Before Lady Gaga instructed us to "Just Dance," David Guetta rethought rap and Deadmau5 sold instrumental electronica to the masses with a cartoon mouse head and DJ cube -- there was Tiësto.

When Stefani "Lady Gaga" Germanotta was an 18-year-old New York University sophomore, Tiësto was DJ'ing at the opening ceremony of the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens. In 2007, when Guetta was a French house DJ searching for his first big radio hit, Tiësto was playing his epic yet pop-wise brand of trance for 250,000 revelers on Ipanema Beach in Rio de Janeiro.

Tiësto 'Club Life' Song Exclusive "Don't Ditch"

Throughout the early 2000s, when a stagnant DJ culture couldn't sustain more than one large dance-dedicated venue per U.S. city, Tiësto was the exception, one of the few artists who could command an audience all over the world, not only with fans but with brand partners. The longevity and scale of his popularity are paying huge dividends: Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal reported his annual income at around $20 million.

And now that dance is dominating, Tiësto -- born Tijs Michiel Verwest -- is reasserting his influence, setting out to claim new fans from the torrent of fresh electronic converts. And he's doing it hand in hand with major brands, which are signing on for not only traditional sponsorships, but symbiotic relationships in which both brand and artist benefit.

On Sept. 15, the DJ/producer will launch Tiësto's Club Life Campus Invasion tour, a 21-date trek through the outskirts of America, and the largest college tour ever mounted. Axe and Sony PlayStation are sponsoring, adding to a list of active brand partners that includes Heineken, SanDisk and Armani Exchange. It concludes Oct. 8 with a record-breaking stop at the Home Depot Center in Carson, Calif.: The 26,000-capacity show will be the biggest single-headliner DJ concert in U.S. history, according to the organizers.

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"There's clearly a new generation of electronic music fans emerging in the U.S. at the moment, and a lot of them are in college," Tiësto says. "We get a lot of feedback on our social networks from college kids asking me to come play their school, so here I come. I hope this tour will allow me to reach a new crowd that may not have had the chance to see me before."

"We'd always thought about the college market," says Tiësto's worldwide manager Michael Cohen of Complete Control, a boutique artist management firm that also handles A-Trak and Duck Sauce. "But hip-hop had such a strong hold. Early this year we decided it was time. College kids are really discovering this music and scene for the first time, and they need a test of the Tiësto experience. It's almost a rite of passage: Whether you like dubstep or techno, whatever your entry point, at some point someone is going to say, 'Have you seen Tiësto?'"

The Tiësto live experience was one of the first to challenge what an audience could expect from a DJ, making the simple act of blended music playback an event. With immersive video, pyrotechnics and custom stages bathed in color-changing light, all set to his blissed-out yet blistering beats, Tiësto helped hasten DJs down the road from nightclubs to concert venues.

Video: Tiësto, "Club Life Volume One"

Competing against Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber, Tiësto was a finalist for the Breakthrough Award at the 2010 Billboard Touring Conference & Awards. He's the first electronic act to crack the list of the top 25 touring artists in the world, according to Billboard Boxscore. In 2010, he ranked No. 25 on the year-end tally, grossing $28.6 million and drawing 526,000 concerts-goers to 110 shows.

"The first time I saw Tiësto was during his In Search of Sunrise 2008 tour, and I was blown away by the response from the crowd-all chanting T-I-E-S-T-O," says Patrick Doddy, senior VP/brand director of Armani Exchange, one of Tiësto's longtime brand partners. "It was like nothing I had seen before for a DJ."

As he preps for the college tour, Tiësto is savoring his first taste of musical independence. During the course of his 10-year recording career, he has sold 761,000 albums and 1 million tracks in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan. But in late 2010, after long associations with Ultra Records (dance's closest thing to a major) and Black Hole (the indie imprint he co-founded), he started his own label, aptly titled Musical Freedom. The label is a vehicle for his original work and mixed compilations, as well as new tracks from up-and-coming producers hand-selected by him. He also self-publishes, with administration by Kobalt, and handles physical distribution in short-term, project-based deals.

"We collectively took the view a few years ago that we wanted to remain independent," Cohen says. "We saw where the business was headed and felt that to be able to control as much of our own destiny, to move quickly and work with whoever we wanted to work with, this was the way to go. The trade-off of working with a major, or other kinds of major parts of the industry, has never felt worth it to us, for what you have to give up for what you potentially get. So we built our own structure."

The consortium of Cohen, Complete Control partnership manager Josh Neuman, Musical Freedom GM Cyrus Bader and worldwide booking agent Paul Morris of AM Only is unique, and not just because of how closely they work together. Tiësto might be the only large-scale international act to have a single team covering management, booking and music for the world, allowing him to centralize and leverage his considerable scale behind each of his projects, including those with brand partners-a very seductive bargaining chip.

"He has broad global appeal, as well as a massive presence in the U.S. It's very well-balanced," Neuman says. "When you look at his overall numbers, his reach, his history and his continued relevance-the fact that he's a huge artist, but it's not like he's a heritage act, he's still putting out new exciting music and touring bigger than ever-all those things combined, for a brand to be able to tap into that is very appealing."

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