What is EDM ?

Electronic dance music (also known as EDM, dance music, club music, or simply dance) is a broad range of percussive electronic music genres produced largely for nightclubs, raves, and festivals. Produced for playback by disc jockeys (DJs), EDM is generally used in the context of a live mix, where a DJ creates a seamless selection of tracks bysegueing from one recording to the next.

EDM gained popularity in Europe long before it found its way to the United States by appealing to the European club scene that had not made it to the United States yet. However, by the early 2010s the term "electronic dance music" and the initialism "EDM" was being pushed by the U.S. music industry and music press in what was largely an effort to re-brand U.S. rave culture. In the UK, "dance music" or "dance" are more common terms for the genre. In this context, EDM does not refer to a specific genre, but serves as an umbrella term for several commercially popular genres, including techno, house, trance, drum and bass, dubstep, hard dance, Jersey club, and their respectivesubgenres.

History

Early examples of electronic dance music include the disco music of Giorgio Moroder and the electronic music of Kraftwerk and Yellow Magic Orchestra in the late 1970s.

Criticism

Despite the growing mainstream acceptance of EDM a number of producers and DJs, including Carl Cox, Steve Lawler, and Markus Schulz, have raised concerns that the perceived over-commercialization of dance music has impacted the "art" of DJing. Cox saw the "press-play" approach of EDM DJs as unrepresentative of what he called "DJ ethos". Writing in Mixmag, DJ Tim Sheridan argued that "push-button DJs" who use auto-sync and play pre-recorded sets of "obvious hits" has resulted in a situation overtaken by "the spectacle, money and the showbiz".

Some house producers openly admitted that "commercial" EDM needed further differentiation and creativity. Avicii, whose 2013 album True featured songs incorporating elements of bluegrass, such as lead single "Wake Me Up", stated that most EDM lacked "longevity". Deadmau5 has criticized the homogenizationof EDM, stating that the music he hears "all sounds the same", underlining his diversification into other genres like techno. During the 2014 Ultra Music Festival, Deadmau5 made critical comments about up-and-coming EDM artist Martin Garrix and later played an edited version of Garrix's "Animals" remixed to the melody of "Old McDonald Had a Farm". Afterwards, Tiësto criticized Deadmau5 on Twitter for "sarcastically" mixing Avicii's "Levels" with his own "Ghosts 'n' Stuff".

In May 2014, the NBC comedy series Saturday Night Live parodied the stereotypes of EDM culture and push-button DJs in a Digital Short entitled "When Will the Bass Drop?". It featured a DJ who goes about performing everyday activities—playing a computer game, frying eggs, collecting money—who then presses a giant "BASS" button, which explodes the heads of concertgoers.

Genres

EDM has various subgenres that evolved over the past 30 years that are often defined by their varying tempo (BPM), rhythm, instrumentation, and time period. For example; hardstyle, dubstep, trance, electro, hardcore, trap, chillstep, chillout, drum and bass, house, and some other genres which came from combinations from the genre above.