Five Questions at Ultra: Pete Tong on the Evolving 'EDM' Scene

Billboard caught up with BBC host and international dance music icon Pete Tong at his annual pool party at the Surfcomber during Miami Music Week. The always astute veteran offered a peek into the strategy behind Evolution, his new terrestrial radio station brand with Clear Channel (which just debuted in Miami this week); and addressed how the term “EDM” has changed over the last few years.

What do you think about Billboard adding YouTube streaming data to the Hot 100 calculation?
I didn’t know about it. But I think it's a positive evolution. To stay relevant, I think it's good. And it’s hard to quantify what’s really the most popular thing these days in a world where so many people unfortunately don’t buy it. It’s good. I would say it’s a good attempt to get a more realistic appraisal of what’s really the most popular thing, which is what charts are all about, right?

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I’m sure everyone’s asked you the EDM question today. I wanted to vary it a little bit. Do you think the term has changed over the past 12 months?
Massively, yeah. Yeah, because I think it now refers to a type of music as opposed to what was originally used probably by you guys as much as anyone else. The New York Times needed a way of describing the phenomenon that was happening in America with the rise of popularity of the festivals. And then obviously, the rise in popularity of Swedish House Mafia, and this music that came on the radio. So I think two years ago, probably longer than 12 months, that was a way of summing up what was happening. But now I think it really defines a sound, and therefore, it’s quite a divisive term, because you're either into it or not. And it doesn’t mean that you're going to go and listen to underground techno. It means you're going to hear the hits, basically.

Is that because you think other genres are emerging in America finally? It seems like we're having a house revival. Trap is kind of happening. So there’s a lot of music that doesn’t seem logical to call EDM.
Well, hopefully it’s all part of a positive fallout of this. It brought so many new people into the scene; so many people were new to our world. So all the ticket buyers at these festivals, it’s often their first experience. They might have heard something on the radio and liked it, but their first interaction would have been going to one of these festivals. They’re a new audience. And they’re very young, a lot of them. So I think it's only natural if you joined at 17, by the time you've been to a bunch of these festivals and you’re 19 that your taste is going to evolve. And I think that's evolved in two or three ways.

One way is the rise of the indigenous artist in this country which we haven’t really had before, and now there’s more and more of them. If we were sitting here two years ago, we’d be talking about Deadmau5 and Kaskade. Now we’re talking about Krewella and Skrillex and millions of them. So that audience, two years later, has now got their own groups here and DJs. They’re a lot closer to them. It’s not just all about Tiësto and [Armin] Van Buuren. It’s about the local heroes and the national stories.

So that's one way it’s evolved. And then the other way people get into kind of the commercial end of it. I suppose that's the best way of putting it. And then they mature and they’re looking for something a little bit deeper. So they’ve either gone into any one of these other sub-genres. Their hero DJ two or three years ago was David Guetta. Maybe now it’s Jamie Jones or Maya Jane Coles.

Hopefully, I think that's why everyone was wondering is after this explosion, is it all just going to go away when radio gets bored and starts playing another type of music. Or is it actually going to evolve? I think it's probably somewhere in between. Maybe it has peaked. Could it possibly get any more popular than it is? But I don't think it’s going to go away. I think it's going to evolve.

How are the radio stations going?
Yeah, good. I mean, it’s very exciting. That's probably my main thing here in America now is I started to work with Clear Channel last year and we launched Evolution, which was a re-branding of their play in electronic music in America, even though they were doing some online already. I’m heavily involved in programming. We kind of perfected or got comfortable with the format in the last month or two, and then they started picking radio stations. So we’ve gone terrestrial in Boston just before Christmas with 101.7. And then this week, we’ve gone terrestrial in Miami with 93.5. They want to target a few more cities this year. And my ambition is obviously to provide a great service, entertainment service, but also something that scales out, that actually starts to mean something if a record’s added, and it will start to bring through the next wave of DJs, the next wave of music. And we can start to hopefully change things; not change, necessarily, just move things on. The reason I was so successful in England is because I’ve always had a great platform, to be able to take Mr. Obscurity or Mrs. Obscurity and put that song on the radio. And we had a big enough audience and I was consistent enough that we were able to kind of break new artists. And that's the ambition, to have that platform in America and use it like the old Trojan horse, you know. Give them one they know and give them one they don’t know. And we’ll see, you know.

What has and hasn’t been working in Boston?
At the moment, it’s all good news, touch wood. It’s so new. We became very popular very quickly in Boston. I believe we’re the No. 1 rated station in the 16-24 market, which is pretty incredible, just by decent programming. And now we’ve started to bring in more local DJs to be involved as well. I’m like the evening host, which is kind of for dance stations like the breakfast show. That’s their mentality. They start to put on more local personalities now as well, and we’ll see how it evolves. But I have to say they’re great. It’s been refreshing working with them, with Clear Channel. They’re good people. It's Premiere as well; Ryan Seacrest’s people actually behind the scenes as well. They’re very experienced about... it’s more like working with the BBC. No disrespect to anyone else that I work with out here. But I’ve been working with individual radio stations or working with satellite stations, and I’ve not really found that here before. Clear Channel has got a lot of clout, and when they do something they really go for it. So it's good.