Tiesto surrounded by the Dutch delegation at the 2004 Athens Olympics opening ceremony
As millions of people tuned in, a parade of athletes from around the globe walked triumphantly into Olympic Stadium in Athens Greece for the 2004 Summer Olympics. Near one of the exits, a makeshift DJ booth had been erected. Nearly 40 minutes into the opening ceremony, DJ Tiesto began his set.
The first and only DJ to perform an Olympic opening ceremony, Tiesto was asked to play a 90-minute set while athletes were paraded through, mythical scenes were performed, and the torch was lit. The performance sent Tiesto’s career into the stratosphere and brought electronic music to its biggest audience yet.
Despite the growing acceptance of electronic music into the mainstream, the perception of raves was still a negative one, after years of hostile press coverage. For commercial interests looking to capitalize on electronic music’s newfound popularity, that perception was bad for business.
To counter the negativity, electronic music got a PR makeover; many promoters stopped using the word “rave” in advertising, replacing it with the term “EDM,” a commercially viable way to describe the scene. EDM stands for Electronic Dance Music.
The term EDM was not necessarily novel — it had been used at times within the scene in the past. Now, though, with the corporate music industry adopting it as an umbrella term to describe various dance sounds and their scene under one marketable name, its usage exploded. Many in the electronic music scene balked at the insinuation of commercialism that the EDM branding carried.
But EDM wasn’t simply marketing lingo. Electronic music and the scene that surrounded it moved away from its underground, counterculture roots. As the electronic scene drew in increasingly more mainstream crowds, the scene itself began to reflect mainstream sensibilities. The early electronic scene had been largely one of acceptance and freedom. The EDM community, however, was much more accepting of society’s dominant cultural values and the status quo.
As the scene became more mainstream, major brands began offering corporate sponsorships of events. Heineken, Bud Light, and Corona started sponsoring stages at Electric Daisy Carnival. Bud Light built an entire branded festival experience around EDM. Forever 21 began selling festival wear lines marketed towards EDM fans.
Over time, EDM came to refer to a specific type of electronic music: a pop-infused, commercially-driven, big-room sound with appeal at massive festivals. The music generally featured shrill melodic synth lines, long breakdowns, big drops, and cheesy pop vocals, often sung by mainstream vocalists.
EDM would ultimately influence every electronic music genre with pop-influenced, commercial flavors that were increasingly dominant. The Big Room sound of EDM would go on to define the 2010s, redefining both the pop music scene and the electronic music scene until they were nearly indistinguishable.
Electronic music’s influence wasn’t entirely new to pop music, but for the most part those influences had been kept primarily to the gay market. American pop divas had been using electronic sounds to create dance-friendly tracks for a while: Donna Summer and her work with Giorgio Moroder; Madonna and her collaboration with Orbital; Above & Beyond’s remix of Madonna’s “What It Feels Like for a Girl”; Tiesto’s remix of Delerium’s “Silence” featuring Sarah McLachlan, to name a few examples.
As the 2010s began, though, the difference was in scale. The decades before, rap and hip-hop had been the dominant influence on pop music; now it was EDM shaping pop, with stars like Lady Gaga releasing Europop-influenced music.
DJs such as Tiesto, Armin, Avicii, Swedish House Mafia, David Guetta, Zedd, Deadmau5, Martin Garrix, Calvin Harris, Hardwell, Porter Robinson, and Skrillex were some of the names sweeping the globe, becoming superstars in their own right. In the 2010s it was nearly impossible to turn on a pop radio station without hearing the influence of electronic music. Borrowing heavily from the anthemic structure of early 2000s uplifting, pop producers folded those elements straight into the charts. Some examples include Rihanna’s “Only Girl (In The World),” Katy Perry’s “Firework,” and Lady Gaga’s 2011 album Born This Way.
With DJs as pop stars, fans flocked to big festival stages to see their favorite celebrity DJs. Newer fans, often unfamiliar with the distinctions between genres, generally referred to everything as EDM. The sound and ethos of various genres became less defined as pop-influenced, big-room-style sounds blurred the lines and squeezed out their original sound.
Festivals were a driving force behind EDM’s growth in the U.S. and globally. Though the U.S. had been slow to embrace electronic music, as it became entwined with pop culture the scene exploded, with more and more festivals popping up throughout the country, drawing bigger and more mainstream crowds who were often uninterested in the cultural history of electronic music.
