The history of EDM, or Electronic Dance Music, goes farther back than you think. Electronic music can be characterized as a genre of music that is produced using electronic, electromechanical, and digital instruments. Electronic music instruments can include electronic oscillators, the theremin, synthesizers, electronic pianos, electric guitars, vocals, or whatever the chosen artist feels like bringing on stage. Electronic music can be made from an extensive variety of resources, from electronic oscillators to diverse computer installations and software, to microprocessors. These sounds are recorded and edited on tape and then transformed and then played back and reproduced using loudspeakers and other instruments. EDM is one of the most popular musical genres on the globe.

Electronic Dance Music is a compilation of electronic music subgenres. Some of these are as follows:

Ambient: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mehLx_Fjv_c
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-- Ambient music focuses on atmosphere and tonal textures rather than rhythm and structure. It surfaced in the 1970s when synthesizers were used to create experimental music. The term “ambient music” was reportedly coined by English producer Brian Eno.

Big room: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlCL9z-cDy8
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--- Big room (or big room house) is one of the newer genres. Initially a subgenre of electro house, the big room rose around the early 2010s through acts such as Swedish House Mafia and Martin Garrix. It has minimal melodies and electro-house-style drops.

Chill-out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUjE9H8QlA4
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-- Chill-out can be characterized by slow rhythms, relaxed moods, and sometimes even jazzy or classical influences.

Deep house: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SM-BT9cijI4
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-- What classifies as Deep House is up for debate. It is influenced by House tracks of artists like Marshall Jefferson and Larry Heard from the ‘80s. It is a style of house music adopted with a lower tempo (bpm) and a more soulful feel through gospel-like vocals or Jazzy vibes in comparison to a “regular” house. However, it can also mean the commercialized form of house music of recent times. ‘Deep house,’ often upbeat, radio-friendly, and very summer-like, leans more toward pop-dance or electro-pop due to its frequent application in pop music.

Disco: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dYWe1c3OyU
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-- Disco is where music styles such as rhythm and blues, funk, soul, and pop collide. It was popular in the 1970s and 1980s and was one of the first genres of electronic dance music to gain a following. Disco largely featured more acoustic instruments than electronically produced elements, but it was also one of the main influences for house music.

Drum and Bass: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkjNL4dX-U4
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-- Commonly abbreviated to DnB, it originated in the U.K. in the 1990s. It is built on fast-paced breakbeats in non-standard rhythms and can use raw and heavy bass rips to achieve an aggressive sound. For instance, the liquid drum and bass(a subgenre) are gentler and melodic.

Dubstep: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSeNSzJ2-Jw
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-- Often confused with drum and bass, dubstep is less fast-paced and generally not break-beat-like. It features unconventional rhythms and is widely known for a specific sound element: the wobble bass (the 'wub').

Electro House: https://www.traxsource.com/track/11760407/blade-extended-mix
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-- Electro house surfaced when electro, originally a fusion of funk, early hip-hop, and New York boogie, met in the house scene of the late 1990s. Electro house is defined by raw, prominent basslines and powerful kick drums, making it a pumped-up version of 'regular' house music.

Hardcore: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leLiXABWg68
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-- Hardcore, supposedly going by the name of hardcore techno once, originated in the Netherlands in the 1990s and is arguably the hardest style in this list. It is incredibly fast-paced (160 to 200 beats per minute) and often described as violent by those who favor more delicate music. The true signature of hardcore lies in the kick drums, which are unrivaled in both intensity and the application of distortion effects.

Hardstyle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsG_zDV83mo
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-- Hardstyle is one of the harder styles. It is more melodically oriented than hardcore, and certainly not as noise-heavy. It is somewhere in between hard techno and hardcore, but it also draws from trance music.

House: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUVCQXMUVnI
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-- House music is the genre that began it all. It began in Chicago through artists such as Frankie Knuckles, who took over cities in the United States, such as Detroit and New York, Europe, and the rest of the world. There, it became one of the most prominent and popular genres within the dance music space.

