That's really interesting, this thread is definitely telling me I am out of the loop anyway, as it seems that difference in understanding has even morphed over time. It doesn't surprise me at all though, there's still disputes about what "real" Bossa nova is to this day so that a genre as broad and eclectic as electronic music has a blurry cultural lexicon isn't all that shocking.
I agree regarding EDM being a bit of a misnomer, I had always thought it was a weird term to use for everything. Another specific sub-genre in electronic music is IDM, Intelligent Dance Music, which occasionally doesn't even have a stable time signature, so it's not alone in that!
I wouldn't say you're out of the loop. Generally speaking I think you're right in what you're saying (commercial vs. underground).
Ultimately it's just a label that people can apply to certain things to lump stuff into a category for them to conceptualise what "thing in category" is.
In the UK (at least in my experience), we had an existing label to call this "thing". Then Skrillex, Steve Aoki etc happened and everyone tried to tell us it was called something different (EDM).
We were like, no. Piss off. It's not that. What you're doing is not what we're doing.
And it's sort of stuck as this "definitely not what we're doing" labelling category.
Tomato, tomaaato.
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IDM is an awful term. And I say that as someone who buys a lot of IDM.
My friend has a different (arguably better) name for it: "hurty brain music".
I believe Aphex Twin's label Rephlex called it braindance originally. I've always liked their description: "braindance is the genre that encompasses the best elements of all genres, e.g traditional, classical, electronic music, popular, modern, industrial, ambient, hip hop, electro, house, techno, breakbeat, hardcore, ragga, garage, drum and bass, etc."
IDM first gained mainstream attention with the Warp records compilation album "Artificial Intelligence", which called it "electronic listening music." It's a pity this name never caught on, because it's more accurate than IDM. Wikipedia quotes Warp co-founder Steve Beckett:
"You could sit down and listen to it like you would a Kraftwerk or Pink Floyd album. That's why we put those sleeves on the cover of Artificial Intelligence – to get it into people's minds that you weren't supposed to dance to it!"
I agree regarding EDM being a bit of a misnomer, I had always thought it was a weird term to use for everything. Another specific sub-genre in electronic music is IDM, Intelligent Dance Music, which occasionally doesn't even have a stable time signature, so it's not alone in that!