Attendance soared at U.S. festivals like Ultra in Miami, Electric Forest in Michigan, TomorrowWorld in Georgia, and of course Electric Daisy Carnival — first in Los Angeles, and when it grew too large for LA to sustain, moved to Vegas. A scene that had once existed almost exclusively in the underground, created for misfits and rebels, was becoming normalized and acceptable to mainstream audiences. Ravers who had prided themselves on counterculture attitudes hostile to the status quo were being displaced by mainstream crowds with more conventional beliefs and attitudes.
A public display of sex might be shamed. An antifascist view might be met with a fascist one. A queer person might be made to feel unsafe in the scene that their community had largely started. And with mainstream audiences came the mainstream’s lack of understanding or awareness about consent, especially when it comes to sexual harassment or violence towards women.
Across genres, electronic music found itself confronted with the costs of its own success. In many ways, trance and uplifting had been precursors of what would ultimately happen to all genres of electronic dance music, impacted not only by the EDM/pop song structure and cheesy vocals, but by increasingly mainstream crowds.
The genres that remained healthiest were those able to maintain a robust underground scene. The guardrails of an underground willing to gatekeep helped maintain space for experimentation and creativity.
Techno in particular maintained a comparatively autonomous, institutionally robust underground ecosystem that helped insulate it from the homogenization and wholesale adoption of passing music fads and trends that affected other electronic genres.
Trance, by contrast, was already hollowed out by nearly a decade of commercialization, and was especially devoid of an underground scene. Embarrassed to be associated with the cringe-inducing saccharine sounds of uplifting and EDM, the trance underground had mostly abandoned that scene for greener pastures — usually techno and psytrance.
Still, there were a few notable labels like JOOF Recordings, headed by John 00 Fleming, stubbornly trying to hold on to some semblance of the trance ethos. But the early commercialism of the trance scene had long since pushed many from the scene altogether.
Just as trance had given way to uplifting, uplifting began to give way to EDM. Producers who had peaked at the turn of the millennium were falling stars who could not match the brightness of EDM’s glare. Though a dwindling and aging group of passionate uplifting fans remained, uplifting was becoming irrelevant in the larger electronic scene.
Many of those who had followed the trance trend to uplifting were now abandoning it. Those seeking fame or hoping to maintain cultural relevance began to distance themselves in the hopes that they wouldn’t go down with the sinking ship.
The highest-profile example of this occurred when one-third of the “Three Musketeers of Trance” unceremoniously dumped uplifting for EDM. Tiesto moved to a more house-driven, indie-pop sound, deleting uplifting entirely from his sets.
The festival scene revolving around uplifting was also seeing a decline. The Trance Energy festival failed to sell out for the first time in 2010, feeding a narrative that the uplifting scene was on the decline. The failure led to the event being rebranded as “Energy the Network” in 2011. Along with the name change, EDM DJs were added to the lineup, no longer focusing on uplifting or its progeny.
Uplifting fans widely panned the move and began to abandon the event in droves. In 2012 it sold only half of its tickets. 2013 saw the event moved to a smaller venue with a focus on big room house. When even that couldn’t sell out, the event was shuttered — an event that had helped popularize the uplifting genre was no more.
By 2014 or 2015, EDM had peaked. Its obituaries were being written. In the words of Mixmag magazine, the genre of “drop-heavy, stadium-filling, fist-pumping, chart-topping, massively commercial” stage sound that conquered America was fading from relevance. Some were calling EDM a bubble. Festivals were consolidating and many were disappearing entirely.
In 2016, SFX Entertainment — the parent company of ID&T — filed for bankruptcy. In 2019, the International Music Summit reported that the ten highest-earning DJs’ net worth dropped to its lowest level since 2013; attendance at Las Vegas clubs and pool parties declined; and dance music’s share of the U.S. recorded music market dipped from 4% to 3% over two years.
For the many DJs who had incorporated big room elements into their music, their stock plummeted. Though they had adopted EDM sounds to remain culturally relevant, as that sound began to lose favor, those efforts were for naught.
For the uplifting scene, this meant increasing marginalization — a bit player in the electronic music scene, often left off festival lineups entirely despite diluting their sound to fit in. And without mainstream relevance, it appeared that any remnants of trance would disappear, forgotten as a curious but irrelevant electronic music innovation that was never fully understood.