Progressive House: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3C2KSaqm3so
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-- Progressive houses are subject to the same issues as Deep House. There are two different ways to describe it. It is sometimes defined in the style of music with the sound of artists such as Sasha and John Digweed, Eric Prydz, and Deadmau5. It also draws from the sound of early trance tracks. The other progressive house forms are radio-friendly vocals, simple song structures, and easy-to-listen-to melodies, which share traits with Big Room. This form of progressive house was the first to cross over into the pop realm. Some of the first examples of these tracks are songs like ‘Clarity’ from Zedd feat. Foxes, ‘Take Over Control’ from Afrojack feat. Eva Simons, and Avicii’s 'Wake Me Up'.

Techno: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oC-GflRB0y4
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-- The foundations of the genre were largely created by Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson, jointly known as the Belleville Three. With emphasis on atmosphere and an often extended build-up of the track, techno music has a rawer, less polished sound set than house music.

Trance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6120QOlsfU
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Trance music is all about the atmospheres, epic breakdowns, and melodies. It started as a minor subgenre within the house spectrum and shared traits with house, techno, new age, and synthesizer pop. The first tracks classified as trance emerged in the late 1980s, although the early 1990s is when the genre began to flourish. Artists such as Armin van Buuren, Chicane, DJ Tiësto, and Ferry Corsten helped trance music grow into one of the most popular genres within the music realm.

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Richard James Burgess would be the man to coin the phrase “EDM”, or Electronic dance music in the 1980s. Coining this phrase would place him at the front of the electronic music revolution. Born in London and raised in New Zealand, Burgess was drawn to percussion at an early age. By the time he was 15, Burgess was making enough money as a musician to pursue a full-time career. He would travel the globe and be attached to prominent record labels such as RCA and Capitol.

Burgess was different from other artists at the time as he mainly used synthesizers in his work. This began with the EMS Synthi A, an analog synthesizer and matrix pad built into a suitcase.

He later got his hands on devices like the ARP 2600 and the Roland MC8 and invented his instrument, the prototype of the SDS-5 (“described as a piece of wood with wires and components on it”). InIne formed a band known as Landscape, which was formed by Christopher Heaton, Andy Pask, Peter Thoms, and John L. Walters. The band was known for its early, synth-wave-era embrace of computer programming.

Walters played the lyrical, the world’s first electronic wind controller, while Heaton, Pask, and Thoms developed and mastered synthesizers that manipulated their acoustic instruments. “Avant-garde electronic stuff, 100% improvised,” Burgess would affirm. One of their tracks, “Einstein a Go-Go,” was the first computer-driven song to become a top-five hit in the U.K.

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In 1980, Landscape’s record titled “European Man” stated the now infamous phrase: “EDM; computer programmed to perfection for your listening pleasure.” The name for the genre was born.

Burgess may have been at the forefront of making the genre popular, but where the technique and music style originated was long before his time in the music scene.

A turning point for the overall music industry was the invention of the phonograph by Thomas Alva Edison and Emile Berliner around the 1870s/1880s. Phonographs were the first means of recording and reproducing audio files, marking the beginning of the recording industry.

The genre originated at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Emerging electronics allowed for experimentation with sounds and electronic devices. Several electronic instruments were developed, including the Telharmonium, an electrical organ developed in 1896.

From the late 1920s, the increased practicality of electronic instruments influenced composers such as Joseph Schillinger and Maria Schuppel. They were typically used within orchestras, and most composers wrote parts for the theremin that could be performed with string instruments. The Hammond organ, Trautonium, and the Ondes Martenot would also be developed, an early electronic device played with keyboards or a ring along a wire. These early innovations were first used for demonstrations and public performances as they were too complex, impractical, and incapable of creating a sound practically for music.
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The introduction of electrical recording in 1925 was followed by experimentation with record players. Paul Hindemith and Ernst Toch composed several pieces in 1930 by layering recordings of instruments and vocals at adjusted speeds. In 1935, the first practical audio tape was invented. Influenced by these techniques, John Cage composed Imaginary Landscape No. 1 in 1939 by adjusting the speeds of recorded tones.
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In 1948, musique concrète, a type of music composition, was invented in Paris, France by French composers Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry in the Studio d'Essai at Radiodiffusion Française (RDF). The Musique concrète technique created tape collages or montages of recorded sounds. All these sounds produced by an individual and their environment were considered materials taken from ‘concrete’ means and situations. Therefore, music concrète was opposed to the use of oscillators as they were considered ‘artificial’ and ‘anti-humanistic’ but still used electric devices to record them.

