Electronic Dance Music (EDM)Trends 2018
Electronic Music Trends 2018
2018 is destined to be an incredible year in music history, and most notably so in electronic music. With the advent of mobile and desktop applications such as “Qello Concerts”, allowing music fans around the globe to remotely view music concerts from the comfort of their homes, or anywhere else for that matter, a brand new aspect of music creation and enjoyment is opening: Virtual Reality. VR is slowly, but surely, becoming an accessible platform to people young and old who like to have a little extra fun with their media consumption. Fortune.com predicts that over 200 million Virtual Reality headsets will be sold by the year 2020. In fact, Youtube is already using virtual reality technology into their widely-delivered platform.
– http://www.electrowow.net/2017/08/top-music-trends-for-2018.html
Contemporary music experts have their own predictions on what sub-genres of electronic music will be hitting booms of popularity within the underground and mainstream media outlets. Heavily electronic British hip-hop colloquially referred to as “Grime” music is due for a worldwide surge in popularity.
– https://noisey.vice.com/en_us/article/jppxpy/we-asked-the-experts-to-predict-the-biggest-music-trends-of-2017
At this juncture, the internet has integrated itself so deeply within all facets of society, that it has allowed for anyone to to get an extra push towards finding their true calling. This effect has become quite apparent with the recent surge in impressively young artists gaining record labels and massive followings. 4AD-signed band, The Lemon Twigs formed in 2015, while the founding D’Addario brothers were still fourteen-year-old high schoolers. The internet can be credited here as an influence, a pool of resources, and a platform.
– https://www.highsnobiety.com/2017/01/02/music-2017/
Electronic music, being such a broad and innovation-driven style, has countless variations. Of its sub-genres, some you may have heard of are EDM, techno, drum n’ bass, synthpop, industrial, and ambient. Some of it lesser-known, but no less grand in scope include glitch, IDM (intelligent dance music), horror synth, witch house, vaporwave, and folktronica. Because electronic music is just that, music with electronic instrumentation and/or production techniques, the realm of possibilities within it are quite literally endless.
We’re sitting at the brink of 2018 in an internet age, with a world of electronic music stretching back to its roots with experimental composer Joseph Schillinger and others in the late 1920’s. Backed by nearly a century of endless innovation, electronic music is still picking up more steam in its progression.
One of the largest umbrella-styles of electronic music, EDM stats, has been at the height of sonic popularity since its night-club-driven inception in the late 1980’s. Today, and even more-so, this coming year, our ears will be graced by a species of digital sounds we have hardly yet to imagine.
Some sub-groupings of EDM that have been beginning to hit the charts fresh from the club scenes around the globe include:
• Bass House: a UK-based focused heavily on its colorful low-end frequencies.
• Tech House: a chimeric music styling fusing the various attributes of techno with that of house music.
• Melodic Bass: yet another bass-heavy styling, this time geared towards soaring emotional melodies.
• Drum n’ Bass: an older genre, making a delightfully vast resurgence due to the Soundcloud renaissance we have been blessed with this past decade. D&B is characterized by its heavy bass lines, rapid (160+ bpm) “breakbeats”, sample-usage, and floating synthesizer-work.
• Future Bass: Last but not least, this style is marked by a hard bassline and detuned-sounding synthesizer leads.
– http://mix247edm.com/5-genres-that-will-take-edm-by-storm-in-2017/
Internet forums, the heart of online music discussion, have a great deal of insight as to what should be arriving to dance music facts and listeners in this coming year. Recent fan-favorites and clairvoyant guesswork has been pointing to future house, techno and psy-trance resurgences, tech trance, dark mid-tempo electronic music, and breakbeat revivalism as its current champions.
Trends in electronic dance music in these more recent couple of generations within internet communities are noted to be propelled nearly in totality by their individual artists (and listeners). More promotional and creative power wielded by the artists themselves has been repeatedly prove itself to be a thing of beauty in these contemporary circles. This dynamic has been allowing for the artist to create and distribute as they please, and for any kind of music-listener to get their hands on whatever it is they wish to hear. With as oceanic in size the realm of electronic music continues to be, an easily accessible digital media catalog becomes increasingly crucial.
– https://www.reddit.com/r/EDM/comments/5m6jfd/rising_new_genre_for_2017/#bottom-comments
In order to get a more precise look into what is destined to be in vogue this coming year, it is necessary to take a scope into what is on its way out.
• “Drops” being an an integral part of each track’s structure. Many music listeners have grown weary of perceiving large chunks of their electronic music as filler only to lead up to barbaric, sawtooth, bass-line wobbling.
• Artists that seem more focused on the business end of their careers, as opposed to the music itself, is something we all should be glad is coming to an end. Music listeners in recent years have migrated to more intimate platforms such as Soundcloud, and have reaped a more genuine look into the artists’ personal creation as a result.
• An assumed obliviousness that EDM is a dance-oriented genre: your average EDM wants dance-able beats and melodies. Heavy complexity and frills is seen as more of a niche interest, and not something that a dance-focused fan tends to seek out.
– https://www.edmsauce.com/2017/07/10/hated-edm-trends/
Although electronic dance music seems to be a style of music that is always looking towards the future, it would be exceedingly difficult to find an artist that does not take a degree of influence from music even several decades prior to their career. This fact is dramatic, and here to stay in 2018, cemented by sampling and intentional homages to earlier sounds.
– http://humanhuman.com/articles/deconstructing-musical-trends-for-2017
Trends in electronic music, just as they are in anything else, are driven by their popularity. There is a clear desire shown by listeners and artists alike, to return to the style’s roots and have fun.
– https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/1523-the-dance-music-trends-to-keep-you-moving-this-summer/