Pepperidge Farm and countless others who use Dance music as their lifeblood remember a time when EDM ended up being a perfect way to describe all of the iterations of the genre. Sadly, the term was transformed by the “underground” society as a means to segregate the newer fans who enjoy festival mainstages. Tiesto talks about this further in an interview with Indian publication Decan Herald, saying he wished we could have just stuck with EDM, as it was a term that legitimately brought everyone together in the spirit of what raves stand for.
“EDM used to be a term for all of electronic dance music, but now it just means all the music that you’re not supposed to play. It became the new trance. It got popular, so now we’re all into deep house. And soon we’ll be over that. You can’t win. I wish we could have just stuck with EDM, honestly, because we finally had a term that captured everything in one big family, like jazz. But no, we had to be hip.”
The commercialization of dance music and the insincerity of individuals and companies that represent and buy into dance music is an issue, but a separate argument from what terms should be used to define a type of music. The damage seems to have already been done though, and a majority of the people who would in most contexts be educators of a newer generation are instead insulting those who take interest in something they found on the radio.
Read everything Tiesto has to say to Decan Herald here.
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