Article by djpangburn
Robert Sillerman — Would-be Emperor of EDM
Sillerman’s move is brilliant business: it places him front and center inside Miami’s EDM mecca Ultra Music Festival, which has been going on for over a decade, but is now as commercially saturated as Coachella.
There is more to Sillerman’s story, though. In February, Sillerman bought Beatport for about $50 million. Beatport, founded in 2004, features one million tracks, many of which are exclusive to the site, which claims some 40 million registered users. This gives Sillerman, amongst other things, access to emerging electronic music talent, which can quite easily be rebranded as EDM, then shuffled out onto festival stages organized by the North American division of Holland-based ID&T Entertainment, which he now owns. ID&T organizes festivals like Tomorrowland in Belgium, and Sensation White, which is big in Europe and now spilling over into the US.
But Sillerman isn’t the only egregious corporate offender.
Wynn Las Vegas, for instance, boasts the wildly popular, gigantic and incredibly douchey club XS. It is, like Las Vegas itself, pure stimulation and simulation. Reality is constructed and simulated there in much the same was as Disney theme parks. And people pay for the pleasure to the tune of about $90 million annually. That is no small, underground operation, folks, but big business. And XS is not the only lucrative cash cow on the strip.
Las Vegas is quite literally overrun and infected by dozens of other electronic music clubs. There is MGM Grand’s five-story Hakkasan club, Marquee Nightclub at the Cosmopolitan, Surrender Nightclub at the Encore (which has hosted eternal jackass Steve Aoki and Calvin Harris), and Mandalay Bay’s Light, to name a few. Then there is the annual Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas, which, like Ultra Music Festival, is yet another epicenter of Mecca-esque migration for electronic music fans. EDC’s promoter, Insomniac Events, has branched off its EDC brand in Los Angeles, Chicago, London, Puerto Rico and Orlando. It’s also worth noting that Insomniac Events is rumored to be exploring a 50/50 deal with Live Nation, which, as noted above, was created by Sillerman and is now owned by Clear Channel.
Dick Clark Productions is even angling for an EDM awards show, as The New York Post reported in April.
“They [marketers] want to be associated with live events, with a young audience and that interests us as well,” Dick Clark CEO Allen Shapiro said.
Too true. That is essentially the case with Coachella, which is owned by AEG, a subsidiary of Anschutz Corporation. Coachella ticket prices rose as the annual music festival became a cultural event as actors and celebrities started showing up, followed shortly thereafter by Madonna. The rest is history.
Then there is Amy Thompson, manager of Swedish House Mafia (just wonderful electronic music, incidentally). Thompson recently spoke of the capital investment in electronic music. She didn’t go so far as to call it an EDM bubble, but she might as well have.
Amy Thompson, Manager of Swedish House Mafia
“I feel the investment buzzards are circling. I worry about the big valuations flying around that could lead to disappointment,” said Thompson at the recent IMS Engage conference. “What you don’t want is some big fucking massive city sale and everyone’s fucking cheering, and then in three years time you’re declared bankrupt and you’re a stigma for 20 years when you’ve just finally been accepted and legitamised.”
“The buzzards circling worries me,” added Thompson. “The saturation worries me. But who backs down? Which promoter stops? There’s a huge demand, it’s being supplied currently, but at what point do kids get sick of it, and whose fault will that be? I’m as guilty as anyone else.”
Thompson’s cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy is charming. Like others, she won’t back down and will continue making money while the EDM money-making bubble is good. But, the greed is wide-ranging. Everyone from investors and promoters to managers (like Thompson) and EDM artists like Skrillex and DeadMau5—who have no doubt energized electronic music on a mass scale, but with precious little artistry—are making good money… for now.
Even 20th Century Fox is trying to get in on the EDM action with a film on the booming sub-culture. The film will follow three teens as they try to gain entry into Diplo’s electronic music festival. Sounds absolutely amazing.
Diplo
When the EDM Bubble Bursts
Who knows when it will happen, but I’d wager that since 2013 looks to be the year of peak EDM saturation, with the hype likely spilling over into 2014, then 2015 will probably be the branded movement’s wasteland.
Ultra Music Festival, Electric Daisy Carnival, Miami club culture, other electronic music festivals and the general Las Vegas douchebag decadence will survive. But the current speculative effort to commercialize and exploit electronic music under the EDM brand will, like any good bubble, collapse; though not before it makes people like Sillerman, 20th Century Fox, Amy Thompson and others a whole lot of money.
And, when this happens, electronic music will have to cleanse itself of the EDM label by retreating into the underground whence it came, and where it continues incubating and evolving electronic music forms. That is, until the next generation of Skrillexes and Zedds come swimming in the groundbreakers’ slipstream to make future speculators some fine, quick bubble money.
“But,” you might say. “Isn’t it a good thing to infiltrate electronic music into the mainstream?” Yes and no. True, lesser known, independent electronic music producers and artists will find their profiles bumped up a bit, and that is good. The Nicolas Jaars, Baths and Comas of the world deserve more recognition. But they’ll never ascend to the heights of superstar DJs; and, more to the point, the main EDM demographic isn’t interested in those artists.
The entire artifice of it all also means that people like Robert Sillerman make all the money without laying any, any of the foundations. And because of that, they do not care about the future of electronic music.
For them, electronic music is only useful in the here and now, as with all speculative bubbles.
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