Why the Corporate Takeover of EDM Was Inevitable: The Straight Bros are On Board

Ian Witlen

Skrillex and Boys Noize

You're not likely to hear many heavy-handed conversations about business at Ultra Music Festival this weekend, but if you do, it will more than likely be about billionaire Robert F.X. Sillerman's plans to buy up just about everything related to electronic dance music and consolidate it all under SFX Entertainment. Our sister blog Crossfade has chronicled his hostile takeover of the scene. His possessions now include nightclubs (like Miami's LIV), a string of well known EDM promotion companies, and Beatport, the EDM scene's answer to iTunes.

While Sillerman's business strategy might strike some as odd (what is it they say about putting all of your eggs in a single basket?), the formal corporate takeover and consolidation of EDM has been a long time coming.

Anyone present at Chicago's infamous Disco Demolition Night in 1979 would surely be surprised to see the current state of dance music in America. Over the half decade leading up that night, disco music -- which was once almost exclusively the soundtrack to underground clubs that catered primarily to gay, black and Latin audiences -- had gone mainstream even without masking its gay and minority roots (hello, Village People and Sylvester).

Of course, this didn't tend to sit well with your basic straight white guy. So, desperate to sell tickets, the Chicago White Socks arranged for local shock jock Steve Dahl to promote an anti-disco night which would feature him burning disco records. What followed was a testosterone-fueled display of violent aggression that Chicago police in full-riot gear had to break up.

"It was your most paranoid fantasy about where the ethnic cleansing of the rock radio could ultimately lead," wrote music critic Dave Marsh in a column following the events in Rolling Stone. "White males, eighteen to thirty-four are the most likely to see disco as the product of homosexuals, blacks, and Latins, and therefore they're the most likely to respond to appeals to wipe out such threats to their security."