How Swedish House Mafia and Other Artists Broke Big Tracks at Electronic Music Festivals
To break or not to break? The ultimate DJ dilemma.
By Marcus K. Dowling for Festival Advisor.
Over the past decade, DJs “breaking” a big track at a festival has come to define the best of what EDM-related festival experiences have to offer. How do you go about delivering on creating ultimate impact for a new or hit song, though? Here are a few answers from people who would know.
April 12, 2013 saw Daft Punk delight the Sahara Tent’s evening crowd Coachella Music Festival by dropping a trailer video on the main stage’s big screen for Pharrell Williams and Nile Rodgers collaboration “Get Lucky.” This signaled the French dance tandem’s return to the pop mainstream as an act in nearly a decade. For most of the festival’s revelers who were in the midst of adoring hard charging electro and mosh-ready dubstep, it was also the resurgence of funk-led house and disco into the festival-beloved EDM conversation. For 24 hours, the conversation shifted from sick drops and shuffling to enlivened basslines and sultry soul. It was a rare moment that seismically shifted sensibilities, expanded expectations, and created lifelong memories.
“The festival play, that’s the ultimate litmus test,” says Washington, DC-based Chub Rub label boss zacheser. He continues, “[w]orking in the studio, it’s hard to see how that will translate to an audience. But a festival, with thousands of people experiencing dance music on an incredible sound system, it either it works, or it doesn’t.”
One such example of when a track truly worked is when a reveler interviewed at 2009’s Miami Music Week noted, “I can’t believe it, house music is back in the United States,” during the music video for Swedish House Mafia and Laidback Luke’s then collaboration with R & B vocalist Deborah Cox for “Leave The World Behind.” Described in the same video by a BBC Radio 1 host as a “Miami monster,” the track — debuted during Axwell, Ingrosso and Angello’s 2009 set at Ultra Music Festival — kicked off a five-year run for the trio that saw them become synonymous with electro house worldwide. Their success, in many ways was birthed by a track signifying to the American marketplace that “house music [was] back,” that spawned two world tours that grossed $50 million in gate revenue, two feature film length documentaries, two compilation albums, and seven global top-ten singles.
In 2015, journalist Michelle Lhooq, while writing for VICE, noted that DJs, at that point, had been recast from “skilled track selector to adulated player of big hits,” noting that there was a potential for “downplaying the importance of improvisation and surprise in sets in favor of familiarity and spectacle.” However, as previously noted, when it comes to breaking the game changing hit, it may be a blending of the two — improvisation to create a surprising spectacle-as-indelible memory — that is likely the best course of action.
Even deeper into this rabbit hole regarding the best definition of whether surprise or spectacle is best, John Digweed noted to MTV, “if you just chose to play stuff they know just to get a reaction, that’s just being lazy…but playing a record no one knows and hearing them go crazy is a “better buzz.” Artist/producers like John Digweed and Swedish House Mafia are talented veterans in both music and as festival-playing DJs. For the flip-side of the “better buzz” argument though, it may be best to get another veteran opinion. In a 2018 interview with Dance Music Network, trance icon Markus Schulz offered his thoughts on the potential perils of a surprising “unknown” new track missing the mark. “With a festival set, you’re competing for the attention of thousands of fans who haven’t necessarily come to see you, and you’re competing against top-tier DJs for attention, across different genres. So at festivals, you tend to play a lot safer; with emphasis on your big signature, tried and trusted tracks. Because of the short set length, you don’t particularly have the time to explore into the unknown, and if you make a programming mistake, you could lose the crowd very early.”
Rising producer/selector zacheser frames the conversation moving forward regarding creating the big moment for the big track moving forward quite well. “Overall, with set times usually being a bit shorter, it’s easier to just create the moment for the big hit as opposed to building excitement for the unidentifiable stuff. There’s nothing more satisfying than dropping something you don’t normally play, and it works. But, there’s also that moment when you hit the crowd with firepower, and they love it. No matter what, you’re there to hopefully create the most memorable experience possible with your time.”
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