I came back to making music seriously in 2016, right in the middle of the stretch this post covers. I heard the first half of it as a listener and the second half as someone trying to finish tracks. This is my account of how the sound of EDM changed from about 2010 into the early 2020s, and it sticks to that window.
2010 to 2012: dance music becomes pop
Three records from 2011 sum up the start of the decade for me: “Titanium” by David Guetta with Sia, “We Found Love” by Rihanna, written and produced by Calvin Harris, and “Levels” by Avicii. They share a recipe. A house tempo, bright stacked synth chords pumping against the kick, and a hook big enough for radio. Clubs had heard all of those parts before. What changed was how often you heard them on pop radio.
At the same time Skrillex was pulling in the opposite direction. His Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites EP came out in 2010 and won him three Grammys in 2012. Its sound was aggressive mid-range bass over half-time drums, and for a couple of years that’s what a lot of listeners meant by “the drop”.
Swedish House Mafia closed this chapter neatly. They released “Don’t You Worry Child” in September 2012, having already announced their split, and played the last show of their farewell tour at Ultra in Miami in March 2013.
2013 to 2015: big room and its opposite
Big room house had been building for a few years, but 2013 was when it took over the main stages. Martin Garrix released “Animals” that June and it reached number one in the UK in November. “Tsunami” by DVBBS and Borgeous followed later in 2013, and a vocal version topped the UK chart in March 2014.
The sound was stripped to the frame. A long build with a snare roll, then a drop made of little more than a kick drum and one blunt lead. It worked on enormous sound systems and it was easy to copy, which became the problem. Critics called it formulaic, and so did some well-known producers. I liked the discipline of the best big room tracks and got tired of the hundredth imitation. There’s more on that in my post on what producers can learn from Martin Garrix’s career.
The reaction came fast. Kygo released “Firestone” in December 2014, and tropical house, slower and softer and built on plucked melodies, became the gentler alternative.
2016 to 2019: softer, slower and more varied
2016 is usually named as the breakout year for future bass. Flume’s album Skin came out that year and won the Grammy for Best Dance/Electronic Album in 2017. The Chainsmokers’ “Closer”, a pop song with future bass production, went to number one in the US. Marshmello followed with “Silence” with Khalid in 2017 and “Happier” with Bastille in 2018. To my ears, the swelling, detuned chords of future bass replaced the big room lead as the default festival sound.
This is also when I noticed more listeners drifting toward labels that had been there all along. Dirtybird in San Francisco and Anjunadeep, the deeper sister label of Above & Beyond’s Anjunabeats, both started in 2005, well before any of this.
The period has a sad marker too. Avicii stopped touring in 2016 and died in April 2018, at 28.
For me, 2016 was a good year to come back. The main-stage formula was loosening, and melody-first music had room again.
2019 into the 2020s
Two things from 2019 pointed at what came next. In February, Marshmello played a concert inside the video game Fortnite. And David Guetta and MORTEN started the project they’d call future rave, beginning with “Never Be Alone”: main-stage music with techno’s darker textures and trance-style arrangements.
Then 2020 shut the clubs and festivals. Tomorrowland ran a digital edition that July, and DJs everywhere streamed sets from home. Livestreams kept people connected through that stretch. I don’t think they replaced a room full of people, and I doubt they were meant to.
What I hear in the early 2020s is the darker, faster end of things moving back toward the centre: techno influence on the main stage, and trance melodies showing up in places they’d been missing from. I’ve looked at that second point in a separate post on whether trance music is making a comeback.
What I take from it as a producer
By my count, every dominant sound in this period lasted about three years before something close to its opposite replaced it. Loud pop-dance, then louder big room, then soft tropical house and future bass, then dark again. I take that as a reason to pick the thing you’d make anyway and get good at it, since chasing whatever’s next usually means arriving late.
I make progressive house, trance and melodic electronic music, none of which led the charts in these years, and I’m fine with that. If the genre names in this post went by too fast, I’ve written a plain guide to EDM subgenres and who to start with. And if you’d like to hear where I landed, my music is on Spotify.