People ask me why I always have a bone to pick with EDM. It’s not the music that’s the problem, it’s the attitude of a lot of the artists.
This morning one of them wrote about how “living a life of art, devoid of rules & answering to absolutely no one is sublime”. Sure, but your ability to live like that is largely owed to the Live Nations/ClearChannels/SFXs that elevated you to this level. Not because your “movement” rose up from the underground by itself. For years and years the US scene showed no signs of evolution whatsoever. (A scene cannot survive on a handful of Avalons and Twilos alone - for those old enough to remember)
For a community that supposedly cares about dance music so much, I don’t see them looking into the future, when all the stock is being dumped and the investors stop having interest in this music/lifestyle/branding opportunity, thus leaving everyone (including the underground) in the dust. So just as every trend got eradicated by the next one, all dance music is in danger of vanishing. And that doesn’t mean going “underground”. It means getting buried. If you want examples, there are many: Hair metal, Grunge, Nu-Metal, boy bands, the list is endless.
I have nothing against going for the big bucks, or great branding opportunities, we all do this on one scale or another since music is a business. But it’s hypocritical to project that the mass appeal EDM has is purely based on “organic”and “grass-roots” efforts. And on top of that, the EDM community is shocked when events such as the tragic deaths of people at festivals cause such large-scale media outrage. When things like that happen to publicly traded companies it reflects directly on their stock, hence the outrage. So it’s the stock market vs. whoever wants to go up against it. And we all know how that turns out.
