Just as there was a long gap between punk going mainstream here and then in the US, rave also took around 15 years to hit big in the US. Reynolds breaks down a number of factors in this, from the impact of smoking bans changing drug consumption patterns to a death at a festival ironically publicising the existence of large-scale rave (EDM as its been relabelled in the US) live scene.
Above all, he notes how social media, including YouTube, Facebook + Twitter, have enabled UK scenes that once might have briefly enjoyed some cult, ultra-cool following in New York or the west coast to become mainstream in the US. BBC Radio 1 can, in our globalised, online age, greatly influence music culture in the US and beyond, as this excerpt suggests:
Best points to a September 2006 Radio One show by Mary Ann Hobbs as a critical moment in dubstep's dissemination through North America. "Dubstep Warz was this session where she had all the key DJs on the scene playing tracks, but more importantly talking about the music and the culture. It really painted a picture of what dubstep meant. That show was traded throughout the Internet, to the point where it's almost a cliche to say that it influenced you. Hobbs also talked about Dubstepforum in that broadcast. At that point it had a few hundred users. But subsequently it just grew and grew until it now has a million."
The internet helped to obliterate the time-lag that always used to hamper the US outposts of UK-based scenes like jungle. Because of the dubplate system, whereby the leading British drum & bass DJs played the latest sounds months before their official release, by the time American deejays got hold of the tracks as expensive imports, the UK scene was already six months into the future. But dubstep, as the first fully networked dance scene, is globally synchronized: sound-files are traded more freely and new tracks gets edited out of DJ mixes on pirate radio and posted as YouTube by fans.
I post this not just to reinforce yet again the key point about the impact of digitisation (the article also makes the point that dance is no different from other music forms these days in that artists make most of their income from live performances, not CD/recorded music sales, citing figures for the likes of Skrillex), but also as a potential audience for an artist relaunched through a new music video for a back catalogue track can be non-UK ... and through social media you have the opportunity to research and evidence the potential without travelling anywhere!
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