IMS has a way of compressing a year’s worth of industry conversation into a few days. Here’s what cut through for us in 2026.
With Rising Revenues In Electronic music, Where Is The Money Actually Going?
The IMS Business Report points to another year of growth for electronic music. The numbers are compelling. But spend any time talking to people on the ground at IMS and a persistent, uncomfortable question keeps surfacing: if the industry is growing, who exactly is it growing for?
The anecdotal evidence is hard to ignore. Clubs are closing, and costs are spiralling. A ticket to a show in Ibiza this summer will set you back more than ever, with a ticket to Pacha last Friday costing from 250 Euros. Accommodation costs are also massive, with people preferring tents or camper vans to stay on the island. None of this is unique to Ibiza, either – it’s felt more broadly.
And yet the headline revenue figures continue to climb year on year. Something doesn’t add up, or at least doesn’t feel like it does.
The honest answer is probably that growth at scale and health at ground level are two very different things. The money exists – but it is concentrated. A smaller number of larger players, bigger festivals, superstar bookings and corporate-backed venues are capturing an ever greater share of the pie, while the grassroots infrastructure that has historically been the breeding ground for electronic music’s next wave quietly struggles. The mid-tier, in particular, seems to be getting squeezed from both ends.
It’s a tension the industry needs to reckon with more honestly than it currently does. A business report that shows growth is genuinely useful – but the follow-up question has to be: growth on whose terms, and sustainable for whom?
[quote align=right text=”if the industry is growing, who exactly is it growing for?”]
Artificial Intelligence
Not since the sceptical rush of energy behind NFTs has a conference been so dominated by a single topic. At IMS Ibiza this year, that topic was AI – and the range of opinions on it was about as wide as you’ll find anywhere in the industry.
Deezer CMO Maria Garrido set out the scale of the challenge with one arresting statistic: the platform is currently receiving 75,000 AI-generated uploads every single day. What’s notable is what Deezer is doing about it. They are currently the only major streaming platform labelling tracks as AI-generated, and through active curation have reduced the presence of AI content in their playlists from 80% down to 3%.
Perhaps more interesting than the numbers, though, is what the listener data is suggesting: audiences may not object to AI music as instinctively as producers and DJs do – but they do want to know. Transparency, it turns out, might be the most important variable in this debate.
Whether this is the future of how platforms handle AI is unclear, and many questions remain unanswered. What threshold of AI involvement qualifies a track as AI-generated? How often are human artists being incorrectly flagged? Is an AI-generated drum track acceptable if everything else was made conventionally? The potential for uncertainty is enormous, and the industry is nowhere near consensus.
Another perspective on AI’s potential came from Voice-Swap, whose CMO, Declan McGlynn, outlined how the technology can serve as a creative tool rather than a threat. The concept is cool: an artist’s voice can now become a licensable asset, with Voice-Swap modelling a vocal that can then be licensed to other producers – opening up entirely new royalty streams for both artists and labels.
There’s a creative dimension to this, too. Some artists are already using AI versions of their own voice to build out demos before returning to the studio to record and perform the finished version in person. It’s an unexpected use case that reframes AI as part of the creative process rather than a replacement for it.
AI is an unavoidable tidal wave – and at this stage, forming a considered opinion probably requires exposure to the full spectrum, from the true believers to those who regard the whole thing with understandable contempt. Expect it to dominate the discussion for a few more years yet.
[quote align=right text=”What threshold of AI involvement qualifies a track as AI-generated?”]
Time To Tackle Hate Speech
One of the most important panels of IMS, at the HE.SHE.THEY stage, addressed something the industry has been too slow to confront: that online visibility – the very thing artists are told they must cultivate – has become a vector for sustained, often gendered abuse.
The framing was stark. Platforms are structurally designed to reward provocation, algorithms amplify outrage, and the people most exposed to the consequences are frequently artists, particularly women, simply trying to build a career.
The panel brought together a well-constructed group of voices to work through this: Chloe Timoney from Defected, publicist Scarlett Pares Landells, DJ Mag Ibiza editor Mick Wilson, artists Just Her and Sydney Blu – whose organisation Change the Beat has made this advocacy central to its mission – and Jen Smith of the Creative Industries Independent Standards.
The consequences are massive, and solutions need to be found. With mental health deterioration and careers quietly curtailed, artists are disengaging from platforms entirely rather than enduring daily hostility. These are not edge cases but a genuine dark side of trying to build an online following.
There was a structural argument running through the panel too: that online abuse doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It reflects power imbalances already present within the industry itself. The question put to the room was whether the industry is willing to treat this as a collective responsibility rather than something that individual artists must simply absorb and manage on their own.
The panel stopped well short of easy answers, but the more the discussion moves forward, the greater the chance of making it a nicer place online.
[quote align=right text=”These are not edge cases but a genuine dark side of trying to build an online following.”]
The Importance Of Enthusiasm
Among the most valuable aspects of IMS is hearing those at the top articulate not just what they’ve built, but why they built it. Two keynotes stood out in this regard: Yann Pisseman, Founder and CEO of The Night League – the company behind UNIVS, Hi Ibiza and Ushuaïa – and Maykel Piron, one of three co-founders of Armada Music alongside Armin van Buuren.
It would be easy to assume that reaching such dominant positions in the industry means the hard questions are long behind you. They aren’t. But more striking than any strategic insight was something simpler and, arguably, more important: both appear to have a genuine, undiminished enthusiasm for music. Not the business of music. Music itself. Of course, the big sums can’t hurt either.
