If I tried playing EDM in Ministry of Sound, Fabric or Egg, without being Guetta etc, I’d never be allowed back!
Here in Valencia, Spain I took a gig to pay the rent and ended up having to play EDM, partly because of the management. I was playing more UK commercial deep house and there were as many people dancing to that as there were for EDM but the management are more comfortable with music they know – there were lots of tourists from France and Italy so I’m sure they knew Tchami, even if the Spanish management didn’t!
I find I don’t really like the current EDM of now which is much harder and seems like an offshoot of Dutch Hardstyle, while I prefer the more melodic and musical EDM from Sweden for example. I find the reaction from playing Calling or If I Lose Myself is much better than say David Guetta’s Shot You Down (I still prefer the mid-2000s version of this..!). When the drop comes, people have their hands in the air and sing along. With the current hard EDM sound it’s more jumping around than dancing, eg. Boneless (which to me sounds just like Tujamo’s other song Who, so I play them back to back)…so I don’t think it’s necessarily the hard beats that give the energy either. A good melodic well-known/liked song can get a better reaction eg. Calvin Harris’ Feel So Close or Guetta’s Wild Ones gets a much better reaction than say DVBBS’ Raveology to take an example.
You can also use pseudo EDM/commercial deep house … Oliver Heldens and Tchami use sounds from both styles to straddle the edge, though they can be considered more EDM I guess.. but usually go down well.
You have other slower songs that will get the energy up despite not being a “hard” sound, eg. Clean Bandit’s Rather Be, or The Magician’s remix of Lykke Li’s I Follow Rivers.
I play usually deep house, tech house and techno styles where the crowd do not want EDM at all (thankfully!) so you can just find harder sounds in those genres if you like.
I made a commercial mix without typical EDM tracks that I’ve played to get energy up when I want, so you can see how BPM differences and mixing songs in with others can do this:
Ronnie Emjay – UK – Miller SoundClash by Ronnie Emjay on Mixcloud
Also, I like to start a night around 115bpm and work up to around 124/125 when it’s deep house, techno mabe to 128-130bmp. eg. a song like Hoodlum gets the energy up, but it’s also because it’s a good song and makes you want to dance, whereas hard EDM makes people jump than dance (and I love dancing, so I’ll always want people to dance!).
