How Electronic Music Became a $12.9 Billion Industry: Streaming, Festivals, AI Production, Copyright, and the Shift from Spectacle to Meaningful Culture
The 2025 International Music Summit Report documents not merely the commercial success of electronic music, but a transition of the scene into a fundamentally new qualitative phase. Electronic culture is no longer a niche or purely entertainment-driven phenomenon — today it stands as one of the key ways of interpreting and understanding the contemporary world.
Economy and scale
By the end of 2024, the global electronic music industry reached $12.9 billion, confirming steady growth even amid broader turbulence across the music market. Crucially, it is not only the volume of this growth that matters, but its structure.
Streaming platforms report a sharp expansion of audiences: electronic music consistently accounts for a significant share of global listening on Spotify, Apple Music, and Minatrix.FM, while streams of electronic tracks on SoundCloud increased by 14%. Across Spotify, YouTube, and TikTok, more than 566 million new listeners engaged with electronic music over the course of the year.
Live music shows a similar trajectory. Clubs and festivals report rising attendance, and ticket revenues from Ibiza’s club sector exceeded €150 million. A key factor has been the island’s shift toward VIP-oriented experiences, the growth of daytime parties, and hybrid formats that combine club culture with gastronomy and lifestyle tourism. Ibiza is selling less of the “night” and increasingly offering an exclusive experience — a change that is directly reflected in the scene’s economic performance.
Electronic artists now account for approximately 18% of lineups at the world’s largest festivals, a figure that would have seemed unattainable just a decade ago. In the United Kingdom alone, electronic music contributed around £2.4 billion to the national economy.
A shift in listener motivation
What is fundamentally important is that the rise of electronic music is no longer driven solely by spectacle or escapism. Increasingly, the scene functions as a space for reflection — on social change, historical memory, and visions of the future.
Today’s listener is not seeking volume and scale, but meaning, perspective, and an individual artistic voice. This is reshaping both the sound itself and the ways it is distributed.
Key trends in the electronic scene
Artificial intelligence: a tool, not an author
The influence of AI on electronic music manifests across two fundamental dimensions.
The first is technological.
Machine learning algorithms are increasingly used in composition, sound design, mixing, and mastering. Recurrent neural networks analyze and predict musical sequences; transformer models help structure track form; and generative systems create MIDI frameworks from text prompts, which are then refined inside DAWs.
Generative adversarial networks shape rhythmic patterns, while diffusion models produce unconventional textures and noise fields. DDSP technologies enable neural control of synthesis parameters, transforming acoustic sources — such as flutes or strings — into hybrid electronic timbres.
While the artistic value of music created entirely by AI remains debated, its effectiveness in mixing and mastering is largely undisputed. AI plugins analyze spectrum, dynamics, and phase relationships, aligning frequency balance with references and genre standards.
Particular attention in 2026 is focused on copyright, one of the industry’s most actively debated topics. Legal consensus is gradually shifting toward recognizing AI not as a creative subject, but as a production tool, with responsibility for the outcome resting on the human creator. This means that rights are assigned to the artist who uses AI within the creative process — provided there is conscious artistic involvement, from data and prompt selection to final editing and aesthetic decisions.
This approach is shaping a new production ethic: what matters is not the mere use of neural networks, but the context, idea, and authorial intent behind the track. As a result, AI is increasingly seen as an extension of the studio, rather than its replacement.
The second dimension is accessibility.
AI has dramatically lowered the barrier to entry for music production. Where creating a high-quality track once required a studio and substantial investment, today a laptop — or even a smartphone — can suffice. This has accelerated the influx of new artists and reshaped the ecosystem of the scene itself.
The aesthetics of imperfection
Paradoxically, as technology reaches unprecedented levels of precision, the value of imperfect sound is rising. “Raw” recordings, noise, glitch artifacts, and deliberate errors are increasingly embraced as artistic devices.
Imperfection is perceived as evidence of human presence — a marker of authorship and emotional engagement. Instead of sterile loops, artists turn to unique textures, including semi-random AI-generated material that serves as a starting point for further sound design.
Organic elements are also returning: natural ambiences, live percussion, breathing, and mechanical noise. Music is once again striving for physicality and emotional depth. Listeners are fatigued by scale and anonymity — they seek connection with the artist and their personal narrative.
Transgression and ultra-locality
The electronic scene continues to erase genre and cultural boundaries. Within a single space, EDM coexists with Afrobeats, Latin rhythms and Asian percussion, baile funk, amapiano, dembow, and hybrid forms that defy classification.
Scenes from South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, and South Korea play a particularly prominent role. In Berlin, kuduro is heard; in Paris — techno infused with Indian rhythms; in Seoul, hyperpop intertwines with trance. Ultra-local cultural codes are unexpectedly gaining global resonance.
Festivals as cultural communities
These shifts are most visible within festival culture. Large-scale mega-events dominated by pyrotechnics and aggressive commercialization are gradually giving way to local, intimate formats. Raves on beaches, in forests, and within repurposed industrial spaces are becoming the new norm.
Festivals are no longer merely entertainment — they increasingly function as platforms for social expression, addressing themes from environmental responsibility to dialogue about science, culture, and the future of society.
A telling statement came from Jean-Michel Jarre ahead of his performance in Bratislava:
“I like the idea of trying, through art, music, and science, to build a bridge from the future into the present.”
Organizers are increasingly abandoning plastics, reducing energy consumption and air travel, and introducing flexible ticketing models. At the same time, festivals remain laboratories of innovation: hybrid performances, immersive formats, VR elements, and experiments with AI are becoming integral to the experience.
Yet even here, the focus is shifting away from spectacle toward artistic value. Phone bans, live experiments without DAWs, audiovisual installations, and 3D sound systems create a sense of total immersion — transforming the dancefloor into an artistic space.
Conclusion
Electronic music is indeed experiencing a period of flourishing — economically, technologically, and culturally. However, its sustained growth is driven not by the exploitation of simple emotions, but by shared values, the search for identity, and a forward-looking perspective.
Today, the electronic scene is more than just the soundtrack of an era. It is the language through which the modern world speaks to itself.