Yet, in an era where social media has made it fashionable to question whether figures at this level are truly in it for the art, watching these two speak is a useful corrective. The passion hasn’t been diluted by scale, by private equity conversations, by the complexity of managing multimillion-pound deals and global venue brands. If anything, it appears to be the thing that has sustained them through all of it.
That matters for two reasons. For anyone already working in the industry, it’s a reminder of what should remain non-negotiable at the centre of every decision: the music. For anyone just starting out, there is something genuinely powerful about encountering that energy in person.
Yes, both speakers addressed the bigger picture – the role of private equity in dance music culture, the tensions that inevitably arise when significant capital enters creative industries, and the strategic thinking required to navigate deals and partnerships at scale. These are conversations worth having. But the lasting impression wasn’t the deal talk. It was the reminder that longevity in this industry and authentic love for what you do are not in conflict. In fact, they may be inseparable.
[quote align=right text=”longevity in this industry and authentic love for what you do are not in conflict. In fact, they may be inseparable.”]
Erica Synths – An Unexpected Guest
Not everything at IMS fits neatly into a panel or a keynote. Tucked amid the industry conversation and the relentless black t-shirts was something altogether more tactile: the Erica Synths Bullfrog Drums.
First announced in 2024, the Bullfrog is an intuitive, classically-styled drum machine – seven sample-based voices, a CV/gate sequencer, factory samples curated by Richie Hawtin himself, and enough hands-on functionality to appeal to everyone from beginners learning drum programming to producers who want something compact and performance-ready on stage. It’s a serious piece of kit – which happens to look great too. In fact, to our eye it looks nicer than the prototypes that have been around these last two years.
Whether intentional or not, it felt like a quietly provocative presence at a show where so much discussion centred on AI! Here was something entirely physical, entirely hands-on, and, in the spirit of the creators, a reminder that, amid all the industry noise, some people are still just trying to make interesting sounds in interesting ways.
We’ll be covering Erica Synths properly at Superbooth next week, so for once, we find ourselves with something rare in this industry – a head start. More to come, but first impressions? A super dope device that’s out now, priced at 600 EUROS.
[quote align=right text=”Not everything at IMS fits neatly into a panel or a keynote.”]
An Alternative View On The Business Report
The IMS Business Report is covered in detail elsewhere, but it’s worth pausing on why it deserves your attention – particularly if you’re starting out in electronic music.
If you’re trying to break into the industry, read it closely and follow the money. The report maps where electronic music growth is, where investment is flowing, and where the jobs probably exist – and that intelligence can be the difference between a speculative cold email and a genuinely informed approach to the right company at the right time.
The headline is broadly positive: electronic music continues to grow. But the details are more nuanced. Streaming remains a tale of two industries. For major labels and larger players, it represents significant and growing revenue. For independent artists and smaller labels, the economics remain deeply frustrating – and that’s not a new conversation, but it’s one that clearly isn’t going away.
Beatport continues to offer a more favourable alternative for dance music specifically, but the broader streaming model still has a long way to go for those without scale on their side. The one counterintuitive opportunity worth flagging: streaming companies themselves, precisely because of their scale, can be good employers and solid partners for labels. If you want a career in music, don’t overlook them as a destination.
Download the full report, identify the companies operating in spaces that interest you, and knock on doors. The worst that happens is silence. You just never know. But the 16-year-old version of the person penning this would have done just that.
[quote align=right text=”If you’re trying to break into the industry, read the business report closely. Follow the money.”]
The Floor Fights Back
It was a fitting way to close the conference. Sister Bliss, in conversation with DJ Jaguar, delivered a keynote that felt less like an industry debrief and more like a genuine reckoning with what electronic music is actually for.
The central thread was one that ran quietly beneath much of this year’s conference: a growing, collective appetite to go back. Back to a pre-smartphone dancefloor. Back to a time before every moment was instinctively documented, shared and algorithmically sorted. Back to the simple, profound experience of losing yourself in music with other people in a room. It’s no coincidence that IMS chose “Reclaim the Dancefloor” as this year’s tagline.
There’s a tension worth sitting with here, though. The same platforms that promised to connect us globally are, in practice, producing greater fragmentation. As a result, subcultures appear to be splintering. People are finding smaller, tighter communities rather than feeling part of something larger. On the surface, this reads as a problem – and for the platforms selling mass connectivity, it probably is. But zoom out, and a more interesting question emerges.
Is this actually a pattern we’ve seen before? Almost every significant genre in electronic music emerged from small, marginalised communities that existed largely outside the mainstream. Communities built on shared identity, exclusivity almost by necessity, and a fierce relationship with the music itself. If what we’re witnessing now is a new wave of fragmentation and localisation, driven not by geography but by algorithm fatigue and a rejection of performative culture, are we watching the conditions for something genuinely new being created in real time?
Sister Bliss didn’t offer a neat answer, and the best keynotes rarely do. But the question she left hanging felt like the most important one of the weekend: in trying to “Reclaim the Dancefloor”, are we inadvertently laying the ground for the next chapter of this music’s evolution?
[quote align=right text=”in trying to Reclaim the Dancefloor, are we inadvertently laying the ground for the next chapter of this music’s evolution?”]
Find out more about IMS Ibiza on their website.
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