival, he played an edited version of Martin Garrix's "Animals" remixed to the melody of "Old McDonald Had a Farm," generating a public argument with Tiësto on Twitter.

  Porter Robinson took a more deliberate exit. In August 2014 he released a studio album titled Worlds that abandoned his previous EDM-oriented material in favor of atmospheric tracks drawing on video game music, new wave, and electropop. His later albums Nurture and Smile! :D moved further still, with the former carrying an indie pop sound and the latter a pop-punk and hyperpop influence.

  By 2016, after years of rapid growth, the American popular EDM market began to wane. David Guetta and Showtek directly addressed this shift in a techno-influenced single released in April 2016 titled "The Death of EDM."

• 8. A Global Stage

  ›

  In May 2015, the International Music Summit's Business Report estimated that the global electronic music industry had reached nearly 6.9 billion dollars in value, counting music sales, events revenue from nightclubs and festivals, DJ equipment and software sales, and other revenue streams. The report identified several emerging markets, including East Asia, India, and South Africa.

  Festivals became the most visible proof of the genre's scale. The 2014 Ultra Music Festival brought 165,000 attendees and over 223 million dollars to the Miami and South Florida regional economy. EDC Las Vegas boosted the Clark County economy by 350.3 million dollars in 2015 alone, with over 405,000 attendees across three days from the 19th to the 21st of June.

  The first edition of TomorrowWorld, the US-based version of Belgium's Tomorrowland, brought 85.1 million dollars to the Atlanta area, a figure comparable to what the region earned from hosting the NCAA Final Four basketball championship games in the same year.

  The COVID-19 pandemic brought the festival economy to a halt. On the 4th of March, 2020, Ultra Miami became the first major electronic dance music festival to cancel an event since the pandemic began, unable to comply with Florida state capacity rules and county safety protocols. Electric Zoo, which takes place on Randall's Island in New York City, cancelled its full 2020 edition after New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio suspended all sizeable events through the 30th of September, 2020. Electric Daisy Carnival Las Vegas, originally scheduled for May 15-17, 2020, was postponed and ultimately cancelled for that year. Its CEO Pasquale Rotella announced that the festival's 25th anniversary would instead be celebrated May 21-23, 2021, though that event was subsequently postponed further to October 22-24, 2021. The Grammy Award for Best Dance/Electronic Recording, first given in 1998, reached its 2025 edition with Tame Impala winning for "End of Summer," a sign that the genre's awards infrastructure has become as durable as its dance floors.