The WMC had its 20 year anniversary in 2005, and has ever since been gathering the most enthusiastic visitors that have been there for one reason only; the love and passion for pounding electronic music. According to the official website, the interest for the festival has been growing gradually since the start of the festival 27 years ago. Statistical numbers on their website indicate that people from more than 206 countries in the world visit the WMC website each year (between October 2010 and March 2011), with 51% of the event attendees in 2011 being between 22-30 years of age, followed by 36% middle-agers between 31-40 years of age. I turned to Google for some insight on the real statistical truth behind WMC, because frankly, I’ve had doubts whether the annual conference in Miami really is the “pivotal platform for the advancement of the industry” or just a cash generator and publicity stunt. I must say that it used to be the centre for all things electronic music as well as product announcements, but watching the evolvement of NAMM (Los Angeles, USA) and Musikmesse (Frankfurt, Germany), there is no doubt that the music manufacturing industry is detaching itself from company executives and marketers on the show floors by bringing DJs and musicians to announce their products. And WMC in Miami is one such place that has been doing this very well for the past years.

There has been an increase of music festival events for the past few years, and the electronic music scene is constantly growing. But I am not seeing the same trend for World Music Conference in Miami. Below is a trend chart based on main search keywords that I believe is mostly common when searching on Google for these two events. Not so surprising, but Electric Daisy Carnival now is becoming a very popular event, that recently spread its wings to the US East coast, specifically in the tri-state area for the EDC 2012 in New York.

Let me reiterate what I mean. Electronic music is not anymore in its infancy. In fact, there are so many sub-genres under the EDM umbrella, that not even the craziest Electronic Dance Music fan would have imagined this kind of widespread popularity of ths music back in the days (i.e underground Detroit Techno music scene), or not even the Trance producer Ferry Corsten at Innercity back in the late 90’s would probably never imagine that the Trance genre would evolve into Electro, Dubstep and Progressive House. If you don’t remember Gouryella and System F, then you probably weren’t into Trance music in the 1990’s, but as a long-time dedicated EDM follower and musician, I certainly have seen the ups and downs that followed the introduction of electronic music in mainstream clubs and radio stations, as well as in featured remix tracks for Pop, Rock and R’n B artists. Another interesting part of the evolution of electronic music is the trend that we are seeing for the most common genres in EDM. Trance and Techno are collectively decreasing in popularity, while sub-genres of these genres are becoming more popular.

Below, I compared the search trend and interest for Techno, Trance, Dubstep, Electric Daisy Carnival and WMC Miami. It is very clear that Dubstep is rapidly increasing in popularity, while techno and trance are slowly decreasing in interest.