Today on Glitch Hop Forum, Angryrancor posted a link to an interesting article, entitled, ‘Are Mega-Corporations and Wall Street Killing Electronic Dance Music?’ written by Julianne Escobedo Shepherd.

Live Nation Entertainment (the lovechild of a merger between Live Nation and Ticketmaster) has recently gone and purchased the underground electronic music event promotion company, Hard Events. Robert F.X. Sillerman (the guy who used to run Live Nation) has already stated that he plans on injecting at least one BiLLiON dollars into this emerging market, which, I don’t need to tell you, is a LOT of cash! So what does this all mean? It means there might be a bubble. Dubstep is the new disco… or, maybe more appropriately, all of ‘edm’ is the new disco?

So what will this mean for underground electronic music overall? Well, look at other popular forms of music that have been commercialized – rock music, for example. Remember arena-rock in the 80s? Tons of money was put into it, and a lot of money came out of it, too. But eventually, what happened? Well, if we believe the widely-accepted narrative of American rock music, it came to a close when grunge came in… Fine, right? I’d say so! But then, sooner or later, grunge also blew up commercially (to the chagrin of many Seattlites) and it eventually died out, too.

Rock always goes through periods of rise and fall, as does hip hop, and electronic music, too. If you really look at what’s happening, and consider the history of electronic music, it’s burst before. It burst in the late 1970s/early 1980s with the rise and fall of disco – after which, there was STILL electronic music, but it was forced underground until something called ‘acid house,’ (a reworked form of disco with updates technology, updated aesthetics, and updated drugs) formed. And, as the chart below shows, we might be coming into another electronica-bubble soon, and not some vaguely entertaining Aphex Twin analogue-bubble, either! (wink)

Now, before you freak out and get really uptight about this, remember, it’s a little tongue-in-cheek. Meaning? It’s a joke… and, as any uptight electronic music fan will tell you (like me, for example) it’s not 100% accurate. You can tell because the ‘tipping point’ is witch house. (Yes, Dugg Funnie, you’re completely right – I DID forget to add trance :D …my bad)

The Great EDM Crash

Also, it should be pointed out, skwunc is not a real genre, and grungestep never got THAAAAT big. Nor did witch-house… it’s a joke, there’s no ‘EDM’ stock.. ;)

-StrangeFlow