At what point did dance music become "EDM"?

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On Wikipedia, "dance music" refers to music played in clubs at whatever era you're in. So it could be jazz or swing if you're clubbing in the 1950s or disco if you were at it in the 1970s. In the 1980s, we had synthpop like Erasure and Human League, then bands like the Pet Shop Boys and the New Order pretty much closed the gap to nowaday dance. Full-on dance started around 1987 with house hits like Pump up the Volume by Marrs, then Ride on Time by Black Box soon after. House then became breakbeat hardcore and happy hardcore in 1991, then jungle in 1994, drum'n'base in 1996, garage in late 1990s, hard house in the early 2000s, dubstep in the early 2010s and now trap is a big thing in recent years. Year numbers are approx. Meanwhile, house has remained a mainstay and trance grew in the mid/late 90s and has also remained a mainstay in the clubs.

Again on Wikipedia, "EDM" pretty much refers to all of the above dance music as we know it nowadays 1987-present when it became electronic music.

Is EDM an actual style though or is it generic? I've only known the term in the last 5 years or so.

There is for example, this tune which is referred as EDM, although to me I would classify it as house. A lot of EDM-labelled dance sounds like house to me. Just more modern sounding house with the occasional wink to dubstep.

 
Cheers guys. Seems like EDM is a fairly general term then.

I suppose ‘dance’ had, in the early 2000s, modern connotations of cheesy female pop vocal DJ Sammy music... which is nevertheless great and has its own place... and people wanted to distance themselves from that.

Good call about DJ Sammy. Although there is a lot of decent dance / club music nowadays, DJ Sammy definitely killed it for a while back in 2002!
 
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