genre electronic
This week in dance music: DJ Snake graced the cover of Billboard France ahead of his giant stadium show in Paris last weekend. “With all humility, I don’t claim to represent France,” the producer said in the story. “I represent a guy from Paris, who’s Franco-Algerian, and I just try my best to do interesting […]
EDC Las Vegas starts Friday (May 16) at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. The three-day dance mega-festival will feature sets from more than 250 artists, with many of them being blasted out of Vegas and onto the internet via the festival’s free livestream.
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Fans can thusly enjoy EDC from the comfort of their couch by tuning into either Insomniac TV or the Insomniac YouTube page. Live coverage begins at 6:45 p.m. PT/ 9:45 p.m. ET daily, with the broadcast going all night and into the dawn Friday, Saturday (May 17) and Sunday (May 18).
The livestream will feature coverage from five of Insomniac’s nine stages — KineticField, CosmicMeadow, CircuitGrounds, NeonGarden and BassPod, with Insomniac TV dedicating a separate channel to each stage.
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While the exact coverage schedule isn’t known, the festival overall will feature performances from artists including Dom Dolla, Alesso, Afrojack, Alison Wonderland playing b2b with Kaskade, Illenium playing b2b with Slander, Sara Landry, Horsegiirl, Gesaffelstein, RL Grime, Martin Garrix, DJ Snake, Interplanetary Criminal, Rezz, Fisher, Eric Prydz and many, many more.
Produced by Insomniac Events, EDC Las Vegas is the biggest dance music festival in North America, welcoming more than 540,000 attendees over its three days. Myriad versions of EDC also take place around the world in countries including Mexico, Brazil, the U.K., China, India and South Korea.
Earlier this week, Insomniac announced that a new edition of EDC will happen in Medellín, Colombia, in October. The show will be produced in partnership with Colombian events company Páramo Presenta.
Australian singer, songwriter and EDM icon VASSY has teamed up with Dutch producer RSCL for the release of her latest single, “Beg.”
Released Friday, May 16 via Revealed’s Gemstone Records imprint, “Beg” is the latest in a long line of singles for the Darwin-born, U.S.-based musician. Described as being rooted in emotional surrender and the desire to hide vulnerability, it sees VASSY (born Vasiliki Karagiorgos) using her trademark strength to turn pain into power.
“From the moment I wrote and recorded BEG, I knew it had that special spark—emotive, energetic, and made for the dancefloor,” VASSY explained to Rolling Stone AU/NZ.
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“When the label heard it, they instantly loved it and introduced me to RSCL,” she added. “We clicked right away, and the collaboration came together effortlessly. What we created is a soulful, piano-driven house track that feels like summer—uplifting, emotional, and full of energy that you can feel in every beat.”
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VASSY rose to fame as a musician in her native Australia throughout the ’00s, finding widespread fame in 2012 when her single “We Are Young” topped Billboard’s Dance Club Songs chart – her first of seven tracks to do so. She found wider fame in 2014 after appearing as a featured artist on David Guetta and Showtek’s Platinum-certified single “Bad.”
In 2020, the success of “Bad” saw her become a member of APRA AMCOS’ The 1,000,000,000 List in celebration of the track reaching a billion streams. Since the honor, it’s since surpassed the two billion mark, and in 2023, she became the first female recipient of the Icon accolade at the EDM Awards in Miami.
RSCL (pronounced “Rascal”) also boasts an impressive career, with releases on the Spinnin’ Records and Casablanca Records labels, and credits alongside names such as Mr. Belt & Wezol and Jake Shore.
The release of “Beg” comes just a matter of days after the arrival of VASSY’s BossAcoustics EP, a collection of intimate acoustic tracks that showcases her early influences while reimagining her classic cuts with an immersive Bossa style.
Stream ‘Beg’ below:
What began in 2014 as a beautiful Instagram moment in the Mojave Desert with thousands of biodegradable lanterns launching in unison in the night sky will this year transform into a full-scale music festival with major acts.
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Taking place Oct. 3-5, Rise Festival will feature headliners Rüfüs du Sol on Friday, Calvin Harris on Saturday and John Mayer on Sunday. Other artists on the bill include Ben Böhmer, Coco & Breezy, Goose and LP Giobbi.
Rise Festival will happen at the Jean Dry Lake Bed about 40 minutes southwest of Las Vegas. Organizers expect around 20,000 people per day at the event, which brands itself as “the world’s largest sky lantern festival.” Ticket packages go on sale Friday (May 16) via the festival’s website.
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The independently produced and promoted festival took a break in 2024 and in 2025 hired a new CEO, David Oehm, who previously worked with Las Vegas festival Life Is Beautiful and who laid plans for a significant expansion.
