Critical Perspectives on Music and Society Electronic Dance

This text explores how the Electronic Dance Music subculture transitioned from a marginalized deviant subculture to a billion-dollar culture industry, looking at how the culture’s success has undermined in-group solidarity and marginalized those who helped pioneer it. Electronic Dance Music: From Deviant Subculture to Culture Industry explores the subculture’s emergence as a deviant subculture. This text analyzes how industry professionals, fans, and public officials helped usher in a new age of EDM, arguing that while the defining features of the subculture made it attractive, they also laid the foundations for outsiders to commodify the movement as a culture industry. Conner and Dickens explore the concept of “commodified resistance” as the mechanism by which the movement's politically dissident features were removed and its place as a multi-billion-dollar industry made possible. Ultimately, this text advocates the continued utility of the culture industry thesis through an empirical analysis of the EDM subculture.Check out an interview with the author on the New Books Network podcast here: