EDM Is Slowing Down

We've all seen clubs and restaurants that were white hot for a while and suddenly petered out after the sheen had worn off. That's what's happening with EDM at the moment as the scene is slowly winding down on a number of fronts.

Although some big festivals like Ultra Music can still command large crowds, they're not the instant sellouts that they once were. In fact, many formerly successful festivals like TomorrowWorld have been cancelled this year.

Why is this happening? There are a number of reasons why the scene is said to have peaked (some say back in 2013).

• For one thing, EDM is a victim of its own success, with entrance, VIP and bottle prices now beyond what the normal fan can handle.

• There are fewer South American high-rollers to prop the clubs up as unfavorable exchange rates and country economics have kept them at home.

• Soaring DJ fees (as high as $400,000 per night) have also made it impossible for many clubs to continue.

• The "show" that most DJ's put are is basically the same, and is pretty much limited by the genre and environment. People that used to love EDM are now looking for something new.

• Many are also tired of the house music genre that's at the heart of EDM.

Both Las Vegas and South Beach, the respective ground zero for the genre, have seen mass club closings in the last year, and SFX Entertainment, who bet heavily on investing in EDM, has declared bankruptcy.

It looks like we're ready for a new trend. Do you see it on the horizon?

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Beatport To Offer A Streaming Feature

In an interesting development, the DJ/EDM portal Beatport will soon be launching a new streaming service. The feature will be part of Beatport.com, which currently offers downloads of beats and songs used by DJs and EDM producers everywhere.

Contrary to what you might thing, the streaming feature is not intended to compete with other streaming services like Spotify as a "jukebox in the sky." Instead its aimed at professional DJs who want to access a library of beats and songs on the fly.

Artists and record labels will be paid if a song is streamed, since this will be a paid service, although the royalty rate has yet to be revealed. Currently the Beatport library is composed of 90% independent label material.

Beatport was purchased by SFX Entertainment in 2013, and the company has steadily tried to revamp the service. It now consists of Beatport Pro, a desktop media manager and player for DJs, and Beatport.com.

This is an application for streaming that hasn't been tapped yet, so it should be interesting to see how well it works in real life with sometimes flakey Internet connections.

Why The SFX IPO Is Bad For EDM

SFX Entertainment’s recent IPO (Initial Public Offering) seems to have met both some backlash and bad timing, as it’s stock continues to struggle to come back to its original IPO price of $13 per share. Part of this is due to the stock market having a case of the yips over our boys in Washington being unable to come together to fund the government, so there’s your bad timing. The other part is due to the IPO stock offering being on the high side to begin with, much like the Facebook IPO last year.

But the fact that we’re even talking about the stock price rather than the company’s impact on music is the problem here, and it’s a symptom of a larger malady that pertains uniquely to the entertainment business. Once a company goes public, it becomes beholden to the stockholder and not the customer, and that’s bad for a company based around a totally creative product. In this case its music, more specifically electronic dance music (EDM), where SFX has made its big play.

Just a refresher on SFX - it’s the brainchild of chief executive and chairman Robert Sillerman, who saw how EDM was becoming the next big trend in music and wanted to cash in on its popularity. The company went on a buying spree, rolling up several event producers as well as online music store Beatport, and was planning on using the IPO money for additional acquisitions of other major EDM events.

It’s great when someone has so much confidence in a part of the music industry that he invests heavily in it, and then convinces Wall Street to invest as well, but that also brings about a self-fulfilling prophecy, meaning that when big money comes into something artistic, the art inevitably gets squeezed out in favor of something safer and more likely to result in a profit. Read more on Forbes.

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