The Rise of EDM: How Dance Music Took Over Between 2010 and 2016
by Daniel Finn
EDM didn’t begin in the 2010s, so why did it suddenly become absolutely massive?
There was a period in the early 2010s when electronic dance music became absolutely enormous, and looking back now, the part I wanted to understand was why this particular version of dance music became so big at exactly that moment.
Obviously none of this began in 2010. House, techno, trance and rave culture had already been developing for decades, but several things were coming together at once that allowed electronic dance music to reach a completely different scale.
One important precursor, I think, came a few years earlier, when Daft Punk debuted their pyramid stage at Coachella in 2006 and then developed the concept through their Alive 2006/2007 tour, which will live in my memory, and many others', forever. The combination of the pyramid, synchronised visuals and a set constructed from their own catalogue became an influential reference point for the enormous audiovisual electronic shows that followed.
Then YouTube, SoundCloud and the growth of streaming made it much easier for a track, DJ set or festival performance to travel around the world, while increasingly accessible production software and resources to learn how to use it meant producers working from laptops had fewer barriers between making music and finding an audience.
At the same time, festivals were becoming enormous businesses, particularly in the United States, and events like Ultra and EDC were turning dance music into something closer to a stadium spectacle, with huge stages, LED screens, lasers and tens of thousands of people experiencing the same build and release together.
The music suited that environment almost perfectly, with many of the biggest records sitting around 128 BPM and using four-on-the-floor drums, huge synth chords and increasingly long builds where everything eventually arrived at the drop.
David Guetta, Avicii, Swedish House Mafia and Afrojack all approached the sound differently, but they shared that emphasis on tension and release, and by the beginning of the 2010s it had become one of the defining sounds of the era.
But almost as quickly as that sound became enormous, producers started pulling it in completely different directions. By the time the EDM boom reached its peak, the sound that would replace it was already taking shape.
By the early 2010s, the huge build and drop had become one of the defining sounds of electronic music, but while that festival formula was reaching its peak, producers were already starting to take it in completely different directions.
Skrillex came from the heavier end of dubstep, where distorted bass, chopped rhythms and extreme shifts in dynamics pushed the idea of tension and release somewhere much more aggressive, while still translating perfectly to the enormous festival stages that had emerged around EDM.
Then in 2012, Flume released his debut album from Australia, and compared with the clean four-on-the-floor structure dominating many of those main stages, his music felt completely different.
The drums stumbled and shifted, vocals were chopped into pieces, synths bent around the beat and tracks like “Holdin On” found their impact without relying on the enormous festival-house drop.
That approach became closely associated with the development of future bass, while elsewhere producers were moving towards tropical house, deep house and slower forms of electronic music, meaning EDM was becoming harder to describe as one particular sound.
By 2015 and 2016, the huge festival sound hadn’t disappeared, but the period when that particular formula seemed to dominate electronic music was already passing, and many of the ideas that emerged during the boom were being absorbed into completely different styles.
Looking back at 2010 to 2016 now, it feels like an unusually concentrated period where technology, festival culture and electronic music all changed alongside each other, creating a sound that became enormous and then started evolving almost immediately.
I’ve made a playlist covering the whole period, from the huge festival records through to the music that started changing the sound. Have a listen and let me know if any of these tracks are as nostalgic for you as they are for me.