Electronic Dance Concerts Turn Up Volume, Tempting Investors
By BEN SISARIO
One Friday afternoon last month, 60,000 tickets at $100 and up went on sale for a major music festival at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., before the headliners had even been announced.

It sold out in three hours.

The festival with the fervent following was the Electric Daisy Carnival, a two-day event next month dedicated to the concert industry’s new favorite genre: electronic dance music. Long considered a marginal part of the music business that subsisted in clubs and semi-legal warehouse raves, dance has now moved squarely into the mainstream, with a growing circuit of festivals and profit margins that are attracting Wall Street.

For an industry increasingly reliant on aging headliners — like Bruce Springsteen, Madonna and the Rolling Stones — the appeal of a genre with fresh stars and a huge young audience is undeniable.

“If you’re 15 to 25 years old now, this is your rock ‘n’ roll,” said Michael Rapino, the chief executive of Live Nation Entertainment, the world’s largest concert promoter.

Two weeks ago, 165,000 fans went to the Ultra Music Festival in Miami to revel in the pulsating bass and wave glow sticks in the dark. Similar numbers have turned out for events in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Dallas. With the boom, artist fees have exploded. Top D.J.’s like Deadmau5, Tiësto and Afrojack can earn well over $1 million for a festival appearance and $10 million for a Las Vegas nightclub residency, talent agents say.

Having developed on the margins, electronic dance music — high-energy waves of mechanized sound that, at its best, creates a communal experience for a sea of strangers — is dominated by a network of independent promoters.

They include Insomniac, which presents Electric Daisy Carnival; Hard Events, another nationwide promoter; Ultra, whose namesake festival in Miami has expanded to Brazil, Argentina and Poland; and Made Event, behind the Electric Zoo festival in New York.

Their success has attracted a clutch of potential investors from inside and outside the music world. The insiders include Live Nation and A.E.G. Live, the two biggest corporate promoters.

The outsiders include Ron Burkle, the supermarket magnate who made an unsuccessful bid last year for the Warner Music Group, and the media mogul Robert F. X. Sillerman, according to people involved in investment talks who declined to be identified discussing private agreements.

Mr. Sillerman — who transformed the concert industry in the 1990s by consolidating regional rock promoters into what is now Live Nation — declined to comment for this article, as did a representative of Mr. Burkle....