Joining Oehm is Rise president and COO Ashley Goodhue-White, who was also part of Life Is Beautiful in its early years and who later left to pursue her own production company. In 2015, Rise was one of her first clients. She rejoined the festival this year after a stint with Las Vegas Grand Prix. In 2024, Rise was acquired by NobleLight Foundation, a nonprofit that supports entrepreneurs focused on positive socioeconomic and environmental change, and converted into a nonprofit charitable event meant to “bring more light into the world.”
“Each night has a unique musical point of view,” Oehm says. “We wanted to find acts aligned with our brand ethos and overall identity: joyful, elevating, cinematic, atmospheric, emotional. Our headliners and everyone else down the lineup reflect that. Every artist we’ve spoken with has been surprised by the concept — there is nothing like it — and seeing visuals where we’ve got thousands of sky lanterns [launching in unison].”
Their work assembling the lineup results in 17 artists across electronic, indie, folk and experimental genres, and a new site footprint encompassing three experiences. The Path, a desert lounge with seating meant to be a transition space, weaves within an open art gallery. It’s a space to chill, meditate and appreciate the scenery.
“Rise is not just another music festival,” says Goodhue-White. “There’s so much powerful meaning behind it, and it is a space for everyone. We want people to get out of their cars, stop scrolling on their phones and be immersed — take in the desert around them.”
The Compass hosts the sky lantern release twice per night. Here, “there are 6,500 torches, perfectly spaced, surrounded by food and beverage options,” Goodhue-White says. When festivalgoers arrive, they get a kit with a cushion, an instruction card, a pen and two lanterns. When ready, they pick out the torch they want — closer to the stage or farther away. Most people personalize their lanterns with messages. Then the staff lights the torches and everyone releases lanterns at the same time.
“After a few acts perform on The Compass stage, the lanterns are released and we refer to that as the ‘world’s largest collaborative art installation.’ People are releasing their hopes and their dreams. You sit there with thousands of other people and have a moment together,” she says.
Then, guests go from The Compass to the new Horizon Stage, where the headliners and other acts perform. Gates open daily at 3 p.m., and Rise wraps up by midnight.
“Rise has always been the largest event at the Lake Bed,” Goodhue-White says. “We work closely with the Bureau of Land Management, Metro and Clark County Fire. We partner with Leave No Trace and leave the area better than we found it every year — everything we bring, we remove.”
See the complete lineup below.
Rise Festival
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Charli xcx is a party of one in her new music video for “Party 4 U,” which finds the star revisiting a fan-favorite track from 2020 while spending a day by herself in the middle of nowhere before things get wildly out of control. In the visual released Thursday (May 15) — the five-year anniversary […]
Assembling a show for the technological mecca that is Las Vegas’ Sphere is a head-spinning process for any artist and their team. But CAA agent Ferry Rais-Shaghaghi and Sphere Entertainment vp of live Erin Calhoun worked side by side to help create the buzzy, boundary-pushing run by melodic techno artist Anyma, who became the first electronic act to play the venue when he kicked off a residency there in late December that ran through early March.
Booking an electronic artist had been a priority, particularly given that the right artist would, Calhoun says, “be able to leverage all of Sphere’s experiential technologies in a new, compelling way.” Anyma (born Matteo Milleri) had been on the Sphere team’s radar for years, and over time, it became clear that his international appeal, futuristic music and strong preexisting visual identity made the Italian American artist the perfect choice.
Rais-Shaghaghi says that for him and the rest of Anyma’s team, Calhoun became “the point person for us to navigate everything.” In the year or so it took to produce the show — titled Afterlife Presents Anyma ‘The End of Genesys’ — Calhoun and Rais-Shaghaghi formed, he says, “an incredible business relationship that became a friendship with someone we trusted and felt comfortable going to and having the difficult conversations we needed to have.”
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Through these conversations, the team created huge and viral moments, like the scene where a character falls through space, creating a wild, lightly dizzying effect for the audience. They also made a pair of cello-playing robots that helped bring Anyma’s melodies to life. Calhoun says such elements “highlighted the way technology combines with artistry to make for an unforgettable experience.” Milleri developed the visual feast of a show himself alongside Anyma’s longtime visual creative director/lead computer graphics artist Alessio De Vecchi and head creative Alexander Wessely.
Rais-Shaghaghi and his team leveraged their network and hype around the residency to book support acts — “We looked at them more as guests,” he says — for the run that included Peggy Gou, John Summit, Solomun, Amelie Lens, Charlotte de Witte and Tiësto, giving each night a mini-festival feel.
