Electronic dance music hits its stride

Uptempo hits by the likes of Skrillex and deadmau5 make their mark on modern music

Will 2012 be the year for electronic dance music?

With dubstep artist Skrillex nabbing five Grammy Award nominations and superstar DJ deadmau5 landing three, all indicators say yes.

“Skrillex is a purely electronic artist, and getting a best-new-artist nomination is Grammy’s way of acknowledging the rise of EDM (electronic dance music),” says Keith Caulfield, associate director of charts at Billboard. The awards “have overlooked EDM artists in the past, like David Guetta and Moby. Skrillex is the face of all EDM at the Grammys.”

Who is Skrillex? With his eerie, spine-tingling samples and grinding bass lines, 23-year-old Sonny Moore — a diminutive, bespectacled Los Angeles-based DJ and producer — is the undeniable leader of dubstep.

“What makes this an incredible achievement is that he has been so successful by being off the radar,” Caulfield says. “Sure, kids know who he is, dance fans know him.” But when the awards show rolls around Feb. 12, “your average music fan won’t have the foggiest idea who he is.”

EDM is having its moment, says electronica pioneer Moby, who broke through to mainstream audiences in 1999 with album Play, which sold 3 million copies.

“For pop stars, their main currency is youth and the record label. For rock stars, their currency is songwriting and their ability to play live,” Moby says. “Electronic music artists are only as good as the last record they played, and their ability to play other people’s records. Luckily, there are a lot of good records out there.”

Last summer yielded a bumper crop of electronic dance festivals, from Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas, which pulled in 250,000 attendees, to Live Nation-backed IDentity, the first electronica touring festival, which made 20 stops. Dozens more such fests are slated for 2012.

“If you go to a rock concert, there are four people standing onstage playing songs that sound nice,” Moby says. “You go see Skrillex or deadmau5 live, and there’s a huge production value, the lights, the sound. It’s hard not to be impressed.”

The audience for such spectacles is almost certain to get bigger.

“Pop music has become so aggressively uptempo, when people go to search for more of this kind of music, they’re discovering this whole world that exists,” Caulfield says.