Electronic Dance Music in China: Value, Organization and Professional Identity

The project examines how different electronic dance music (EDM) scenes in China define value, translate these valuations into organizational practices, and shape practitioners’ professional identities within shared industrial and regulatory conditions. EDM is a broad family of electronically produced, rhythmically prominent and groove oriented music practices organized around dance floors, clubs, festivals, parties, online streaming environments, and other occasions of embodied, social and participatory listening. Approaching the Chinese EDM industry as a polycentric industrial ecosystem composed of multiple music scenes, it investigates the organizational formations that sustain these scenes and the wider industrial infrastructures through which they are connected. The project aims to map the actors, organizations, collaborative relations, resource flows, and operational strategies that constitute China’s EDM industrial ecology. Conceptually, it explains how value, professional identity, occupational subjectivity, organizational practice, and cultural management practice are formed through their mutual relations. Empirically, the research will examine several types of EDM scenes in mainland China, including commercial electronic music festivals, rave events, commercial mega clubs, underground and independent electronic music parties, online streaming environments, and localized EDM forms such as mic shouting, Tuhai, and short video dance tracks.