And when issues inevitably arose during production, Rais-Shaghaghi says Calhoun “would always help us in navigating it within her ecosystem and [figuring out] how we could get to the finish line. Erin is firm, but she knows how to get the results she needs without burning bridges. She’s also really good at being a team player, understanding the artist’s creative process and direction and being the voice between the artist and the owner of [Madison Square Garden] in finding that middle ground.”
“We were completely aligned on the overall goal here: to blow everyone away with stunning visuals, next-level sound and an unparalleled live experience,” Calhoun adds. “Every move we made was side by side, which is how we approach every artist playing our venue. The vision is led by the artist, and we do everything we can to make it happen. Ferry is so passionate and was hands-on throughout the entirety of the run.”
This shared mission was ultimately a huge success, with the 12-night residency drawing more than 200,000 fans from around the world. The first eight dates alone sold 137,000 tickets and grossed $21 million, although Rais-Shaghaghi says money is ultimately beside the point.
“Obviously, as agents, we have to look at how we make our clients win financially,” he says, “but more so, it’s about how we can do things where the promoter wins, the fans win and the artists feel that they created an experience that had a high impact.”
This show is clearly one such instance. “From the performers onstage to the fans in the crowd,” Calhoun says, “everyone wanted more, more, more.”
This story appears in the May 17, 2025, issue of Billboard.
Charli xcx is ready to throw a party 4 her fourth studio album, How I’m Feeling Now, which celebrates its fifth birthday Thursday (May 15) amid the viral resurgence of one of its tracks — for which the musician has announced a new music video.
In a heartfelt handwritten letter posted to Instagram Wednesday (May 14), the pop star first opened up about crafting her 2020 LP, the release of which she wrote “honestly just feels like yesterday.” “So much has changed since then: me, my life, elements of my music and most definitely the world,” Charli wrote.
“I made the album in just five weeks, from conception to release, entirely publicly in collaboration with all of you,” she continued of crafting the album at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. “It was so special. I felt like I rediscovered myself, my sanity + my sense of connection with the world, at a time where we were all so alone.”
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Though far from her most commercially successful, How I’m Feeling Now is one of Charli’s most beloved works among her fanbase. Released four years before she’d experience a career breakthrough with 2024 year-defining album Brat, the LP peaked at No. 111 on the Billboard 200.
In recent months, however, the album has undergone a renaissance thanks to one of its tracks in particular: “party 4 u,” which made its Billboard Hot 100 in early May a full five years after its release after going viral on TikTok. On the chart dated May 17, 2025, it reached a new peak at No. 55.
With the well-timed retroactive success of “party 4 u,” Charli went on to announce Wednesday that she has a music video in the works for the half-decade-old track. Sharing a seconds-long closeup of her eyes paired with a snippet of the song, she wrote on her social media accounts, “5 years later… the party 4 u video. tomorrow.”
The news comes shortly after she shared a clip of herself running down an empty street while holding a bushel of pink balloons — a direct reference to one of the song’s lyrics — on TikTok. And in her handwritten note, the Essex-born star had hinted, “I really can’t believe that 5 years later one of the Angel favorites is having its own special moment.”
“So obviously I wanted to do something to celebrate…,” she’d continued. “This one’s for you Angels.”
The How I’m Feeling Now anniversary comes just a few weeks after Charli performed at Coachella 2025, incorporating “party 4 u” into her Weekend 2 setlist. The weekend prior, she brought Lorde, Troye Sivan and Billie Eilish on stage with her to perform their respective Brat remix collaborations: “Girl, So Confusing,” “Talk Talk” and “Guess.”
Charli is now fresh off of four nights at Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., on her own headlining Brat Tour. She’ll next embark on a European leg starting May 31 in Poland.
See her post about How I’m Feeling Now‘s anniversary below.
The International Music Summit (IMS) will return to Dubai this fall. This will be the electronic music industry conference’s second time in the United Arab Emirates after debuting in Dubai in late 2024. The event will happen November 13-14 at 25hours Hotel One Central. At this year’s conference, IMS will gather industry figures from the […]
Billboard’s Dance Moves roundup serves as a guide to the biggest movers and shakers across Billboard’s many dance charts — new No. 1s, new top 10s, first-timers and more.
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This week, on charts dated May 17, HUGEL, Flume, RÜFÜS DU SOL and others achieve new feats. Check out key movers below.
HUGEL, David Guetta, Kehlani & Daecolm
HUGEL, David Guetta, Kehlani and Daecolm make a splashy entrance on the latest Hot Dance/Electronic Songs chart with their new collaboration, “Think of Me.” Released May 2 via Virgin/Capitol/ICLG, the track debuts at No. 10 with 1 million official U.S. streams earned in its first week, according to Luminate, making it the highest debut on the chart.