Trance was a jilted bride, left at the altar of its own commercial success; a victim of greed and excess. Artistic integrity had given way to the pursuit of fame. A forgotten history had led to years of misunderstanding about what trance really was or what it was about. There was little left of the hypnotic sound of trance music. Most people now equated trance purely with its fad-driven, trend-following euphoric offshoot: uplifting.
Attempts To Reclaim The Genre
In its earliest inception, uplifting was trance. But by the late 1990s or early 2000s, uplifting had strayed so far from its parent genre that it was really a unique genre in its own right. This is how genres typically work — a subgenre emerges carrying the central precepts of its parent genre while moving them in a new direction. But if it moves far enough from those precepts, eventually something new emerges. For a time, uplifting retained substantial elements of trance, but over the years many of these disappeared almost entirely.
There were exceptions, of course. Especially through the 2000s, plenty of music still occupied the territory somewhere between uplifting trance and fully developed uplifting. But by the 2010s, whatever trance elements remained at the beginning of the EDM era were being further eroded as uplifting adapted itself to the festival sound.
The music was often more harsh and cold — a big room sound aimed at large festival appeal, designed around hands-in-the-air euphoric moments and sing-along, pop-oriented, cheesy vocals with the approximate depth of a teaspoon. Music designed for the instant gratification of the festival main stage. In many ways, uplifting had become the opposite of trance: where trance sought hypnosis through repetition, gradual tension and release, and sustained forward momentum, uplifting sought interruption through long breakdowns, overt anticipation, and enormous drops.
The early 2010s were dark times for many veterans of the scene, including those who had enjoyed considerable mainstream success. Some, such as Solarstone and John 00 Fleming, were contemplating walking away altogether. DJs who had spent decades immersed in the scene were finding it difficult to source enough new music that they liked well enough to play. The music ecosystem that had sustained them seemed to be disappearing.
DJs and fans alike began to recognize that there was a problem, but there was very little agreement on what the problem was, let alone how to fix it. Richard Mowatt, or Solarstone as he is known, had been around since the mid-1990s and had seen his share of hits, such as his Balearic trance tune “Seven Cities.” Mowatt was feeling frustrated with a scene that he no longer felt connected to.
It was around this time that Orkidea reached out asking Solarstone to create a remix of Orkidea’s track “Unity.” The resulting 9+ minute track, Solarstone called the “Solarstone Pure Mix,” because it was his idea of pure trance — one that didn’t include elements from EDM or hardstyle. Solarstone followed this up with what he believed would be his final album, a goodbye that he titled Pure. He wanted to make an album that represented his sound, but also what “pure trance” meant to him — not a BPM, but a journey. He titled the final song of the album “Swansong” to signal his intention to exit the scene.
He wasn’t even sure anyone would listen to it. “Pure Trance is, for me, about the feeling conveyed in the music, it’s more than a tempo or production style,” Solarstone said. Solarstone’s style is warm, melodic, and emotional. When the album did better than expected, he realized he wasn’t alone — he believed he’d found a gap in the market for people nostalgic for the late-90s-era sound. He didn’t feel that aggressive, hard music had anything to do with trance, and it seemed that people had forgotten what trance was about.
Pure Trance Recordings logo
So rather than leave the scene, Solarstone created a label, Pure Trance, to offer an alternative to the more abrasive, aggressive, heavily saturated, and mass-produced sounds dominating the scene — a sound that hearkened back to the mainstream days when the music retained much of its trance lineage.
Solarstone wasn’t the only person who disliked the direction of the scene. Even those who had popularized uplifting had had enough. After a thirteen-year break, Ferry Corsten decided to return with his Gouryella alias in 2015. “I was sick and tired of all the ‘put your hands up, put your fucking hands up!’ whatever. Without getting too sentimental, I felt like I wanted to bring back the old sentiment and emotion from the turn of the century type of thing. I thought it was the right moment,” said Corsten. He released “Anahera,” an uplifting track that hearkened back to a sound he had first popularized, and took his Gouryella concept on tour. “Today’s [trance] is so close to EDM that I really just wanted to bring an old sentiment back. It stems from a personal tiredness of what’s going on in the scene right now,” Corsten said. Corsten wasn’t alone.
