Dance music and big festival’s evolution towards it

Over the past decade the dance music scene has seen an exponential growth of presence within the festival industry. Reflective in the dominant expansion of the Ultra Music Festival and Tomorrowland concept’s most predominately, these events now cater for global audience’s of over six-digits annually.

Seeing the mass of popularity it has gained, multi-genre festival’s have started to take a broader proportion of electronic act’s within their line-ups and roster’s. In turn, bringing in a new wave of interest and ticket sales in the process. Reflective at Coachchella earlier this year, the likes of Calvin Harris, Major Lazer and Zedd drew some of the biggest crowds of the event. And with Kaskade himself breaking records for his set the previous year, the overall trend is emphasized year upon year.

Arguably kick-started by Daft Punk’s iconic performance at the 2006 edition of the desert-based festival, the ‘EDM Boom’ as many have refereed to it as in recent years, has also highlighted another pattern for the genre as a whole. With many dance music artist’s outside of the disk-jockeying arena headlining line-up’s in equal quantities more often than not, the hype of the Big-Room sub-genre as it were didn’t cause its popularity to implode as a number of people predicted. Rather it created an opportunity for dance music to prove its sustainability within the music industry.

In turn, leading to the prediction of future headlining artist’s being partially made up of dance music’s established names, emerging talent’s and iconic representative’s. With the latter of that list prevalent in some of this years theories, the likes of Daft Punk, The XX and even Swedish House Mafia have been tipped for next year‘s edition of Coachella.

Begging the question, who do you want to see at the next editions Burning Man, Exit, Glastonbury, Lollapalooza, Sziget or other major music festivals?