A lot of the time, the downturn of a popular trend isn’t best recognized by news, statistics or charts. Sometimes though, it’s easy enough to tell from gut feeling.

And I have the feeling that EDM, as a pop genre, is on the way down.

There’s plenty of evidence to substantiate this claim — music news site Pitchfork put up an article last week titled “Popping the Drop: A Timeline of How EDM’s Bubble Burst.” It featured a timeline of the different peaks of the brief era of 2010s popular electronic dance music, as well as irrefutable evidence of the genre being in decline, such as Avicii’s retirement from touring and the bankruptcy of EDM concert promoter SFX Entertainment.

And before you jump out at me and scream: “EDM isn’t dead, it’s all I ever listen to,” hear me out.

When a genre “dies” or is “dying,” it’s not disappearing entirely from existence. When rock “died” as a popular genre in the 1990s, rock artists didn’t suddenly start making hip-hop, and hardcore fans didn’t instantly switch over to the next popular trend of the time. Genres live on as long as we’re willing to keep them alive, just like how “by-the-numbers rock music” can still succeed and perform moderately well in a 2016 climate where it’s not necessarily the dominant genre anymore.

It’s easier to track this decline if you look at a trustworthy local barometer of popular music — Syracuse University on-campus artist bookings. While events earlier in the 2010s featured artists like Avicii, Calvin Harris, Dillon Francis and Zedd — big-name, big-room pop EDM artists — more recent bookings are evidence of how these popular genres have changed.

Though the Mayfest lineup hasn’t come out yet, the artists booked for Block Party this year are living proof of this change. The Chainsmokers represent the lone electronic act at this year’s event, and represent more of a mellow, progressive electronic sound rather than the pop EDM acts of earlier in this decade.

I also see Kygo’s performance last year as a bridge of sorts between the Dillon Francis of yesterday and The Chainsmokers of today. Though tropical house music seemed to fade almost as quickly as it rose, its effects on the world of pop music are clear — it transitioned the genre from a sweaty, adrenaline-fueled perpetual rave to just another genre a crowd can peacefully bob its heads along to.

Like so many other music fads that eventually died out, pop EDM died because it was everywhere, too much and too fast. Our lives became so oversaturated with the sounds of dubstep and big-room EDM that it feels almost silly now that we were so obsessed with it at one point.

Now that we’re a few years past the brief phase of dubstep, hearing anything that sounds remotely like dubstep makes us cringe a little. Something I’ll admit to liking a lot way back when the genre was still in its peak is one-hit-wonder Alex Clare’s song “Too Close.” What once seemed like a future-looking, fresh take on a rising genre now seems — at least, to me — like a relic of a distant past.

Now that the festivals have shut down, the artists have gone missing and the fans have put away all their drugs and glow sticks, it’s as good a time as ever to look back to the past and see what it brings to the next come-and-go pop music fad. Maybe the chillstep electronic movement will move and dominate the Top 40 charts for a while. Maybe jazzy instrumental hip-hop a la Kendrick Lamar or Anderson .Paak will become the next big thing. Heck, maybe something none of us expect will blow up and shock the world.

Whatever it ends up being, I’ll say one thing for sure: it’s bound to die soon enough, too.

Brett Weiser-Schlesinger is a sophomore newspaper and online journalism major. His column appears weekly in Pulp. He can be reached at bweisers@syr.edu or on Twitter at @brettws.

Published on April 12, 2016 at 10:34 pm