Artist Representation in the Electronic Dance Music Festival Circuit FESTIVALS AS FIELD-CONFIGURING EVENTS AND NETWORK ANALYSIS OF THE CURRENT FESTIVAL CIRCUIT

As electronic dance music has been adopted by the mainstream culture and become widespread throughout the globe, electronic dance music scenes have developed in virtually every country – with a corresponding microcosm of artists, labels, promoters, managers, booking agents, programmers, and a plethora of other players. At the heart of the electronic dance music industry lies the live performance, which has steadily moved from derelict nightclubs to the stages of massive open-air festivals, making the latter the most important arena for electronic dance music. The current electronic dance music festival circuit is a wellintegrated global network, with DJs and live performers flying across the world to perform at different festivals, however, there have been claims that this integration is only benefitting artists from certain regions of the world, namely, those deemed ‘Western’ or from the ‘Global North’. Re-formulating these claims into a research question, this thesis empirically tests whether there is indeed a unilateral flow of artists from ‘developed’ regions of the world to the festival circuits of ‘underdeveloped’ regions of the world. The methods utilised are quantitative and use network analysis as well as a large dataset in order to answer the research question. The thesis begins with a literature review that builds a framework for why the existence of artist underrepresentation in the electronic dance music festival circuits is important, and how it can have real impact on artists careers. Furthermore, it formalises ways in which electronic dance music festivals can be studied as they are relatively new territory in terms of academic research. The results from the network analysis indeed point towards a unilateral flow of artists from ‘developed’ regions of the globe to festivals in ‘underdeveloped’ regions of the globe. At the same time, festivals in these ‘developed’ regions do not book artists from ‘underdeveloped’ regions barring a few exceptions. Furthermore, and perhaps most interestingly, the ‘superstar’ artists which achieve success in more than one continent’s festival circuit turn out to be overwhelmingly European or North American.