The electronic dance music industry has achieved a remarkable $11.8 billion valuation, according to the 2024 IMS Business Report.
Reinforcing its prestige as a cultural and economic force, the global dance music business “is now firmly in its post-pandemic growth phase” after achieving 17% revenue growth in 2023, per the report.
The upsurge can be attributed to EDM’s universal appeal, technological integration and unparalleled ability to captivate audiences. As the genre’s popularity snowballs at major events like Coachella, festivals and clubs continue to dominate revenues, amassing nearly half of the industry total. The next biggest segment was music hardware and software, which comprised roughly 25% of total revenues.
The rise in the number of EDM fans far surpassed those of hip-hop, rock and Latin music, reflecting a substantial boon for its “share of global culture.” Electronic music has the smallest fanbase of those four major genres but grew fastest across all key DSPs in 2023 by a wide margin, passing rock on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. It was dwarfed by hip-hop, which still dominates in streams.
Elsewhere are key data points revealing the swelling influence of non-major labels, which increased their market share for the fourth consecutive quarter at a clip of 31%. The majors still dominate, according to the report, but lost share to “the newer generation of future-focused labels.”
When it comes to streaming, the four markets with the most monthly electronic music listeners are Germany, the US, Australia and the UK, respectively. But the report indicated strong market penetration from South Africa, which has nearly twice as many Spotify listeners as its total population. That figure reflects the degree to which the country “has built its own electronic scenes and culture.”
South African dance music icon Black Coffee won the Grammy Award for Best Dance/Electronic Album in 2022 and the renowned Defected Records imprint recently launched One People, a label aiming to “orchestrate a sonic celebration of Afrocentric music from a diverse and international roster of artists.” Meanwhile, Zimbabwean producer Nitefreak was recently named to the EDM.com Class of 2024.
That global appeal is the upshot of a post-pandemic rebound the likes of which David Guetta predicted in late-2021, when he said “the next few years will be the best years for dance music in history.” Today’s $11.8 billion valuation towers over the dance music industry’s $6.9 billion reckoning a decade ago in 2014, when the genre experienced a cultural stateside explosion.
“2022 was an unusual year, in that it reflected the post-pandemic bounce back effect for live,” MIDiA Research’s Mark Mulligan said. “There was a risk that 2023 would struggle to live up to those inflated expectations, but instead the electronic music industry grew strongly once again, with impressive growth across virtually all of its constituent parts. What is more, electronic music culture grew its fan bases faster than other leading genres, in part due to the rapid rise of African music and fans, illustrating the growing cultural footprint of electronic music culture and its vibrant global scenes.”
You can download the full 2024 IMS Business report here.
