Electronic Music Conference celebrates Australia's booming dance scene
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Version 0 of 1. You’d have been hard-pressed to locate a cultural cringe at the Electronic Music Conference. “The music that’s been coming out of Australia over the past few years has really made a mark on a global level,” said Neil Ackland, EMC's founder. “There’s just generally a buzz in what’s happening in Australia at the moment.” This week, over 800 DJs, producers, promoters, managers, agents, club owners and label executives from around the world gathered at Carriageworks in Sydney for two days of panels and workshops – and, of course, the many after-hours parties. Global stars including Armin Van Buuren, Boys Noize, Tommie Sunshine and Ferry Corsten mingled with industry figures like Matthew Adell, CEO of leading online digital-music shop Beatport. Yet despite the presence of the overseas luminaries, the buzz was all about the “Australian sound”. Aussie artists like Will Sparks, Tommy Trash, Emoh Instead and Touch Sensitive were the focus of much attention from fellow delegates and media as the question of what makes the local flavour so unique and sought-after was endlessly considered and debated. Along with Sydney wunderkind Flume’s four Aria awards earlier in the week, ECM provided one of the strongest indicators yet of the tremendous growth of Australian electronic music. (Flume didn’t attend EMC, but his name was mentioned so often that someone suggested making a drinking game out of it.) “The artists that Australia exports are breaking through by making sounds that no one else is making," said Jon Hanlon, director of dance music at Sony Music Australia. EMC, timed to dovetail with Aria week and the Sydney date of Australia's largest dance music festival Stereosonic, is only in its second year but has already doubled in size, and was supported by the New South Wales government. The official theme of the conference was Asia in Focus. One session, subtitled The Giant is Awake, claimed that the near future promises a much bigger middle class in the world’s most populous region, with more online connectivity, more tourism between Asian nations – and an enormous youth market capable of setting worldwide trends. The Future Music Group, who run Future Music Festival in Australia, have already tapped into this potential. Kuala Lumpur’s Future Music Festival Asia expects to draw 75,000 attendees in its third year – half of them tourists from around the region. “We could see a really clear trend that Asia-Pacific was going to be the next big growth platform for electronic music over the next five years,” says Ackland. “So we decided we wanted Sydney to be the hub of that. Our vision with EMC is to make Sydney the heartland of electronic music for the Asia-Pacific region.” Delegates claimed there is plenty of room to grow in an industry that is only at the beginning of a massive boom. An oft-repeated refrain at EMC was that the electronic music industry is now worth $4.5bn worldwide – a conservative estimate, according to Beatport’s Adell. Data shared by conference speakers and panelists showed the industry exploding in every region – from its traditional stronghold in Europe to brand new markets in places like South Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines. Growth was consistent across all electronic music's genres, from main-stage EDM to trance, techno, deep house and many points between. The one territory all have their eyes on is America. Though dance music originated in the States, with New York disco and garage, Chicago house and Detroit techno, it never quite achieved mainstream status there. Now the market has come alive, with electronic music cracking the radio and huge festivals taking place annually – the gigantic Ultra in Miami averages 80,000 attendees per day. “America’s impact on pop culture is undisputed,” says Ackland. “America’s come late to the party but now they’ve woken up to electronic music and now it’s permeating down across the world.” The surest sign of this is the growing corporate interest in its youth-driven market. “Big brands are seeing that electronic music is a really valid form of music,” says Tim Duggan, content director of youth brand media company the Sound Alliance. “It’s not all about drugs and raves and stuff like that. It is what young people listen to.” “Now it’s really penetrated the hearts and minds of America and will continue to do that,” says Ackland. “And what that actually does for the business and the economics of the music industry is quite profound, so you actually have a trickle-down effect where brands will invest more in the space.” It’s not only the branding. This year, the Totem OneLove group, which runs Stereosonic, was purchased by SFX Entertainment, the US-based conglomerate that also owns many festivals in Europe. Beatport was also recently purchased by SFX. Connoisseurs may groan, but the music’s days of being exclusively confined to clubs and warehouses is over. Flume and his contemporaries are carrying that torch for a new generation; firmly implanting dance music on the radio and pop charts in Australia. But many at EMC cautioned against categorizing it as an Australian “sound,” considering the diversity of music on offer, from Rainbow Chan’s shiny electronica-pop to Tommy Trash’s aggressive EDM. “The Australian sound is a phenomenon, not a certain style per se,” says Melbourne producer Motez. (Chan, a Chinese Australian woman from Sydney, and Motez, who migrated to Melbourne from Iraq in 2006, also highlight the music’s multiculturalism.) A buzzworthy corollary of this phenomenon, the “Melbourne Sound” was another running motif of EMC. Young producer and conference delegate Will Sparks’s name was mentioned nearly as often as Flume’s was, and there was an entire panel devoted to the style. Sparks and fellow panelist Joel Fletcher deal in a particularly energetic and cheeky twist on the current style of EDM (epitomized by Sparks’s hit Ah Yeah!), marked by frequent drop-outs, abrasive percussion and feral sub-bass, served up with larrikin attitude. Coming seemingly out of nowhere in the past year, the sound (also called the Melbourne Bounce) now dominates DJ charts and main stages worldwide. “All these kids are loving anything that has a kicking bass,” Sparks says, hinting at the music’s appeal beyond data and dollars. “The kids getting into electronic music now at 15, 16, 17, they don’t really care much about the history and the past; they’re just thinking about the future,” Ackland says. “And at the moment this music is the future – and that’s why it’s growing the way it is." Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning. |