Introduction: Dance Music Festivals and Event-Cultures

Researchers across the spectrum of social and cultural disciplines have, in recent times, sought to bring understanding to a growing cultural pattern where festivals have become integral to tourism and regional cultural economies and to the performance of identity and lifestyle. While electronic dance music (or EDM) cultures are implicated in the ‘festivalisation of culture’ (Bennett, Taylor and Woodward 2014) , they have lent their own unique sensibility to the pattern over the past two decades, at the crossroads of diverse local and global influences. When I say unique, I mean that dance music cultures possess distinct festal roots, in the club, the rave, the party. Beneath its diverse variations, electronic dance music culture is an event culture.