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.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1. Phase I: Beginnings (1980s–1995)

Chapter 2. Phase II: The Rise of the Rave Outlaw (1995–2009)

Chapter 3. Phase III: EDM as Culture Industry (2010–2022)

Conclusion

Appendix: The Rave Act

References

About the Authors