Electronic Dance Music

A 6-post blog series analysis of EDM culture, and regulations’ impact on its development (for COMM 4419 at Carleton University)

Hello followers! This semester I’m taking a fun class called Music, Communication and Regulation: Perspectives of the Music Industry. Briefly, the class discusses how social, political, technological and economic conditions have affected musical evolution throughout history. For the class we are to work on a term project: a major assignment that we work on for the duration the semester. I decided to use my blog — and my digital media background — to dabble in some journalistic reviews.

You’ll have noticed that I have been fairly silent on my Medium blog for the past several weeks. I’ve been using that time to research and prepare for a series of journalistic blog posts. I have prepared four different posts for now, and will be working on the final few in the coming weeks. The posts will be sent out periodically over the next few days. So, what are they about?

Electronic Dance Music (or EDM for short). Why? I’m interested in understanding the evolution of the music as a genre and as a culture. I want to answer the following questions in my research:

1. How has regulation affected the transformation of EDM as a musical genre?

a. Did regulation affect its recent emergence into mainstream culture?

b. How has regulation worked to prevent drug use at events (or did it have an opposite effect)?

2. How does the public — external to the EDM cultural scene — view EDM as a musical genre, as a soundscape, as a culture, and the members of the culture?

3. How do members of this public sphere and its culture view the changes that the genre has undergone since its birth?

4. How does this music work to create a soundscape and how does this communicate to the audience?

a. Has it influenced the identity surrounding the music?

b. Does the genre discriminate against potential audience members? (E.g. are there certain social groups that do not partake in the EDM scene, subculture, and soundscape/audio space?)

I’ll be covering the following topics in my series:

Topics

1) Context: “Electronic Dance Music”

a. I’ll list some important things to keep in mind while reading my series

2) EDM History: “EDM: A History”

a. A brief history of EDM’s birth to today

b. Discuss how the negative stigma surrounding EDM has transformed

3) EDM Concerts (First-Hand Reporting): “Participation in EDM”

a. Here I will provide my own account of several shows I have attended

b. I’ll discuss my perception of the culture, the music and how I’ve seen it transform

4) EDM Culture: “EDM, a Culture”

a. Based on research I will discuss the transformation over time of EDM culture. I’ll end this segment off my predicting what changes I expect

5) Regulation in EDM: “EDM and Regulations Influence”

a. Here I will discuss how the music is created, how the artists are discovered, how songs are disseminated to the public, how regulation has impacted festivals and shows and the economic focus in terms of how profit is generated now for this genre. I will also briefly compare some of these facets to ‘traditional’ genres

6) Conclusion: “EDM Series Wrap-Up”

a. Wrap up!

b. YouTube links to my Top 10 Favourite EDM songs

This will be a very interesting topic for me to cover: EDM is a popularized genre that has recently become prominent in mainstream media. The question then is whether EDM will be a lasting genre like Rock, Jazz, and Hip-Hop and whether it be the basis for new genres in the future? Or, will it disappear as quickly as it showed up?

*Note: I will store all of my references (cited in APA style) on a separate blog post called “EDM Bibliography”. It will be a dynamic post, in that as I add more research and more blog posts I will update the references used.

Context

As you all probably know, EDM is a form of music that has been electronically produced and mixed. It is rhythmic, sometimes repetitious, and often there will be a track on which a featured artist performs. Take a look at this video for a great example of a recent EDM track (Avicii, 2013). For the purpose of this assignment Dubstep, Electronic, Trance, House, and Remix music genres will be considered sub-categories of EDM. The rational behind broadening the definition of EDM is to increase the availability of related research and to provide a broader context for answering the guiding questions for this analysis. I think it’s important to understand that the culture at festivals, and the culture that surrounds EDM are present in the EDM ‘acoustic space’. This will be an important term to better understand the context in which this series of blog posts are written in. Let me help you better understand this topic. Shafer (2007, p. 83) quotes Arthur McLuhen, “Auditory space … [is] a sphere without fixed boundaries, space made by the thing itself, not space containing the thing. It is not pictorial space, boxed-in, but dynamic, always in flux, creating its own dimensions moment by moment. It has no fixed boundaries; it is indifferent to background.” This means that wherever you are listening to EDM, you are actively present and participating in the genres auditory/acoustic space. It’s never present only in one place, nor is it static in one place or time. This means that everyone around the world who listens to EDM is linked through this notion of a community transcending time and space, despite not being physically present with each other.

This notion of community and participation will be further discussed in my post on EDM Culture. I think one of the things that draws me to this music and culture, and wanting to understand it more, is from a trend I have noticed: no matter your race, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or ‘social classification’ when someone is participating in the EDM acoustic space these notions are ignored — everyone belongs, everyone is one. To quote my favourite EDM group, Krewella (2013) “We are [all] one”.