Every summer, several songs manage to make their way into mainstage festival sets more often than others. Much more often. Whether it’s Animals, Gold Skies, Skrillex’s Cinema remix, Summertime Sadness, or countless other dance music tracks, festival season has the ability to turn popular tunes into smash-hits. Those smash-hits quickly become overplayed, over-analyzed, and roundly despised by the very same people touting their quality weeks earlier.
That’s not to say that it’s the fault of the producer, the song, or even the never-ending list of DJs playing the tracks in set, after set, after set. Quality, popular songs that people like are going to be played more often at venues with lots of people; it’s common sense. But everyone (except the all encompassing ‘EDM’ money machine) has their limits. And when dance music fans, who have spent hundreds of dollars on festival tickets, reach those limits, you have the perfect storm for incessant complaining. Something elitist EDM fans are astoundingly adept at.
We know we’ll still be attending festivals around the world this summer, and enjoying these songs all the same (with a slight tinge of guilt). In order to curb the whining before festival season starts, we came up with a list of tunes to be prepared to get sick of, because they’ll be on repeat at festival mainstages all summer long.
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