Is it possible that the music scene I despise the most, is now worth that much? According to Billboard, a new report issued at the International Music Summit in Ibiza, Spain, has established that EDM is a $6.2 billion global industry! Yep, you’ve read this right, we are talking billions for redundant, boring, over repetitive noise pollution – and that’s the old me talking. Seriously, all the DJs on the world loop the same track over and over, right?
But where do these $6.2 billions come from? Here are the details: these six billions includes revenue from festivals ($1.03 billion); Las Vegas club dates ($800 million) and other global club gigs ($2.4 billion); traditional recorded music sales ($800 million) and streaming/video services ($600 million); sales of DJ software and hardware ($360 million); DJ earnings from other ventures ($60 million) and value from other platforms like Soundcloud ($140 million).
So by far, live performances are bringing most of the money, and according to Forbes magazine, the top 10 DJs in 2013 earned a combined $225 million, almost doubling what the top 10 earned in 2012. Just tell me why it has become so popular?
No wonder you see more and more DJs, they are here for the dough, as EDM is the only musical genre to post year-over-year sales gains in 2013… Consequence of Sound did the math, the top 10 musicians (not DJs) earned a combined income of $216 million last year, so almost $10 million less than EDM’s top 10.
And it could just be the tip of the iceberg, EDM events multiply like rabbits. Every time I go to a show, they are at the exit, handing out flyers about some EDM show, and when it is not Hard Summer, it’s Infected Mushroom or Insomniac or Nocturnal Wonderland, or some DJ at Avalon or at the Palladium… I am sure you could attend one every night.
How richer these DJs could possibly become? There will be a downside at one point, but for now they sit on billions and declare like Tiesto (who is number 3 on the Forbes list):
‘I think my perspective on money is everything above $10 million, you’re so rich it doesn’t really matter. What are you going to buy? A golden car? I don’t care if I’m number one or number 10 on that list. I’d rather have a Grammy instead.’
A Grammy? So money can’t buy everything after all. These people have so much money they don’t know what to do with it, so please festival organizers, stop booking these DJS and EDM acts, one per event is enough as they all sound the same anyway. At Made in America, you had way too many of them (Tiesto, Steve Aoki, Girl Talk, Gareth Emery, R3hab, Baauer, Tommy Trash, BLAU, Will Sparks, Destructo, Afrojack, DVBBS, Wolfgang Gardner,…) and the place must have sounded like an Electric Daisy Carnival… what a waste of money.
