Insights · June 17th, 2026
Electronic music has never been more abundant. Yet the silos dominating our lives and shaping our habits are walling off new listeners and experiences. In Resident Advisor’s latest video essay, we examine the forces shaping the scene—from AI and inflation to digital exhaustion and generational disconnect—and propose a pivot.
There Is No Sound Of The 2020s. Yet
In the 80s we had house and techno. In the 90s the sounds of rave, drum and bass, and trip pop. The new millennium marked the arrival of minimal and dubstep. Then the 2010s brought us hyper pop, retro mania, and the EDM boom.
But, the 2020s there have been shifts, but no real movement, no sound that’s reached the kind of mass saturation of these previous eras. We’ve got three years left for this decade to produce a sound of its own. So, what’s going on? First, let’s make it clear, there’s not a lack of quality. The problem is quantity. Different people would tell you there are many different sounds of the 2020s and they’d be right, but this heavy saturation could be creating a bottleneck, nightclubs, youth spaces, an internet that actually worked. These crucial structures that once pushed a sound into the mass consciousness are today all crumbling. Instead, we’ve got an ecosystem that can’t grow a genre. Real discovery has been replaced by algorithmic feeds that demand consensus, streaming services built for passive continuity, and an endless barrage of 15 second clips.
There are a few reasons why this might be happening, and it can’t be reduced to simple influencer culture, corporate rave experiences, or TikTok techno. Monoculture is dead. The internet was once shared ground, now it’s a city of separate rooms, and most of us have no idea who’s next door. It represents a clean break with the past, and as the dance floor now lives increasingly online, this is becoming a problem for progress. Try to describe what new sounds are animating the underground. It’s a challenge, right? It may be keeping the revival of sounds like Prague, Tech House, and Dubtechno afloat.
When a sound is easier to grasp and categorize. It’s easier to travel at a time when emergent sounds of the 2020s lack definition or even a name. The high knowledge and access required to enjoy them to the maximum can lock out casual enthusiasts, and it goes beyond genre. Where’s the next untrue coming from?
The next discovery, homogenic black secret technology, oil of every pearl’s uninsides remain in light or double cup, not a cult classic, but a standard setter that has the power to reshape culture and receives the attention and support to guide it there. Electronic music needs new movements, new classics. No one laments that we’ve come to understand acid or hardcore, or any of the once niche sounds too well. When these moments arrive, they extend the life of the music and open up more entry points for more listeners. For now, the electronic music of the 2020s feels as if it’s pushed towards a strange double condition, fragmented yet also repetitive. Then there’s the economy. Since 2020 inflation has made risk taking harder, and risk is what any creative scene runs on. Think back only 10 or 15 years ago, when a club ticket cost seven pounds. It was affordable to flop
for talking about young people kind of engaging with, with art generally, not even dance music culture, is is is kind of ticket pricing, and we can talk about this in a vacuum of club music, but I think just the general economic conditions of like the UK and kind of everywhere it feels like a really fucked when promoters gamble less, producers play it safe, and young ravers default to what they know. We know why the result is a silent stagnancy, where we’re exposed to more of the same, instead of a world of experiments, failures, and the odd lightning in a bottle success.
The 2020s in electronic music needs the latter.
We need experimentation and an economy that can support it. Otherwise, what’s the point? This is all compounded by an industry that is failing to connect with the next generation. Look at the lineups of most big festivals, and you’ll see the same sounds dominating the 2020s groovy house, bass line, hard techno. They please the audience in front of them, but it’s rarely where innovation comes from. Raw, noisy music is still out there. Lost Tutanaku, the rise of South Africa’s electronic underground, boundary pushing Brazilian music and the emerging sleaze pop universe. The path to the 2030s could run through chaos, and that’s just what we know. The global spread of electronic music should give rise to a world where anything can spring from anywhere, but that’s not happening. Hyper. Scenes stay overlooked, while historic hubs keep the center of gravity, and the old infrastructure labels PR music media is built to hold it in place, built to miss whatever’s cutting through somewhere else. We seem to be shackled to the past. Yes, the spaces we rely on are creaking, but are we shaking up our tastes and habits as quickly as we could be.
If not, what can we do about it?
The good news is that we can fix some of this, but it requires direct action. Here are a few ideas. First, we need to capture the present before it disappears. So much of the most radical music you hear is transient, captured in snippets and shorts. Who is taking strides to document it? We don’t want to find out what happens if all that evaporates. We also need to protect the past and make it findable. Lineage and culture matter, but the next generation can’t celebrate what it can’t access media is where that work begins. The challenge is building intergenerational bridges that feel fresh and useful. Without them, the knowledge we’ve amassed won’t make it through intact. Second, the underground needs a realistic framework for new production modes, resistance to hybrid genres and social native music is one thing, AI is another. We’re not talking about replacing human music with slop, but production tools haven’t meaningfully advanced in years, and generative models could be it. It feels like a threat to independent music, but if electronic producers could embrace ethical generative models to twist sounds in weird new ways, they could restore some edge and break the formulaic nature of the sounds we hear. Third, and most importantly, electronic music could benefit from a completely new set of inputs and perspectives. Bookings on the DJ circuit of 2026 don’t look all too different from 2016 or even 2006 That’s rare.
In a scene based on futurism, churn used to be a sign of progress.
The established industry has to start integrating Gen Z’s taste faster, trusting their intuition and letting go of the idea that the old way to experience electronic music and club culture is the right one. If bookers, agents, and industry professionals can seize the future with the same spirit that they’ve lavished on digging through the past, we might break the deadlock. It comes down to openness and curiosity, but what happens if we do nothing? If disco house and EDM keep dominating the mainstream, well, everything alive in the underground stays underground.
This was the old days. Yeah. Now, well, the thing about the old days, they, the old days,
if electronic music can’t adapt to a new generation, can’t make room for new stars, can’t absorb the fresh energy that keeps any music form moving, mainstream dance music could continue to dominate, while innovation briefly electrifies the margins, then fades out. There might be no sound of the 2020s at all, and that should scare us. We’re optimists, though. Ebbs and flows are natural. Nobody predicted dubstep would crawl out of smoky basements and change everything. Nobody knew what Hyperpop would do once it polarized the web.
It’ll be 2030 before we know it come to find the sound of the decade and lift it up, no matter who is making it, and whatever it is, there is no nobility in going down chain to the ship of the past. We must shift with the waves.
Read the special double report: ‘There Is No Sound Of The 2020s. Yet‘: https://ra.co/features/4505
And, take a look at ‘No Music on a Dead Internet’: https://ra.co/features/4504
About Nikolas Badminton
Nikolas Badminton is the Chief Futurist & Hope Engineer at futurist.com. He’s a world-renowned futurist keynote speaker, consultant, author, media producer, and executive advisor that has spoken to, and worked with, over 500 of the world’s most impactful organizations and governments.
Nikolas is an artificial intelligence expert and his 2026 keynote ‘The AI Leader: Create Incredible Productivity, Profit & Growth’ is the level up for the modern CEO and executive leader.
Please contact futurist speaker and consultant Nikolas Badminton to discuss your engagement.
