During Coachella, you can hear the thumping bass from electronic music acts all over the festival grounds—and well beyond, out into Indio and Coachella. From Daft Punk’s iconic set at Coachella in 2006, to last year’s surprise headliner addition of OMG TBA (DJs Four Tet, Fred again.. and Skrillex), Coachella has long made electronic music a key part of each festival.
Meanwhile, DJs and producers are behind some of the most popular hits of the last couple of years, and the Spotify and Billboard charts regularly include dance artists. Does that mean we’re now in the golden age of electronic-music popularity?
Not necessarily.
One of the featured DJs at Coachella 2024 was Will Clarke, a U.K.-born house musician who melds techno and electronica into a nonstop dance party. When he’s not making crowds move, he’s exploring other sides of music on The Will Clarke Podcast, hosted on his YouTube channel.
“I think realistically, electronic music has been in culture since the ’80s, when the synthesizer started coming out in ’80s pop and then disco,” Clarke told the Independent during a phone interview. “There’s always been an underlying underground of electronic music. What’s making it big now, or bigger, is the way we listen to music. … I’m talking about house and techno to a certain extent when I say ‘electronic,’ but radio didn’t really play that often. There was just never the ability for people to hear these types of music. Nowadays, with streaming and social media, everything is way more available to become big and to have a niche audience, and I think that’s realistically why it’s so popular. … Streaming has a huge power over the industry now, and then you have TikTok, where literally artists can blow up overnight with one post. There’s no pathway to success. It’s purely just, like, posting and doing your thing with consistency.”
While dance music often makes the Spotify and Billboard charts, DJ and house-music culture have not yet found widespread popularity.
“Just because it has a 4/4 beat doesn’t make it house music,” Clarke said. “… People should understand the culture and be part of the culture and get it. The great thing about having big festivals like Coachella put electronic music on is you get people who don’t have a clue what this is, and you’re introducing them to it. That’s super-important.”
While TikTok and other social media make it possible for unknown, unsigned artists to instantly go viral, sudden popularity can have a downside.
“I think there are a lot of opportunities for artists to get very big, very quickly, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the healthiest way to do it, because a lot of human beings just can’t handle that,” Clarke said. “Growing a foundation is so key in what we do in the music industry. If you grow a core fanbase that supports you throughout your career, you don’t become that one-hit wonder. What we’re seeing now is not even artists becoming one hit wonders; it’s literally songs becoming one-hit wonders, because they did really well on Instagram or TikTok. Fans don’t engage fully into artists like (how) it used to be, where you’d buy an album from an artist and then play that for a month.”
Clarke said festivals like Coachella can help electronic artists grow their fanbase—and give them stronger careers. “Every artist has to work their ass off, but festivals supporting new artists and clubs supporting new artists is definitely important,” he said.
Dxsko, aka René Tovar, is a local DJ whose music-mixing wizardry has landed him gigs all over the valley. Last year, Tovar (instagram.com/dxsko) was even invited to perform at Coachella, allowing him to share his music on a global stage—right here at home.
During a recent phone interview, Tovar said Coachella has indeed helped local performers, but a lot of work still needs to be done.
“Sometimes we’re a little bit behind what the trends are in L.A. or New York or in the U.K.—wherever the big dance scene is—but since Coachella, there are so many DJs out here who are super-tapped into what is in the moment; we just haven’t had a platform to really show that we are tapped in like that,” Tovar said. “There are a lot of really good producers out here who make music that should be in the big leagues.”
The festival, according to Tovar, has helped shift the mindsets of local music lovers as well.
“Before, I felt the only place DJs could really get some decent exposure outside of the festivals was at the clubs and in Palm Springs and stuff—and a lot of that is bridal parties and tourists,” Tovar said. … “Since Coachella … has been exposing locals to the dance scene, I feel like there’s more of a demographic that wants to see that.”
Coachella curates an environment where people can wander toward a random stage and be exposed to new music, and our valley’s music scene is just now offering music fans similar opportunities to be exposed to new music—like, for example, unfamiliar house or electronic music.
“What got me into DJing was going to the clubs … and I didn’t know what half of the songs were,” Tovar said. “Out here, we didn’t really have that much of that. I lived out here my whole life, and I never was really exposed (to unfamiliar music) until I left, and then I came back, and now there are these outside forces coming in … and influencing us DJs and a demographic that listens to DJs. … Now we can have these pool parties outside of the actual festival (where we are) able to experiment with the kind of music that we play, and people actually like it, instead of asking us to play Bad Bunny.”
Like Clarke, Tovar said the electronic artists who become popular and then make it longer-term are the people who put in the work—a lesson that was driven home during the pandemic shutdowns.
“After COVID, DJs who really wanted it and really wanted to not lose the art were streaming, making mixes—they were doing everything,” Tovar said. “That’s one of the main things that I did, and I saw a lot of DJs do that. I was exposed to a lot of DJs I had never heard, before because they were making videos. … COVID gave us the opportunity to lock into our art in ways that we probably didn’t before. Nobody had shit to do, so we were on Instagram Live. That kind of kickstarted my run out here in the valley, because I came back out here a little bit before COVID, and during COVID, I was dropping content every Friday, because I was just at home doing nothing. Those things got me booked for things, or got other people’s attention on DJs from out here.”
Social media is also doing a great job at “humanizing the DJ,” Tovar said.
“It’s a lot harder as a local DJ to play dance music at the clubs … unless it’s a house night, and people are knowingly going there. Outside of festival season, it’s really hard for DJs to really be able to fully embrace that.”
Dxsko, aka René Tovar
“One of the first DJs I saw do this was Dillon Francis; he was just posting meme content, and it just showed how human a lot of us DJs are,” Tovar said. “We’re not all snotty, like, ‘Don’t talk to me; I’m a VIP.’ A lot of us are dorks. Social media also allowed people to be able to talk to the DJs … via social media and have them responding. I feel like that kind of helped EDM grow big-time.
He cited the role that festivals like Coachella and Splash House have had in exposing more people to electronic music—and allowing DJs to truly showcase their talent beyond just playing “the hits.”
“It’s a lot harder as a local DJ to play dance music at the clubs … unless it’s a house night, and people are knowingly going there,” Tovar said. “Outside of festival season, it’s really hard for DJs to really be able to fully embrace that.”
Festivals, however, give DJs a chance to do their own thing.
“Even though EDC is in Vegas, it did originate in Los Angeles,” he said. “I always tell people that if you lived in SoCal and listened to dance music from 2007 and 2012, you were a part of music history if you were going to these rooms—the same way people were going to the clubs in Brooklyn in the ’80s listening to hip hop. … I feel like after 2012, EDM was established as a forever genre.”
Tovar said he’s hopeful about the future of dance music, both around the world and here in the Coachella Valley.
“I just hope that one day, we’ll be able to do dance-music stuff outside of festival season and thrive,” Tovar said. “… I think we’re going in the right direction and the DJs are out here; the producers are out here; and the demographic is out here. I just think that once we get past that whole old-school gatekeeping type of club mindset that focuses on selling bottles and not the music, I think it’s going to fucking thrive out here. just how it does in LA and other places.”