What Is EDM? Apparently, No One Can Say For Sure

What is “EDM”? This is a debate that everyone seems to have an opinion about but no one seems to agree on today.

Officially, “EDM” is an umbrella term that describes a wide range of genres in the world of dance music, whether it be house music, dubstep, trance, techno, or more.

Google’s top-ranking result for the definition of EDM also falls in line with this idea– it describes EDM as “A broad range of percussive electronic music genres originally made for nightclubs, raves, and festivals.”

So what’s all the confusion about? The way people think about and define EDM extends far past the umbrella term it was intended to be, and understanding why requires taking a plunge into dance music history.

The quest begins with exploring the early days of rave culture. While raves and music like techno, house, and Drum & Bass gained mainstream popularity in Europe in the late 80s and 90s, the US scene mostly stayed underground.

This was due in part to negative stigmas around raving at the time, particularly related to drug use. Mainstream media outlets and record labels largely kept their shoulders turned to electronic music, even as the scene steadily grew.

But by the 2010s, that all began to change. Era icons like Avicii and Swedish House Mafia breached into the American scene and inspired a new appetite for electronic beats with radio airwave-friendly electro-pop hits like “Levels” and “Don’t You Worry Child.”

A major shift in the way people thought about dance music and the culture that came with it was underway, and on many accounts, it all started with the US music industry. 

Eager to hop on growing trends, US promoters sought a new way to repackage dance music in order to reach new audiences and gain mainstream reputability in the media.

That being the case, music industry groups like SFX Entertainment (now known asLiveStyle) began promoting the concept of Electronic Dance Music, or “EDM.”

Kathryn Frazier, a long-time industry professional and Daft Punk’s former manager explains this in an interview with Resident Advisor: 

“The media likes to have something to wrap things up with, and EDM is a very convenient tool for them to wrap up a very large world…I’m sure I’m a little bit to blame [for] why the media has clung onto it, because I pitched a lot of EDM stories to mainstream music editors who did not know about dance music, care about dance music, and were completely unaware of how big it was. It was the numbers that sort of piqued their interest. There was a whole scene going on that they weren’t covering, and they didn’t really know about it [until] the scene started to be called EDM, [which] helped them to make sense of it.”

This new concept didn’t just provide a convenient label for marketing. According to many people in the dance music community, this shift also symbolized a break from the previous era of rave culture–and consequently, another direction in the way people define EDM emerged. 

As mainstage icons like David Guetta and Tiesto drew ever-growing crowds to festival mainstages, the rave emerged from the underground.

Musky urban warehouses and phat pants gave way to sun-lit stadiums, glitter, and Instagram. A new era in US rave culture began, and many people came to associate the term “EDM” specifically with the commercialized brands of dance music from this time. Big Room House, “Brostep” and Electro-Pop are good examples. 

In the same vein, the term also became synonymous with American culture. Anyone familiar with comment sections on forums like Reddit knows this story well– Europeans and members of the rave community from other parts of the world often object to using “EDM” as a universal label because they associate the term exclusively with music from commercial American festival circuits. 

Speaking from my personal experience interacting with non-US ravers, the distinctions get even more granular and oddly specific: When I attended Amsterdam Dance Event in the Netherlands, I encountered a group of travelers who thought of “Electronic Dance Music” and “EDM” as different concepts.

In their view, the full word represents an open umbrella term, and they had no issues with using the label this way. The word “EDM” on the other hand always seemed to evoke images of flower-crown-clad American ravers jumping up and down to Martin Garrix’s “Animals” circa 2014.

To be clear, EDM is just an abbreviation of “Electronic Dance Music” –they are exactly the same term.  Nonetheless, it appears there’s no limit to how lost in the weeds things can get when it comes to people’s personal ideas.

Can there ever be a single way to define Electronic Dance Music? Perhaps the better question to ask is should there be a single way to define it?

In many ways, it seems like a moot point. It’s easy to get sucked into the squabble over labels, but the truth is that words and labels can never encapsulate the vibrant and ever-evolving world of music.

The term “EDM” means different things to different people, and that’s because the music and the many cultures that evolve around it are too vast to encapsulate with language. Dance music is a movement, and when gatekeeping and cultural differences are put aside, it’s a movement that always brings people together.

Images courtesy of Rukes Photography

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