In 2018, Armin van Buuren and Benno de Goeiji (best known as part of the popular uplifting duo Rank 1) previewed their Gaia project album before an uplifting audience. The project offered a sound much closer to the original trance sound than anything the uplifting DJs had done before. The crowd was confused and upset by the performance, and vented their frustrations online about the celebrity DJ who had dared to play trance in front of a self-proclaimed trance crowd expecting a sound much more in line with uplifting.
The Gaia set highlighted the disconnect between what trance had originally meant and what many later fans had grown to believe trance was (or, in their confusion, was not). And while it’s not unusual for people to disagree on what tracks belong to what genres, what’s relatively unique to trance is just how wide the disconnect has become between what trance was and what it’s believed to be now.
JOOF Recordings logo
John 00 Fleming and his label, JOOF, had maintained a sound much closer to the original ethos of trance: hypnotic and deeper than the mainstream festival sound many now picture when they hear the word “trance” (see: Uplifting). Fleming’s radio show, Global Trance Grooves, was renamed to JOOF Radio to avoid confusion between trance and what many people now thought trance was — the show had run under its old name for seventeen years and nearly 200 episodes, and within a month of the rename, plays jumped across DI.FM, SoundCloud, and Insomniac Radio.
“There’s always going to be constant arguments and battles within all musical genres of what and where certain tracks actually belong. To me, Trance will always be a feeling that dictates where it belongs,” says John 00 Fleming. “If a track is designed to be a commercial success, for radio and main stages at festivals, then we already have a new genre for that, it’s called ‘big room,’ but now EDM and the big room tag associated with it is no longer cool, people are not using this and diluting other genres again,” says John 00 Fleming.
The problem with this taxonomy is that the labels no longer helped people find what they were looking for — the descriptions were no longer descriptive. Trance no longer sounded like trance, and an uplifting fan who stumbled across it might be disappointed not to find what they expected. This creates a real problem that, no matter how you slice it, would be better solved by separating the two into distinct genres. It is unfair to both genres, and to their fans, to lump them together when they are so distinctly different. Nor is it acceptable to make trance fans pilfer through techno in the hopes of finding trance. While there are plenty of people who can appreciate both, that is not true of everyone.
But even in a world where trance and uplifting are separated into distinct genres, there will always be a place for the underground and a place for the mainstream. As John 00 Fleming points out, this isn’t a problem. Main stage DJs have to play tracks that everybody knows. As he sees it, commercialism can be a good thing because there is an ecosystem where everything that gets commercialized fuels and drives the underground scene to move forward.
To keep the mainstream of trance, uplifting, and all their progeny healthy, the underground and mainstream must stay connected. For producers to take a journey into trance in the mainstream, they must find things that work in the underground; and once things become ubiquitous in the mainstream, they must push the underground further. This mutual symbiosis is necessary — without a healthy underground, the mainstream loses its soul, and without the mainstream, the underground loses its identity.
This is how trance lost its way. Frightened by the commercialism of what was being passed off as trance, the underground of the genre found itself largely reborn in progressive house and techno. To thrive again, the underground must feed the mainstream, and the mainstream must push the underground.
If the trance scene can learn about and respect its origin, the underground can help show the mainstream where it needs to be. Efforts have been made to do exactly that. Fleming and others have been trying to fix the void missing from the trance world by getting a raw/deep/hypnotic trance subgenre added to Beatport, allowing people to see a different side of the genre.
In 2023, they got their wish. Beatport created a Raw/Deep/Hypnotic Trance subgenre. In announcing it, Beatport noted that the deeper and hypnotic forms had been “overshadowed” by the main-floor side. While Beatport stopped short of separating uplifting into its own unique genre, it was a step in the right direction — for many, it would likely be their first exposure to trance, or at least to another side of it.
Artists associated with what historically would have been the original trance sound had been releasing music for years under categories such as progressive house and techno, while DJs now describe the new category as making underground trance substantially easier to find.
Trance had gone through a dark period. Yet trance could still be found if you knew where to look and weren’t afraid to dive deep into other genres to find it. Producers like Solar Fields, Alpha Tracks, and Vibrasphere are becoming easier to find — they no longer have to rely solely on progressive house or techno DJs to play their tracks. It turns out, sometimes the glow of burning embers can only be seen in the darkness of night.