The song is a notable entry for all four acts:
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HUGEL: The French DJ earns his seventh entry on the chart, and second top 10 after “I Adore You,” with Topic and Arash featuring Daecolm, in January (No. 8 peak).
David Guetta: The superstar DJ adds his record-extending 96th entry on the chart (dating to its January 2013 start), and record-tying 27th top 10, matching Kygo for the most in the chart’s history.
Kehlani: She collects her third entry and second top 10, following her feature on Calvin Harris’ “Faking It,” also featuring Lil Yachty (No. 6, 2018).
Daecolm: The singer-songwriter posts his second entry, following his feature on “I Adore You.”
Flume, JPEGMAFIA & Ravyn Lenae
Flume, JPEGMAFIA and Ravyn Lenae’s new collaboration, “Is It Real,” debuts at No. 17 on Hot Dance/Electronic Songs, powered almost entirely by its first-week streams (792,000). The song appears on Flume and JPEGMAFIA’s new four-track EP, We Live in a Society.
The track is Flume’s 33rd on Hot Dance/Electronic Songs, and first since 2023’s “Chalk 1.3.3. (2017 Export wav),” with Jim-E Stack (No. 44 peak). The new entry also earns JPEGMAFIA and Lenae their first appearances on the chart.
RÜFÜS DU SOL
The Australian trio returns to Hot Dance/Electronic Songs with “In the Moment,” new at No. 21 thanks to a 10% boost in U.S. streams (to 662,000). Released on the act’s album Inhale / Exhale in October, the track is now receiving a new wave of momentum following the arrival of Inhale / Exhale Remixed on May 2. The new set includes the same tracklist as the original but with new mixes of the songs. The “In the Moment” update features Swiss electronic duo Adriatique. (Per Billboard chart rules, all versions of the song are combined into one listing and billed toward the version receiving the most activity.) Inhale / Exhale debuted and peaked at No. 3 on Top Dance Albums in October.
Lady Gaga, Marshmello, Kane Brown, David Guetta, Sia
Looking at the tops of Billboard’s dance rankings, these artists and titles continue their leads:
Hot Dance/Electronic Songs: Marshmello and Kane Brown’s “Miles On It” has now spent a full year at No. 1. It rules for a 52nd week on the strength of 8.4 million radio audience impressions and 5.8 million streams. Only two songs have spent more time in the lead: Marshmello and Bastille’s “Happier” (69 weeks) and David Guetta and Bebe Rexha’s “I’m Good (Blue)” (55).
Hot Dance/Pop Songs, Top Dance Albums: Lady Gaga’s “Abracadabra” spends a 12th week at No. 1 on Hot Dance/Pop Songs, while parent album MAYHEM rules Top Dance Albums for a ninth week.
Dance/Mix Show Airplay: Guetta and Sia’s “Beautiful People” leads for a third week, thanks to a 3% gain in plays among 24/7 dance reporters and pop stations’ mix show hours.
Philadelphia’s Making Time festival has announced the lineup for its 2025 event.
The three-day show will feature performances from legends including Four Tet and Moodymann, electronic pioneer Suzanne Ciana, Japanese phenom Yousuke Yukimatsu, modern mainstays Boy Harsher, Avalon Emerson, Haii, Sherelle, Jubilee and Ben UFO, rising Brooklyn duo Fcukers, Glasgow veterans Optimo (Espacio) and many more.
Additionally, the lineup includes Interplanetary Criminal, Gerd Janson, Chaos in the CBD, Panda Bear, John Talabot, VTSS, Donato Dozzy and others.
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Making Time 2025 will once again happen at Fort Mifflin, an eighteenth century landmark located on the Delaware River in Philadelphia. The site will feature five stages, across which the event will feature indie and experimental electronic music, along with post-punk, shoegaze, ambient and more. Along with music, the lineup includes meditation sessions, sound baths and other activities designed to foster transcendence.
The event happens Sept. 19-21, with tickets on sale now. Tickets are $235 plus taxes and fees, and tickets with no fees attached are available at The Lot Radio in Brooklyn and Middle Child & Middle Child Clubhouse in Philadelphia.
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2025 will mark the fifth edition of the independently produced festival. Making Time was created by Philadelphia-based producer Dave Pianka, whose artist name is Dave P., and is an extension of his Making Time radio show and the Making Time parties he’s been throwing for 25 years.
A press release for the festival notes that “The motto for [Making Time 2025] is ‘choose transcendence.’ For over 25 years, Making Time has been about partying your a– off and transcending the mundanity of the everyday, the average, the mediocre.”
See the full lineup below:
Making Time 2024
Courtesy of Making Time