If you didn't know better, you'd probably attribute the runaway success of Bassnectar's annual New Year's Eve appearance at Bridgestone Arena to a groundswell of local support for electronic music. From the outside looking in, it certainly would appear that way. This year's installment, which will mark the Bay Area producer-DJ's fourth time counting down the final seconds of the year to a cheering crowd of thousands, sold out in under 24 hours, months in advance.
As Bassnectar and contemporaries like Skrillex go on similar world-beating outings of arena-sized venues, the narrative of an EDM popularity surge takes shape. History repeats, even if sub-genre and DJ names change. Back in the mid-'90s, when acts like Prodigy, the Chemical Brothers and Orbital drew massive festival crowds, journalists called it the "electronica" movement. Whatever descriptor you prefer, it appears we're living through the next phase in a logical progression. But how does Nashville — where even during electronica's heyday Fatboy Slim or The Orb never would've headlined an arena — fit into that progression?
Bassnectar (real name Lorin Ashton) doesn't consider his music EDM in the first place. In fact, he pointedly tries to distance himself from the tag. But seeing as how Ashton's music is, well, electronic — not to mention, like EDM's cousin dubstep, aggressively beat-driven and bass-y as fuck — Ashton's insistence on positioning himself as a kind of modern-day arena-rock act beyond the constraints of genre definitions comes across, at worst, as a megalomaniacal power grab for a seat at the pop culture table. At best, though, it sounds harmlessly obtuse — typical, actually, of the way musicians grump in protest when they're compared to other musicians of their ilk. But when Ashton told a Consequence of Sound interviewer in 2013 that "EDM" is as general and flavorless a blanket term as "rock," he had a point.
And then there's the fact that the numbers back him up. According to local promoter Garrison Summersell of MarchOne Music — which, along with Bonnaroo promoter AC Entertainment, has put on all four of Bassnectar's Bridgestone appearances — Ashton truly does belong in a class by himself. Summersell says MarchOne and AC first chose Bridgestone for New Year's Eve 2011 after Ashton drew a crowd of almost 5,000 to a 2010 outdoor show in the parking lot of Limelight the year before. And the rock star DJ sold out Exit/In the year before that. But though Ashton isn't a musical anomaly in the electronic music world, his not just consistent but growing success in Nashville, Summersell says, is unmatched.
"You see a lot of the dance-culture DJs come to Nashville and not pull the numbers you'd expect," Summersell tells the Scene, noting recent underperforming Nashville appearances from Avicii and Skrillex (who, in 2012, even curated a one-off outdoor festival in Music City). "But then you see [acts] like Chromeo, Big Gigantic, Pretty Lights, Paper Diamond, Griz, Beats Antique, these are all EDM acts per se, but they're traveling like bands. They're carrying full productions and road crews. It's not just a fly-in, fly-out, bottle-service DJ," Summersell explains. He says the enhanced stage production is a big part of the draw. A cursory hashtag search of the terms #Bassnectar #NYE #Nashville reveals myriad cellphone pics of the dazzling light show, which gets bigger and more eye-popping each time around. At this year's show, like last year's, Ashton performs in the round. Summersell also attributes Ashton's capable security team, equipped to accommodate a general-admission setup, for the recurring success of Bassnectar Bridgestone shows.
But most of all, he credits Ashton's ability to cultivate and keep an audience interested and active on social media. With that, Ashton laid an online foundation that made it possible for MarchOne and AC to promote these shows as New Year's Eve destination events and galvanize ticket sales so effectively. Summersell estimates roughly half the crowd comes in from out of state, and he surmises some come on the heels of word of mouth in wake of similar events, like Ashton's recent Madison Square Garden sell-out.
"Social media," Summersell explains, "is our No. 1 outlet to reach this fanbase. It's funny, because with other artists we're able to use billboards to reach their audience. But these younger listeners are staring at their phones almost wrecking their car while they pass the billboard. I mean, no one in this demographic is looking up. Social media is 100 percent what this music runs on. There is no radio, and the masses don't know who Bassnectar is. Yeah, the venue sold 12,000 tickets, but if you go to the local coffee shop and ask who Bassnectar is, a lot of people aren't going to know."
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