The work in electronic music taking place in America during this time resulted from two projects undertaken by three composers at Columbia University: Otto Luening, John Cage, and Vladimir Ussachevsky. Between 1942 and 1958, Cage completed Williams Mix (1952) and Fontana Mix (1958) and formed The Music for Magnetic Tape Project along with other composers and members of the New York School. The emphasis of the project was on experimenting with the recording of electronic and natural sounds and combining them with instrumental music, dance, and visual arts.

The goal of the project led by Luening and Ussachevsky was to create a professional tape studio that would demonstrate the musical possibilities of tape as a medium. Joined by Milton Babbitt, the two composers established the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, known as the Computer Music Center or CMC today, in 1959. This is the oldest center of electronic and computer music research in the USA. After 1958, the Experimental Music Studio at the University of Illinois and the University of Toronto Studio were established in 1959.

Karlheinz Stockhausen, who worked in Schaeffer's studio in 1952, had a different idea of how sounds and music could be transformed and altered. So, softly after joining Schaeffer, he left and joined WDR Cologne's Studio for Electronic Music, established by Herbert Einer. His focus was on electronic sound modifications rather than tape manipulation. What he wanted to achieve, through sound alterations, filtering, and modulating, was electric acoustic compositions. This marked the birth of Elektronische Musik, a German branch of electronic music.

Music festivals featuring electronic instruments started to appear in the early 1900s. This mostly included electronic sounds used in experimental music, particularly tape and electroacoustic music, including the above instruments. Live electronic music expanded more in the 1950s, alongside the use of bass and electric guitar.

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Japanese electronic musical instruments started having a strong influence on the international music industry. Various Japanese manufacturers, such as AceTone, Korg, Matsushita, Roland, and Yamaha, were developing their versions of electronic music devices in the 1950s. These included percussion instruments, early drum machines, electric organs, and synthesizers.

The period of the 1960s was crucial for music festivals and their evolution into mass-cultural entertainment. With the postwar economic boom and the rise of the American car industry, festivals and other cultural events had become less elite and more accessible to a wider range of middle classes and even some working classes. Music festivals were also centered around various cultural matters popular among younger audiences, such as fashion, food, art, and literature. Through this music festivals started to become a valuable part of the popular culture of that time.

One of the first ‘pop-culture’ music festivals to be founded was the Monterey Pop Music Festival which was held in June 1967 in Monterey. This festival included stars, like Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, the Who, and Simon & Garfunkel. The greatest musical event of the 1960s was the legendary Woodstock festival which was organized on a dairy farm in upstate New York from 15th-18th August 1969 and attracted almost 500,000 people. The festival offered in total of 32 different performers, and those that were previously present at the Monterey festival.

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The late 1960s saw the rise of popular electronic music merge with other musical genres, especially pop and rock, which led to the establishment of new genres. Musicians of that time, such as the Beatles or the Beach Boys, started integrating electronic instruments, including the theremin or Mellotron, into their sound. Electronica was pioneered by the American duo Silver Apples and bands such as White Noise, which are known for adding oscillators and synthesizers to their psychedelic sound.

Mood synthesizers became particularly popular among progressive rock bands, including Pink Floyd, Genesis, Yes, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer as well. A whole new sub-genre of progressive rock was born in West Germany in the late 1960s and early 1970s by this movement.

Electronic art music developed new-agent art music developed new-age ambient murky ambient dub, in the parent dub was pioneered by several Jamaican musicians such as King Tubby and later adopted by other international artists like Dreadzone, The Orb, and Ott.

After disco became highly popular in the 1970s, the late 1970s and 1980s saw the emergence of synth-pop, featuring the synthesizer. The sub-genre was greatly influenced by musicians, such as Ultravox, with the song ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’ (1977), Depeche Mode, with a track called ‘Dreaming of Me’ (1980), and New Order, with their song ‘Ceremony’ (1981).

Disco music aimed to move crowds of people on the dancefloor, using drum machines and electronic instruments to create synthesized rhythms. Popular disco music that helped to create the EDM scene included Donna Summer’s 1977 hit “I Feel Love,” which was written by Pete Bellotte and Giorgio Moroder, who would later collaborate with Daft Punk, and George McCrae's 1974 hit “Rock Your Baby,” which used a drum machine and Roland rhythm machine.

