IMHO

IMHO: DJ Skyder Predicts the Future of EDM

DJ Skyder: In my opinion, the next big thing in the EDM industry will be a variety of new and immerging styles coming from young talent. The new music is becoming more vibrant, louder, faster, and broader in terms of genre merging. If we take a quick look back at EDM’s history starting from the late 80’s, we’ll find a lot of Euro-Dance and classic Techno mostly introduced by the EDM Godfather – Tiesto. The quality of the samples and melodies were primitive and very repetitive, which got old quick.

Moving forward to the 90’s, the era of early digital music, we started to hear genres like Trance introduced to us by Armin Van Buuren and his Armada crew. Trance music changed the industry significantly since it has more prolonged and calming melodies at slightly slower BPM (Beats Per Minute) than Techno. Listeners truly became addicted to the journey of sound with ever-so-slightly changing drops and long build ups. To this day Trance is one of the most popular genres for crowds in their late 20’s.
In the early 2000’s however, when the digital age got more advanced, we began to see young talents like Skrillex taking EDM in a totally new direction. The ability to slice beats and change the vocal pitch to much tighter compression ratios (how many sounds you can fit into a certain time frame) made him one of the newest and brightest talents for quite some time. With emerging technologies and the unimaginable quality of samples and sounds it became much easier for any teenager to put a loop, a melody, and eventually a whole song together with minimal experience. The only thing that separated stars from hobbyists was true talent and persistence.

Moving forward 10 years we begin to see young talents like Martin Garrix emerge, with his famous “Animals” single, which quickly put him at the top of the charts at his young age of 17. It seems like this is where our topic starts to sound a bit like a history lesson. With that said, I truly believe it’s important to know at least some history in order to understand why EDM is the way it is today and why it has become such a huge industry over the last few years. You see, the new generation doesn’t quite get Techno or Trance anymore. Why, you ask? Well, it’s because Progressive House, Dubstep, and Trap sound so much louder, crisper and more modern, and when combined with bright lights, fireworks and huge festivals around the world there is no way we are going back to Techno.
On that note, I will say one thing that may or may not shock some of you. Being a producer and DJ, I constantly keep myself up to date with all the new EDM music out there, and what I’m hearing lately from these new kids is pretty much the same melodies that we’ve heard in older genres like Techno and Dance music in the early 80’s. I kid you not, I’ve heard so many new Progressive House songs that have exactly the same melody as the old Techno, but with newer and fresher samples in them.

The young talent is not quite the same kind of talent that it used to be 30 years ago. Hardstyle is immerging as one of the main EDM genres, and what do we hear there? The same thing as Techno at 140 BPM but at a much bigger decibel level. Trap is becoming more and more popular as well. At roughly the same BPM as Hardstyle but with a deeper kick that skips every so often and continuous snares in between it sounds almost like Rap, which draws a much bigger kind of crowd into the EDM scene.
With that said, the future of EDM is pretty much an open gate now. I believe we’ll be hearing more and more Trap and Hardstyle in the next few years. The industry is slowly taking over the other genres that are struggling to survive. Eventually, with new talents and newer technologies we’ll be combining the rest of the genres into EDM styles. I guess at this point the wave has become so big that we can only wait and see what the new genres will be called.

Hope you enjoyed, peace!

– Skyder
Producer/DJ