EDM is its own separate thing now, it basically means "radio pop with a four-on-the-floor beat and synths".

No. Just no. You can redefine terms but this doesn't make it so.

Edit: "Despite the industry's attempt to create a specific EDM brand, the initialism remains in use as an umbrella term for multiple genres, including dance-pop, house, techno and electro, as well as their respective subgenres." - Wikipedia. Wikipedia being right for a change, this is industry BS. Don't buy it like a willing consumer.

What, no? At least in Europe, EDM is a specific set of big club / festival House that's all about big bombastic bass drops. If one of my Techno buddies says with disdain 'all they were playing at that place was EDM' I know exactly what he means, and it isn't techno

One can nicely troll young British ravers by casually referring to UKEDM, which is a play on UKG (UK garage) and the less frequent UKJ (UK jungle).

I have always used it as an umbrella term too. Maybe it's a distinction you and your friends have because of the scene you're in?

Could be age too. That use of EDM is in my experience a 90s/00s thing.

I don't agree at all with that outlook, unless I missed a beat EDM has encompassed everything from House to Trance, Jungle to Breaks, even IDM, acid and techno, and the dozens of genres in between.

I see in another comment they mention that's how their friends understand it, so maybe it's a regional thing.

I have been a DJ for about 25 years, playing in the US and Europe so I can at least talk about how the terms are used in those places. EDM used to mean something close to “electronic music”, but as of about 10 years ago or so it has come to mean a quite specific subgenre.

Hm fair enough, I am probably just out of touch then, which makes sense. I used to DJ back in the late 2000s, 2010s, so that's where my perspective comes from. I never played dubstep, but the commercial uprising of dubstep was about when I stopped playing along.

I also regard the term EDM as a specific scene. It absolutely does not encompass the previous 40 years of club culture.

That isn't the implication. I wouldn't even say EDM represents any particular club culture at all, just a shorthand for electronic music in general. If I wanted to refer to a club scene or genre I would use it's actual name and for me at least none of them are called EDM.

It's not surprising to me that there are different interpretations of the term and I am not particularly worried about that. It's all muddied up across the globe, across time and across the internet, music is as colloquial as it is worldwide.

There are so many genre placement disagreements all across music, slotting everything into discrete groupings is only useful in a shallow and practical way, not a meaningful one.

Well I think names and usage do matter.

Not that Wikipedia is an authority, but note that this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_dance_music

correctly covers the whole fields of music for dancing that is made electronically. I am perfectly content to be in the wider field of Electronic Dance Music.

But this specific initialism of EDM came out of the US music industry, and was never in use prior to that.

Wikipedia notes that the specific term "EDM": > By the early 2010s, the term "electronic dance music" and the initialism "EDM" was being pushed by the American music industry and music press in an effort to rebrand American rave culture.[3]

which is where us ornery old techno bastards come in. We will not be rebranded and renamed. Everybody is welcome to come up with new things and new styles, but you cannot rename a past culture.

Imagine if some industry press decided to rename Rock and Roll to "RNR" and back date all usages to 1959, editing Wikipedia to insert their new term in there and push their newly branded marketing channels (eg. https://edm.com/ )

Underground dance music has been fiercely against the mainstream music industry. We had different distributors, different press, different rules. This EDM term and this AOR (Adult Oriented Rock) over replicas of classic 909 house beats is the kind of thing that what we spent our whole lives fighting against.

So I hope that explains why we object to that particular the term, as strange and as petty as it may sound. It's political.

Remain Underground https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5t0l2aOW2o

This is what happens when marketing wonks "decide" to intentionally cause confusion and casually "rebrand" words.

Fuck the mainstream music industry, their playola extortion monopoly on attention, underpaying creators, and crowning of lesser artists while thousands better go undiscovered.