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Massive music festivals were also developing in the UK, too. Some of the most renowned pop festivals in the UK were The Isle of Wight (1967-present), Glastonbury Festival (1970-present) and Reading Festival (1971-present). The 1970 edition of the Isle of Wight exceeded the attendance at Woodstock, attracting more than 700,000 participants., international festivals were also established in the 1970s, including the Canadian Strawberry Fields Festival (1970), the Sunbury Pop Festival in Australia (1972-1975), or Festival Rock Y Ruedas De Avándaro in Mexico (1971).

Synth music, or synthpop, was developed alongside house music and electro music during the “post-disco” era in the ‘’80s. Music of this era began to be produced in the mainstream music industry in Europe as EDM became more sophisticated with the ever-changing technological advancements. Drum machines and synthesizers were used more heavily after the 1970s. Paired with the use of computers, electronic music took off as an accessible art form that could be replicated and transformed by anyone with musical experience and a computer. Music produced during this time included hits like A-ha’s “Take On Me” and the song that would come to be recognized as one of the first house records.

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Synth-pop continued through the 1980s, moving closer to dance music, with acts including Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, and The Communards. In 1987, British DJ Danny Rampling started organizing a weekly party called Shoom in one of London's fitness clubs. Soon, such parties, taking place illegally, spread to other European countries, including Germany. In Frankfurt, this time, a sub-genre, trance, was born.

Artists such as Lime and Men Without Hats from Canada, Propaganda, Sandra and Modern Talking from Germany, Yello from Switzerland, and Telex from Belgium became popular. The sound of synth-pop also became the defining feature of Italo-disco. Bands including Van Halen with their track ‘Jump’ (1983) and Europe with ‘The Final Countdown’ (1986) became instant hits.

The genres of Acid House, Dance, and Techno were all established in Germany and the UK. They then spread to the rest of Europe before traveling to America and landing in the Detroit Techno scene. Detroit techno had many early pioneers, but one main one was Juan Atkins, who in 1981 partnered with Rik Davis as Cybotron and issued the single “Alleys of Your Mind.” Shortly after releasing an album, Enter (1983), the duo split up, at which point Atkins started his label, Metroplex, and began releasing 12-inch vinyl singles under the name Model 500. The sound that emerged from the Detroit scene was an abstract instrumental funk; Saunderson often used vocalists and had his biggest hits with the soul-influenced duo Inner City. It became formalized as a style after Atkins named a track “Techno Music.” which was released in 1988.

In the 1980s the invention of the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI), a technical standard that describes and standardizes a communication protocol, the digital interface, and electrical connectors between various electronic musical instruments, computer software, and other related audio gadgets for recording, editing, and playing music was created. MIDI was completed in 1983 and the technology made the development of electronic sound easier.

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By 1988, acid house became the most prominent music genre in the UK, mostly in nightclubs in London, Sheffield, Manchester, and Birmingham. However, conflicts with local police and attracting people exceeding the capacities of their venues, ‘raves’ were moved to the countryside near the big cities, taking place in various outdoor locations and closed industrial sites.

The official era of open-air raves didn’t last very long. In 1992-1993, the British government passed new laws to ban them effectively. While these events didn’t stop the local promoters from organizing them, these raves moved back to already established clubs or spread to the European continent, where no laws prohibiting raves existed.

The 1990’s rave culture would form out of techno music, house music, hardcore rave (hardstyle), dub, trance, and drum and bass. In the ’90s, EDM was still breaking into the mainstream, and it began to rise in popularity, especially in Europe. It was then that the rave scene began to grow into what it is today. Popular songs included the British group Orbital’s single Chime and their single “Halcyon On and On.”

This music was popularized under the name “electronica” during the 1990s. Bands like Underworld, Fatboy Slim, The Prodigy, and The Chemical Brothers came from England and had a massive impact. In the U.S., “Detroit techno,” or techno that seemed to originate in Detroit in the late ’80s and ’90s grew in popularity. Detroit techno was pioneered by the “Belleville Three,” including Derrick Mayr, who produced music under the names Mayday and Rhythim is Rhythim.

The fall of the Berlin Wall happened in 1989, just on the verge of the 1990s. The political events happening in Berlin, Germany, unconsciously, impacted the development of above-ground electronic music festivals. Shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, in the summer of that year, a group of 150 people, organized by the Berlin underground, took part in a political demonstration in the form of a musical parade that was held in Kurfürstendamm. Officially billed as a political march, the parade was the beginning of Love Parade, a massive electronic dance music festival, and techno parade. The following year, after the fall of the Wall, the Love Parade took place again, this time attracting around 2000 people.

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By 1997, the Love Parade was attended by more than a million partygoers. It had changed its location to the nearby Tiergarten Park, with the parade route ending at the Siegessäule, a ‘Victory Column’. The free-access music festival featured stages as well as floats with music, DJs, and dancers stirring through the audience and was held annually in Berlin from 1989-2003. The Love Parade was canceled due to funding difficulties. Eventually, the parade saw its short revival in 2007 when it was organized in the Ruhr region, centered around the cities of Dortmund, Essen, Duisburg, and Gelsenkirchen. The last Love Parade took place in 2010 in the city of Duisburg and was marked by a fatal disaster from attendees dying from suffocation as they were trying to leave the ramp leading to the festival area. The tragedy caused the deaths of 21 people and at least 500 more were injured. The organizers decided to cancel the festival permanently. However, in 2022, the equivalent of Love Parade was revived under the name of Rave The Planet.

Alongside Love Parade, Mayday (1991-present) and the Swiss festival Street Parade (1992-present) were the biggest electronic music festivals in Europe throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. City-based electronic music festivals were trendy in the 1990s and were eventually seen as lucrative sources of income and tourism. Other most popular city-based festivals of that time were Time Warp in Mannheim (1994-present), Sónar in Barcelona (1994-present), I Love Techno in Ghent (1995-present), Awakenings in Rotterdam and Amsterdam (1997-present) or Hradhouse in Boskovice (1998-2010).

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In the early 2000s, the ‘urban arts festival’ model was the go, and more festivals were being established, including Club Transmediale in Berlin (1999-present), EXIT in Novi Sad (2000-present), MUTEK in Montreal (2000-present), and Decibel Festival in Detroit (2003-present). Non-urban festivals were organized, too, such as Destiny/World Electronic Music Festival near Toronto (1995-2012), Kazantip in Ukraine (1992-2013), Boom in Portugal (1997-present), and Melt! in Germany (1998-present).

In the 2000s, EDM became popular in the U.S. thanks to international DJs and music producers drawing attention to the genre and a techno-pop 1998 album by Madonna called Ray of Light. From there, producers like Tiësto, Daft Punk, and David Guetta rose to popularity. In the early 2000s, dubstep was also introduced to the U.S. music industry through artists like Skrillex.

The genre during this time was strongly shaped by technological advances and higher accessibility of technology and musical software. Many technological innovations introduced in the new millennium, such as CDs or DVDs, the digital audio workstation (DAW) Ableton Live (2001), or the studio emulation Reason (2000) shaped music. These devices provided less complex, more cost-effective, alternatives to traditional hardware-based production studios. Ableton Live is considered one of the first music applications to automatically beat-match a song. DJs have widely used shows and live performances for composing, recording, and mastering records.

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Today, EDM is often characterized by remixes and original sound mixes, produced by DJs like The Chainsmokers, Steve Aoki, Martin Garrix, and others. EDM is used by a large majority of pop and hip-hop artists, including Coldplay, Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez, Drake, Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Alessia Cara, and countless others.

The new millennium is marked by the continuous growth of EDM in the US, such as dubstep promoted by Skrillex. Daft Punk changed the game and the global perception of electronic dance music when they launched their 2006-2007 worldwide tour at the Coachella festival near Indio, California.

Then came the global establishment of EDM festivals in the first decade of the 21st century, taking the format of outdoor mega-events. The most popular are Tomorrowland in Belgium (2005), Electric Daisy Festival in Las Vegas, US (1991), Ultra Music Festival in Miami (1999), Airbeat One Festival in Germany (2002), and Balaton Sound in Hungary (2007).

As of today, 2023, the industry's value has grown in 16 countries, led by market share gains mostly in the UK and Germany. Recorded electronic music grew by up to 18%, with physical format sales growing for the first time in 20 years, and artists’ and DJ earnings went up by 111%.

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