The New Normal Will Change Music

What’s next for cultural programming?

Is Covid and social distancing the death blow to Electronic Dance Music?
If Festivals join my No No Square, then who, what, where?
What do the CIA and social engineers have in store for the next counter cultural youth movement?


Music's Got The Bug - Billboard lists the cancelled festivals and concerts


TL;DR
 EDM afficionados see soft drugs and music forming a consciousness-expanding musical movement, one world, one love. All the references to mind control and a New World Order are ironic.
 From outside, it’s a capitalist, computer-generated commodity in 57 Varieties of same-but-different; the beat and chord progression feed dissociative processes, which are the same in spiritual trance as a military march. With laser shows projecting globalist symbolism, it’s a form of mind control.
 Critical thinkers see parallels with the Counterculture and LSD… claiming to expand minds while focusing on the self; psychotropic drugs; corporatist control behind the youthful smiles. The likely role of the CIA in creating the Counterculture has been documented by authors like Dave McGowan and Tom O’Neill, Neil Sanders and Mark Devlin.

Fade to Black
 EDM relies heavily on festivals for its revenues, which is how DJs earn their income. But their pay has been falling for several years now. The International Music Summit said by 2018, EDM had already shrunk to just 3% of the music market in the US in 2018.

Yet it remained the face of popular music, heavily promoted by the Corporatist Media. Until now.
Is the Corporatist Media preparing us for the the next shift in popular tastes?

 Suddenly EDM is not progressive: The grievance industry has taken aim at the gender-imbalance in EDM: Fewer than one-in-10 DJs is a woman. BLM may finally kill off the fashion for feathered headdress so popular among the festival crowd.

 Billboard – Gay Black Men Helped Create EDM. Why Do Straight White Men Dominate It?
 EDM Struggles: White DJ Goes Black Face, Calls Himself ‘Slave’
 Insomniac – Women Produce 9% of Electronic Music
 Chicago Tribune – EDM is a big, lucrative world, but not for women DJs
 Ebay – Indian Headdress For Sale

 But the real damage is economic – to the bottom line:
 DMN – DJ Earnings Plunge to a Five-Year Low as EDM Revenues Continue to Slide
 NPR – The Mainstreaming Of EDM And The Precipitous Drop That Followed
 Esquire – Coronavirus Might Kill The Music Industry. Maybe It Needed To Die
 ABC – Tasmanian live music industry in crisis as COVID-19 clampdown rolls on
 Music Week – MixMag Pauses Print Edition
 MixMag (2015) – Is the EDM era finally coming to an end?
 MixMag (2020) – Will coronavirus really collapse the live music industry?
 The Diplomat – Can Wuhan’s Punk Scene Survive the Coronavirus?
 UNESCO – https://en.unesco.org/news/culture-covid-19-impact-and-response-tracker



EDM Has Shaped Social Media and Advertising

Lest you think I over estimate the influence of EDM in social engineering, see how social marketers use it. If EDM has changed social marketing, it has changed the political and cultural communication as well. You can be sure that the Behavioural Insight Team and their the influence agencies have taken notice.

EDM fans tweeted a staggering 11 times per day (roughly six times more than the average Twitter user
A whopping 1 in 4 social posts about EDM occur during a live electronic music event.
Source: The Social DNA of EDM Fans

EDM is a channel to push a message. "The social media practices perfected by pop, EDM and major corporations like Coca-Cola will eventually find their way into more obscure music circles."
Source: Assessing Social Media's Impact on Electronic Music

“I think with the advent of fashion, alcohol and other complementary products and or services, which marry in with music, that is starting to drive and upskill brands and artists, individually and collectively, to start to work together more to achieve a common goal.” -- Eamon Chiffey, Electronic Music Conference.

 Eventbrite found that social media conversations about EDM are predominately positive, with love of EDM accounting for 40 percent of all social media conversations.
Source: EDM Fans’ Hyperactive Social Media Use Driving Genre’s Success (Study)

EDM's strength and now its weakness is that social contact is an essential part of the fun. It's about being there. Without the festival, the social media presence will fade. If I interpreted the above research correctly, somebody is watching this musical space very closely.

So what next, in music – or popular culture in general?

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