Electronic Dance Music From Deviant Subculture to Culture Industry

By Christopher T. Conner and David R. Dickens

Electronic Dance Music: From Deviant Subculture to Culture Industry explores the subculture’s emergence as a deviant subculture. This text analyzes how industry professionals, fans, and public officials helped usher in a new age of EDM, arguing that while the defining features of the subculture made it attractive, they also laid the foundations for outsiders to commodify the movement as a culture industry. Christopher T. Conner and David R. Dickens explore the concept of “commodified resistance” as the mechanism by which the movement’s politically dissident features were removed and its place as a multi-billion-dollar industry made possible. Ultimately, this text advocates the continued utility of the culture industry thesis through an empirical analysis of the EDM subculture.

Christopher T. Conner is non-tenure track teaching assistant professor of sociology at the University of Missouri, Columbia.

David R. Dickens was professor of sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, for thirty-eight years.

A critical exploration of EDM’s transition from marginalized deviant subculture to a billiondollar culture industry.

Lexington Books

March 2023

150 pages

30 illustrations

Part of the Critical Perspectives on Music and Society series

Hardback

978 1 7936 2039 2 eBook

978 1 7936 2040 8

Social Science • Popular Culture